Beauty. Objectivism and subjectivism History of western philosophy Eurocentrism and beauty

Pre-Socratic

In one fragment of Heraclitus's writings (Fragment 106) he mentions beauty, this reads : To God all things are beautiful, good, right... ^[33] The earliest Western theory of beauty can be found in the works of early Greek philosophers from the pre-Socratic period, such as Pythagoras, who conceived of beauty as useful for a moral education of the soul.^[34] He wrote of how people experience pleasure when aware of a certain type of formal situation present in reality, perceivable by sight or through the ear^[35] and discovered the underlying mathematical ratios in the harmonic scales in music.^[34] The Pythagoreans conceived of the presence of beauty in universal terms, which is, as existing in a cosmological state, they observed beauty in the heavens.^[27] They saw a strong connection between mathematics and beauty. In particular, they noted that objects proportioned according to the golden ratio seemed more attractive.^[36]