“That is beautiful!” is easy to say and easy to ignore, as it has become platitudinous. This is certainly regrettable, for beauty ought not be identified with the trite and such associations can cloud our thinking about beauty. Such clouding can also result from the mistaken association of “beauty” with beauty pageants and fashion models. All of this can make us neglect an important question: What is the role of beauty in human well-being?

Following Daniel M. Haybron’s classification scheme in The Pursuit of Unhappiness, we can distinguish between two different concepts of happiness. The first is the concept of long-term psychological happiness; the second is the evaluative notion of well-being or living well. (I’ll use “well-being” and “living well” interchangeably.) Happiness is a psychological state as is a certain sort of unhappiness, e.g., depression. The concept of well-being concerns what it is that makes a person’s life go well, what benefits a person. One question is to what extent happiness is necessary for well-being. Could you be unhappy but nevertheless live well. The question about the role of beauty in well-being is analogous. By asking what role beauty plays, I’m asking whether experiencing beauty is necessary for living well. What follows is intended to be clarificatory and suggestive. I hope to treat the topic in more detail later.

To begin, let’s ask how we might proceed in figuring out whether beauty is necessary for living well. If Kant and company are right, then judgments of beauty involve pleasure. This might lead us to a quick answer to our question, for surely pleasure is a necessary but not sufficient condition for well-being. But viewed this way, there is nothing particular about beauty that makes it uniquely necessary for well-being, since there are other ways to experienc pleasure. So what might be unique to beauty that would make it a necessary component of living well?

But perhaps that is the wrong question to ask, for we might think that whether it is a component of well-being will depend on the correct theory of well-being. Expanding on Derek Parfit’s three theory types, Haybron gives us five:

1) Hedonistic theories.

2) Desire-fulfillment theories.

3) Authentic happiness theories.

4) Eudaimonistic (“nature-fulfillment”) theories.

5). List theories. (34ff.)

Which of those, if any, is correct? An important and very difficult question. However, it is possible that instead of going from a theory of well-being to beauty, we might consider going the other direction. That is, if we find reason to think that beauty properly belongs to well-being because of something unique to it, we might count that as a criterion of adequacy when assessing theories of well-being. I want to proceed in this manner: going from what is unique to beauty to a possible criterion of adequacy for a theory of well-being.

Thankfully, we needn’t necessarily work out the ontology of beauty to work out what is unique to it or its place in well-being. I take it that the latter two issues concern our experiences of beauty. Whether those experiences are of something that exists in the things themselves or not won’t fundamentally change the nature of our experiences of beauty.

But while we may be able to leave aside the ontology of beauty, we can’t leave aside its “definition” or what makes beauty beauty. This is the case even if beauty were to be a family resemblance concept not admitting of a formal essence or specification via necessary and sufficient conditions.

We might move forward by asking what are the ways in which we “use” beauty? Haybron does something similar when inquiring about the psychological concept of happiness. He comes up with four functions: 1) we appeal to happiness when considering what to do; 2) we use happiness to assess a person’s condition; 3) knowing a person is happy/unhappy licenses a number of predictions about how she will behave; 4) happiness operates as an explanation for a person’s behavior (53-54). The purpose of elucidating these four functions of “happiness” is to use them as a standard for evaluating theories of happiness, i.e., a theory goes wrong insofar as it runs counter to these functions of our “folk” concept of happiness.

Some of the functions of the concept of beauty seem to me to be the following. First, we seek beauty out so as to experience various kinds of pleasure, especially in contrast to our more quotidian experiences. Examples would be nature and works of art. Second, we use it when assessing the viability of friends and lovers. I take it that this is in part concomitant to a third use, namely, as an indicator of health. An interesting question is to what extent beauty is a reliable indicator of health or a good friend or lover. I’m guessing it’s an issue made further complicated and convoluted by the role of trends and fads. Fourth, we use beauty for an indication of the truth when trying to decide between rival theories that seem to be equally born out by the evidence. Fifth, perhaps at a deeper level we can imagine beauty playing a similar role to food or to the physical contact needed for a baby/child to be healthy. That is, it may be that as a person grows weak without food, as a baby/child becomes psychologically ill from a lack of physical contact, so, too, our psyches and eventually our bodies would be damaged if our lives were bereft of beauty. There are surely others, but those are the ones that most readily come to mind.

A good place to look for more details on the above 1-5 and for others would be in Crispin Sartwell’s excellent Six Names of Beauty, in which he approaches the myriad aspects of beauty by looking at the connotations of six possible translations of “beauty” into other languages. They are:

beauty: the object of longing

yapha (Hebrew): glow, bloom

sundara (Sanskrit): whole, holy

to kalon (Greek): idea, ideal

wabi-sabi (Japanese): humility, imperfection

hozho (Navajo): health, harmony

Reading Sartwell’s reflections and research on these words and their cultural contexts, it is hard to escape the belief that if your life is blind to or without beauty, then you are missing something vital, something essential to well-being. Such a claim is in need of support, of course; unfortunately, I won’t be doing that now (I recommend reading the book). But if such a belief is right, then we might have reason to believe that subjective theories of well-being, or at least the ones that essentially leave well-being up to the desires of the person, informed or not, cannot be right. This is because they leave open the possibility that one could live well without experiencing beauty. And it seems we have good reason to think that beauty is, indeed, necessary for living well. Thus, more generally, a theory of well-being that denies a role for beauty is highly suspect.