Beauty is Not One

It is tempting to think that, although beauty comes in many forms, and although the objects that exhibit beauty are of diverse sorts, that beauty is essentially the same thing—the same property—wherever it is found and whatever possesses it. This chapter is confined to the most central domain of beauty, namely visual beauty. It opposes the idea that beauty is one, suggesting instead that visual beauty is irreducibly multiple, that the types thereof are essentially different and not reducible or assimilable to one another. The chapter articulates this multiplicity in seven categories, which represent the minimum degree of differentiation the domain of visual beauty seems to require: abstract beauty, artefactual beauty, artistic beauty, natural beauty, physical beauty, moral beauty, and accidental beauty. The latter part of the chapter outlines some dimensions of difference among these different beauties, and weigh rationales for affirming the real divergence among them with respect to the dimensions of difference highlighted.