The question of ideal beauty is one of the most controversial one for philosophers and social critics. The paper discusses the principles applied to ideal beauty and depicts the urge to classify all the world’s many things as an impulse which has received encouragement from science. The paper includes historical examples of women ideal beauty and their role in society. A special attention is given to the beauty of bodies and soul. The soul, being what it is and belonging to the world of true reality.
There is no consensus among philosophers, theologians, and social critics concening ideal beauty images and the main characteristics of ideal beauty. There is nothing petty about the nature of the ideal when it comes down to the question of ends, and so the questions multiplied. The main questions often asked by philosophers are; Ought the ideal to reflect truth or beauty? Could the ideal represent both without betraying either? Were images of truth primarily educational, public, and utilitarian, or were they best kept apart for conceptual, inspirational, and private ends? In and among the issues under consideration, the position of the ideal vis-Ã -vis permanence is the most important to the main matter. The comfort offered by Eternal Types in a world of uncertain equilibrium was unquestionably the basis for the insistent use of female forms.
Following Thesander (1997) change, contingency, and expediency are male. Continuity, stability, and principle were female. Beautiful forms are mainly aesthetic (meant to induce innocently pleasurable sensations, even if on occasion they threatened to appeal to amoral tastes), and they must be explicitly moral in order to further principles of love and virtue. Ideal beauty image requires that each generation collaboratively create and declare its own social and aesthetic standards, codes, and norms for ideal truth and beauty (Newton 1950). The ideal is a matter of individual preference, and individual since the experience of truth and beauty can neither be created nor discovered but can only — simply, amazingly –happen. For instance, modernism movement wore a harried masculine face. Classicism and serenity were feminine in feature and arrayed in the white folds of a Grecian garment. Ordinary men might want to go forth to “make” a society founded upon stable rules of thought and conduct, but women (like proper Bostonians and the headgear they inherit) “have” ideals. Men are recognized by the deeds they accomplish (Black 2004).
Women are identified by the ideals they represent. Even the staunchest supporters of stability had to admit that there was precious little about late-nineteenth-century life that satisfied their taste. It was not enough for them to repeat the tiresome fact that permanence was what they desired, although it was not what they had. The visual representations of virtuous order which the American advocates of ideal values commissioned for the walls, corridors, and rotundas of churches, libraries, and courthouses existed in a tarnished world. They had to justify representations of serene forms in the midst of the raucous “rotary system” of modern times (Black 2004).
Self-consciousness about the current state of affairs in the United States, the awareness that caused the desire for permanence in the first place, instilled the need to argue for the presence of stone images of Charity and Knowledge or elaborate murals centered by Justice and Bounty. True, some Americans tried to go home again into the timeless realms where absolute principles supposedly once existed in happy contiguity with great men and women. most of those committed to idealism tried to bring its tenets to bear directly upon the particular American scene in which they were fated to live. If they were to escape the psychic damage done to those who merely lament the decline of society, they had to bring idealism into line with provocative new ideas of evolution (Newton 1950). The world is changing. Idealists could not blink that fact. If they could read change as development, perhaps they could uncover the hitherto hidden process by which Reality in America is en route to the Ideal (Black 2004). Then all those statues and paintings of allegorical subjects would be validated by the future; they would prove to be symbolic representations which wake up to find they are true. Raw change meant the future doom of still greater instability and of knowledge replaced by chaos. Evolution promised a future of the permanence of truth and of things set to rights. In that happy time, the faith placed in the Winged Female as the visual vehicle for all good things would be vindicated. Human conduct and human thought would become what wings had been expressing all along (Thesander, 1997). The desire to reach into the past to the magic source of visual conventions of the ideal in order to bring order and stability to every level of contemporary society was a philosophical botch. Ideals based on conventions require lost origins, yet we can never go back far enough (Wolf, 2007).
The primary beauty of bodies is such a beauty and it is perceived at first sight, and the soul, as being ware of it, calls it by name and, recognizing it, welcomes it and is wedded to it. If the soul meet with the ugly, it shrinks from it and refuses and rejects it, not consenting with it, but alien. Our belief is that the soul, being what it is, and belonging to the world of true reality, when it sees what is akin to it or a trace of kinship, acknowledges it with transport and is reminded of itself and of its own things (Wolf, 2007). For if there is likeness we should have to say they were alike. Our belief is that the things of this world are beautiful by partaking in an essential character. For everything that is formless, though its nature admits of form and essential character, so long as it is devoid of rationality and essential character is ugly and excluded from the divine and rational (Black 2004). That is the absolutely ugly. But a thing can also be ugly if it be not completely mastered by form and rationality, because its matter does not admit of being completely formed in accordance with an essential character. But when essential character has been added to a thing, so as to make it one by organizing its parts, it confers system and unity of plan and makes the thing coherent. For since the essential character was one, that which was formed by it had to become one, so far as the multiplicity of its parts allowed. Beauty is then enthroned upon the unity thus created, conferring itself both upon the parts and upon the whole. But when beauty takes possession if something simple and homogeneous, it confers itself upon the whole. From historical perspective, certain pressures were exerted in the 1890s to extend the accreditation granted to the ideal female type. Enlightened moral and intellectual reasons for inclusivity were slow in coming, as we shall see; but if nothing else, there were strong commercial arguments for tolerance in the matter of who might qualify as the American Girl (Black 2004).
The circulation of the popular press depended on its ability to attract the favor of the immigrant groups, especially in the face of the fact that the latter were setting up their own native-language papers (Thesander, 1997). The Pulitzer and Hearst publications could hardly go too far in making derogatory comments or printing offensive pictures that excluded the new people from what those same papers proposed American life had to offer to everyone. If the chance to become the American Girl was part of the bright promise, then that promise had to be open to all pretty young women who might “pass” socially, economically, or racially for the true type. Images of males rule most of the material (verbal and pictorial) introduced in the following section because this is how the physiognomical treatises of the time chose to present their arguments (Wolf, 2007). Deeply implied in the words and pictures dedicated to the definition of the correct American masculine type is the sexual role accorded to the American female as mother, wife, and daughter.
In sum, the ideal beauty is a complex notion which involves ideals of body and soul. The urge to classify all the world’s many things is an impulse which has received encouragement from science. The social sciences with their avidity for categorizing behavioral patterns were already elbowing their way forward with statistics, charts, and lists of norms and averages. Exclusion remains in force wherever desire for “the better thing” (defined according to social conventions of virtue) controls the content of art. In contrast, there is no room for disgust per se with objects included within patterns laid across art surfaces. Finally design exacts correctness; it excludes forms that do not meet its stern criteria for aesthetic beauty.
References
Black, P. (2004). Gender and the Beauty Industry: Discipline and Power. Routledge.
Newton, E. (1950). The Meaning of Beauty. Whittlesey House.
Thesander, M. (1997). The Feminine Ideal (Picturing History). Reaktion Books.
Wolf, N. (2007). The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. Vintage; New Ed edition.