The Origin, Development and Enlightenment of the Essence of Beauty in Europe

The essence of beauty is not only the most basic theoretical problem in aesthetic research, but also the most fundamental and most concerned problem in the history of Western aesthetics. Especially before aesthetics was formally established as an independent science, European scholars’ thinking about beauty mainly focused on the discussion of the essence of beauty, and generally experienced the evolution process from natural ontology, theological ontology to epistemology and then to humanistic ontology. The enthusiasm of European traditional aesthetics for the problem of the essence of beauty is closely related to the logos centralism pursuit of the truth and the thinking mode of metaphysical. It is not until the end of classical metaphysics and the transformation of aesthetics from tradition to modern that it gradually realizes the digestion or transcendence of the essence of beauty. However, deconstruction, transcendence or anti-essentialism does not mean the cancellation of essence, but attempts to break the traditional shackles and transform the thinking mode and paradigm, so as to open the space for thinking about the essence of beauty. As the logical basis for establishing the system of aesthetic theory, the essence of beauty has inevitable rationality, and it is also an important guarantee for the current aesthetic research to avoid falling into discourse centrifugation after the dispersion of essence.