Art hodontics: the Search for ‘Ultimate Beauty’ in Philosophy, Classicism and Orthodontics

Until the eighteenth century, most philosophical accounts of beauty, treated it as an objective quality, ie they located it in the beautiful object itself or in the qualities of that object. In ‘De Veritate Religione’, Augustine asks explicitly whether things are beautiful because they give delight, or whether they give delight because they are beautiful.¹ Plato's account in the ‘Symposium’ and Plotinus' ideology in the ‘The Six Enneads’ connect beauty to a response of love and desire, but locate beauty itself in the regality of the Form, and the beauty of particular objects in their participation in the Form.^2,3 Moreover, Plotinus' account in one of its moments addresses beauty as a matter of what one might term ‘formedness’: having the definite shape characteristic of the kind of thing the object is.

Though Plato and Aristotle disagree on the nature of beauty, they both regard it as objective in the sense that it is not localized in the response of the beholder. The classical conception treats beauty as a matter of representing definite proportions or relations among parts, sometimes expressed in mathematical ratios, for example, the ‘golden section’. The sculpture known as ‘The Canon,’ by Polykleitos, was held up as a model of harmonious proportion to be simulated by students and masters alike: beauty could be reliably achieved by reproducing its objective proportions (Figure 1). The debate of subjectivity vs objectivity will be continued in the next section.