The function of beauty

Our thinking about function and purpose gets more muddled when we say that certain aspects of a design, or certain things we might consider for a design, are denied a function.

For instance, ornament may be seen as without function; aesthetics as something separate from, or even opposed to, function, and beauty is all very well, but not exactly very functional. All of them commonly fall into the category of nice-to-haves. And some people are downright suspicious of all three.

The function of anything we endeavour to do or make, can be demonstrated by asking ourselves a simple question using ordinary language. All we need to do is ask ourselves what the function of whatever it is we are investigating is. And if we can come up with a sensible answer —and we always can— then, voila!

If we ask, “What is the function of beauty in architecture?” we might receive any of the following answers and more:

Emotional impact: Beauty in architecture evokes feelings—calm, awe, joy—and shapes how people emotionally experience a space.
Human well-being: Beautiful environments can reduce stress, improve mood, and enhance overall quality of life.
Cultural expression: Beauty reflects the values, and the identity of a culture or society at a given time.
Symbolism and meaning: Architectural beauty can communicate ideas—power, spirituality, harmony, or innovation—without words.
Sense of place: Beauty helps create memorable, distinctive environments that people can connect with and recognize.
Inspiration and creativity: Beautiful architecture can inspire imagination, creativity, and intellectual engagement.
Social value: Attractive spaces encourage people to gather, interact, and build community.
Economic impact: Beautiful buildings and cities can increase property values, tourism, and investment.
Harmony with surroundings: Beauty can integrate a building with its natural or urban context, creating visual and spatial coherence.
Enduring relevance: Beauty often contributes to longevity—structures that are admired are more likely to be preserved and valued over time.¹

Why should it be more difficult than that? To settle the case, we need to play the game of giving and asking for reasons until a satisfying decision can be made either way. And no further.

Beauty is a judgment, and as such, is held by the judge. It is subjectively held. There might be any number of people coming to the same judgment, but each does so on their own responsibility, a responsibility that cannot be deferred or denied.

It can be empirically tested and thus properly objectified only to the extent that the community of knowers can check that the judge is being sincere. If the judge is not, and good at lying, there is no way of testing the truth of the judgment.

That is what subjectivity means: the judgment belongs to the judge, exclusively.

Of course, I might have adopted the view of another, but then that was my investment to make.
Of course, I might have been forced to say something, but then I am being insincere, perhaps for a very good reason.
Of course I may have been brought up that way, but so are we all, the point of developing and learning is that we learn to transcend or overcome ourselves and our environment through the process of aufhebung, or overcoming (from aufheben: a famous Hegelian word describing how any concept is simultaneously negated or resolved, somewhere preserved in its new form and thereby lifted to a higher level: a seed resolves into a plant, that makes seeds, whereby the plant resolves into compost etc..)

As such, subjectivity is an instrument of freedom. My response to my understanding of my judgment is my responsibility.

Lying is also an instrument of freedom. We can use lying to avoid oppression. At the same time, lying is also an instrument of oppression in that it can and often is used that way.

But to get back to the central argument, an important function of beauty that is not listed above is its function as a measure. If I say: “the beauty of architecture consists for me in the considered disposition of volumes, their due proportion, careful materialisation and proper construction such that all of this takes account of and allows for good use, comfort, security and stability”, then that is a good if somewhat generic start.

The function of that beauty would be to help me decide on how to judge whether a design fullfils the above. Alternatively, if I come across a building I find beautiful and begin to analyse it, I would be looking for such criteria.

To help me with that, it would help me to make these measures, or criteria, explicit.

You might be able to find a counterfactual, an example of a building that meets all these criteria with flying colours, but which nevertheless fails to please me. Well then, I shall need to consider that and add another criterion, or reformulate one of the ones I already have at my disposal.

Aesthetics is subject to development, to learning. We all undergo an educational process.

