by John Hartley

“Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible.” Noted the Russian novelist Fydor Dostoevsky, “God and the devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.”

When 18th century Scholars used anthropology, physiognomy, and phrenology to apportion value according to race and beauty, clearly something has gone terribly wrong. Yet what is now dismissed as pseudoscience was then seen as a perfectly legitimate means to qualify human ‘beauty’. What, then, can be learnt from examining the critical juncture, as the departure from objective standards of beauty upon which such pernicious conclusions where not merely possible, but actively promoted?

The Enlightenment’s quest for knowledge and reason carried a darker side—one that linked ‘beauty’ with superiority. This fusion of science and aesthetics shaped European thought, whereby the pursuit of an aesthetic ideal became a gateway to racial ideologies. Read more »