Beauty as Divine Order

Berkeley on Proportion, Reason, and Subordination

Abstract

This paper reconstructs George Berkeley’s theory of beauty as a coherent philosophical account grounded in relations of proportion, subordination, and teleological fittingness. It argues that beauty, for Berkeley, spans both natural and moral domains under a single unifying principle – the rational ordering of parts within a hierarchy of ends – and that this commitment leads to a qualified but significant rejection of the moral sense tradition in favor of a view on which beauty is an object of rational apprehension, ultimately grounded in divine reason.