Part of the reason for that is that my finding of beauty and my ability to formulate explicit, compelling criteria for its finding are two different activities that take quite a lot of effort to align. Moreover, my list of criteria may not be particularly rich, and it will almost definitely not be complete. There will always remain a margin of je ne sais quoi. This is the downside of making things explicit. But that is a small price to pay and does not warrant us giving up on it with a flourish of impatience and start celebrating the intuitive approach at the cost of explicitation.

Of course, we can be intuitive about beauty. But intuition and reason work well together, one to show up the weaknesses of the other. The one to show the lacunae of the other.

The explicitation of the beauty of things for those who take the time is a discursive matter, a game of giving and asking for reasons, driven by norms, values, intuition and deliberation. The function of beauty is to judge a fit. That last one is what we all do, all the time, often based on norms and whatever taste we have developed.

The function of beauty in any human product or endeavour, including the thoughtful appreciation of landscape and other natural phenomena that we come across in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics and so forth, is twofold

Looking upriver, it is to respond to a feeling that leads to an aesthetic judgment, “Oh, that is so beautiful!”.
Looking downriver, the judgment prompts a response, “Let’s see if we can get closer…”

If we take Alberti’s definition of beauty as our standard, namely that beauty is that reasoned harmony we arrive at when we can determine that nothing should be added, taken away or altered. Still, for the worse, we can see that the notion of beauty enters every (design) decision as a measure of the adequacy of whatever configuration of things is being judged, expressed as satisfaction and, in some cases, even joy. It also comes into every act of thoughtful appreciation of a thing, situation, or event presented to us.

Beauty in that sense is that intellectual satisfaction that occurs when we judge something to fit some idea or some set of criteria, some taste in things, or some intuition or some feeling, or some rebellious impulse or whatever, appropriately.

This should be enough to demonstrate the importance of beauty. After all, with every decision we make deliberately, we use exactly that criterion of judgment to sway us: reasoned fittingness, reasoned harmony. often expressed in phrases like “Oh yeah, that works…”, “That fits”, “Oh lovely!”, “Nice!”, Wonderful!” and countless others. In fact, aesthetic judgment is prone to slang development: “Cool”, “Chill”, “Great”, “Funky”, to name but a few.

Sometimes, we make do with a compromise; sometimes we learn to find satisfying what we earlier did not find satisfying, and vice versa.

When I see something beautiful, it fits with what we loosely might call ‘my taste’. Taste can be rigorously defined as the set of positions a subject takes with respect to their analytical understanding of the world (their paradigm) and their critical ideas about what is useful and good in it.

As such, I am capable of finding beauty in anything that so fits. At the same time, I am also capable of altering my taste through games of giving and asking for reasons, or simply by copying the apparent tastes of those I admire. That is my investment to make.

Beauty is a seal of approval for things so judged and expressed in forms ranging from light satisfaction to profoundly emotional joy.

So how can we possibly say that beauty has no function?

It is rather the other way around. The beauty and ugliness of things are implicitly of such enormous, all-encompassing importance to everything we do that we have lost conscious sight of them; they matter more than everything: they nudge us in certain directions for our use and purpose-finding, avoiding others. They judge our (dis)satisfaction, attraction, joy, revulsion, and sadness in everything.

We really need to make our world a more beautiful place by taking good care of it.

Beauty and its complicated avatar, ugliness, are as big in our thinking as the sky above us and the ground below us are in our daily being.

But there are difficulties in coming to terms with this view. The reasoning involved is complex, and one can easily drop a stitch.

Alberti’s definition of beauty, expressed as a test, is quite separate from the collection of values and norms that constitute the criteria against which he personally judged things beautiful according to the test it entails.

So, for Alberti, a harmony of reasons is reached under very different conditions than it would be with you or me. His biographical context was Early Renaissance Italy, with its collection of entrenched and normalised views on almost everything. These invariably differ, sometimes radically, from our no less entrenched but certainly more pluralist views today.

It therefore becomes helpful to make our criteria for fittingness, that is, for the moment that we decide that reasoned harmony is achieved, explicit to each other.

