**The Beholder's I: The Perception of Beauty and the Development of the Self Development of the Self**

**The Beholder's I: The Perception of Beauty and the** 

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.69531

Stephen H. Richmond Stephen H. Richmond Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.69531

#### **Abstract**

A consideration of the perception of beauty immediately bridges the subjective and objective. To what extent is beauty residing in the object and to what extent is it a property of the subjectivity of the perceiver? Is beauty an objective feature of the object, like color, for example, which nonetheless needs to be perceived and therefore configured by the observer? Or is there some more complex relationship between the beauty that we seem to perceive "out there" and the state of our internal development? The dualistic framing of that would place beauty either out in the world or as an aspect of the self itself implies an overly dualistic view of the self and the self's environment. I will explore a view that the average development of individuals within a society determines structures of group consciousness, and one element of each structure is aesthetic, meaning that it configures the perception of beauty.

**Keywords:** beauty, aesthetics, self, development, modernity
