June 21, 2013
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Beauty
This is a “retread”from 2010. I’ve posted it at all three sites ( This one, Word Press and Livejournal)
What is Beauty?
“It is strange that this question has not found a larger place in philosophy and psychology. Every heart has heard the call of the beautiful, but few minds wonder why. The Greek found it in youth, sculptured symmetry, or calm; the Romans in order, sublimity, and power; the Renaissance found it in color; and modern souls find it in music and nature. Everywhere an at all times, people have been moved by beauty of some sort, and have spent many lives seeking it.”
So said the historian and writer Will Durant many years ago.
Soc says: My pupil, Plato, associated beauty with the ultimate good. to him the beautiful could only be the highest moral good. He more-or-less rejected art and music as beautiful. Only that which was inhumanly good was beautiful.
Marcus says: That which is beautiful has its source of beauty in itself, and is complete in itself. Praise has no part in it, so it is none the worse or better for being praised. That tells you much about that which we call beautiful – it does not depend on our recognition – but we cannot help recognzing it.
Bucky says: When I complete a project or solve a problem I recognize its rightness by its beauty. Beauty is a feeling from within.
Will says: There is beauty in language; perhaps in its patterns and the images it projects. We seem to have a liking for the symmetry – so also in our love of music.
Soc says: How about the rest of you. What do you think makes beauty?
Comments (3)
I’m tempted to answer, a double quarter-pounder when I’m really hungry but I won’t.
It’s quite a question with many answers. Perhaps what the entire universe moves toward. Perhaps what our senses seek and gravitate toward. Elusive beauty is in the mind of the beholder. I stand staring at Monet’s “Water Lillies” while somewhere else someone stands staring at a painting of people bloodied by war. One listens to Beethoven while another somewhere else listens to Cannibal Corpse.Perhaps how much beauty we see hinges upon how developed is our ability to appreciate the world around us.Ultimately I believe true permanence of beauty is experienced in the life condition of unshakable wisdom and indestructible happiness known as enlightenment. Just before his death the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni, is said to have uttered these words. “What a beautiful world this is. What a joy to have lived in it.”
@TheSutraDude - Dude, you are on the right track with your remark about the quarter-pounder. As I see (hear,smell, taste, etc) it, beauty is more attuned to our sensory perception than to rationality. It gives “Flavor” to our rational perception of the world around us.
As with morality, beauty depends on the observer, as the old cliché goes, it lies in the eye of the beholder. Without an nterpreter, there is no interpretation.