Socrates, an ancient Greek saint, debated with Hippocrates about "what is beauty". In the end, I can't give an ultimate and essential definition, so I have to sigh "beauty is difficult". Until the prosperity of science and philosophy, the question of "what is beauty" is still a difficult "Sphinx mystery" and is still in endless debate. Although countless philosophers, aestheticians and thinkers made arduous explorations in different ways to uncover the mystery of beauty, they raised various questions at that time.
The reason why it is difficult to answer "what is beauty" is that what it requires is not an aesthetic judgment or an empirical description of individual objects, but the discovery of the universal essence of beauty among various beautiful objects or the discovery of its special essence through comparison with non-aesthetic objects. Beauty is not fixed and metaphysical. Under the concept of beauty, it contains all kinds of things with different properties. From the macro world to the micro world, such as the sun, the moon, stars, flowers and trees, all kinds of labor products and even the quality, movements, looks, expressions and manners of people. It can be regarded as an aesthetic object, something beautiful. Of course, it is extremely difficult to summarize the universal nature of beauty in these very different things. Moreover, beauty develops and changes with the development of social history. In the dynamic space-time structure, the connotation and extremely valuable significance of beauty vary greatly with the times and society.
Some people think that beauty is subjective. They believe that beauty can only be produced when people's subjective feelings, consciousness and objects are combined to achieve the unity of subjectivity and objectivity. According to them, "a chair won't be a chair if it's not for people to sit on." However, this view was opposed by "objectivists". They believe that it is not enough to have subjective conditions for a thing to become an aesthetic object, but also something on the object, that is, some objective aesthetic nature or quality of these things themselves.