Only then can we have a sensible conversation about whether these criteria are reasonably well-grounded and to what extent we disagree about things.

I do not think that all of Alberti’s values and norms, as manifest in the book, are well-grounded. Nor do I share all of them, even though I have to acknowledge that I absolutely love Alberti’s architecture.

For instance, regarding the beauty of human beings, when judged against certain norms, things can become very oppressive. The most difficult among them is the beauty of certain men and women and the function of that judgment as a standard against which to measure yourself.

How then, may we judge people not proportioned like the Vitruvian Man beautiful? Well, that would have been a silly question for Alberti. He would answer that you can’t. Such people are an expression of a divine geometry.

By analysing and critiquing the norms and values of each culture, we can see that they are based on particular paradigms that inform people’s tastes.

It is possible to change both the paradigm (the set of beliefs a person holds and perhaps shares within their community) and the taste that goes with it by changing the frame of reference and its space of implications. That is what the game of giving and asking for reasons does: it asks things like “Have you considered x?”, “But what if Y?”, and so forth.

So, to go back to our example: if the norm of beauty for the human male body is taken to be Leonardo da Vinci’s version of the Vitruvian Man, and if we say, “He is a person that passes Alberti’s test”, then all of us who do not conform to this supposed ‘ideal’ are in differing degrees ugly. And this is what many of us do: we take a certain standard (usually the one we have grown up with) as universal without really questioning it. But you do not have to go that way. Why should the Vitruvian Man be the standard of beauty?

We could try the following line of argument: “No, the Vitruvian Man is not a necessary norm; it is a contingent norm, one that has taken on a mystical status by the geometrical coincidence that some men fit in a square and a circle; furthermore, Leonardo’s man is muscly, not too fat, and has a generous topping of hair. We are acculturated to find all of that, taken together, beautiful, perhaps because we have evolved to judge this way.” But that is the whole point. Evolution is the survival of successful traits. And success is nothing more than a measure of survival. If we start selecting for other traits, those would be successful. Imagine we begin to say and believe that any form in which humanity manifests itself is a norm for humanity, and that we find humanity, taken together, beautiful. It would be hard, but not impossible.

Beauty can be found in all people. The challenge is to find the harmony that is there in any and everybody. That is the point of Marc Quinn’s famous and admirable statues of Alison Lapper. There is beauty in the statue, but also in the woman portrayed. And Marc Quinn turns the tables on us and seems to ask: how far are you willing to go in accepting that? Beauty-finding thus becomes a question of aesthetic athleticism.

To normalise all bodies and to find their beauty, wherever it may reside, means that we become more ready to see the uses and purposes of all people as, in principle, legitimate. Having done that, we can have a further conversation about whether we ought to, and on what grounds. Of course, all this takes time and a lot of energy, which is why such things are often left to norms we accept lock, stock, and barrel from our environment. It saves us from having to puzzle things out for ourselves. Intellectual sloth is our investment to make.

Another way around the Vitruvian Man norm is to say that John is the norm for being John. Everything that makes John ‘John’ is in harmony with the idea of ‘John’, and so John is the most beautiful ‘John’. It is, in fact, quite profound. Mind you, unpacking its profundity would take an evening over beer.

There are also other ways around the Vitruvian Man Norm. All of them have exciting and puzzling challenges. For example, we can say that we need an image of our own ideal, and anything that demonstrably conforms to that idea achieves a harmony of reasons.

Nevertheless, the Vitruvian Man and its female equivalent, Venus, continue to exert a strong appeal, perhaps because their beauty has been hardwired by evolution. That, however, is no excuse for accepting things as they stand. Human beings can overcome and transcend themselves. And so, we do not have to stick with any norm, however hard-wired. There lies the most exciting function of beauty.

© Jacob Voorthuis, 2026. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.

I asked ChatGPT (the free version) the following question on 23-03-2026: Could you please give me ten answers to the question: What is the function of beauty in architecture? ↩︎