Beauty

Kanzler

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    What is beauty? Is it purely subjective? Why do we experience beauty? What does the experience of beauty evoke in you?
     
    I'd love to meet the person who could look me in the eye, and with a straight face say that something is objectively more beautiful than something else.
     
    I know nothing about the scientific aspect of beauty, so I ended up googling 'why do we experience beauty' and the first result was an interesting Wired article from 2011 about the subject. Have a little read if you wish, I thought it was rather engaging. The idea is that our concept of beauty is a reaction within a part of our brain, the 'medial orbitofrontal cortex'. It's part of the pleasure spectrum, the same kind of visceral emotion as disgust and delight. The Venus de Milo could be the stimulus but the response in the aforementioned cortex is not uniform across human beings - thus it accounts for the various tastes the world over. Beauty is subjective, but the article raises the question as to why the concept of beauty exists. It's a source of pleasure, but aside from that, that question is just as subjective as whether you find the Venus de Milo appealing or prefer the sight of roadkill. I have no idea why. It doesn't do anything for us aside from, as the article said, stare at something a little longer. I suppose it's just a benefit of being human.
     
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    Beauty invokes a sense of nostalgia for the old times in me
    and longing for the past, is something I hold close.

    I feel good when I am told I am beautiful
    and disheartened when told I am not.
     
    Harley Quinn said:
    I have no idea why. It doesn't do anything for us aside from, as the article said, stare at something a little longer. I suppose it's just a benefit of being human.
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    Because, I figure our bodies are built to create as many means for pleasure as possible. Same goes for the other senses - why do we find pleasure/displeasure in certain sounds, tastes, and smells? You could relate those things to survival, but there are plenty of smells and tastes we find pleasurable that can harm or even kill us. Pleasure, simply, gives us something to be excited about, to continue existing - and for something to be pleasurable, it must come in increments. Hence why there are so many dis-pleasurable sensations to experience as well.

    Not that I know anything about science, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
     
    I imagine beauty is a product of our large brains and intelligence. We can perceive things, imagine things, remember things, compare and contrast things, all while also feeling all the natural and simple feelings that "lesser" animals do. I don't doubt that a cat has preferences for certain stimuli like we humans do, but we can be abstract about what we sense.
     
    But surely there has to be some objectivity to beauty. Can't we have a reason for believing something is beautiful other than other people already believe it to be?

    For example, is there beauty in a circle? Is there beauty in a gentle rainstorm? What contributes to the beauty of a flower?

    Perhaps if we give some thought about just what makes something beautiful, we might be able to detect some underlying themes that could be more objective than subjective. Perhaps the interpretation of those themes would be subjective, but the fact that those themes exist gives us some amount of objectivity.
     
    Kanzler said:
    But surely there has to be some objectivity to beauty. Can't we have a reason for believing something is beautiful other than other people already believe it to be?

    For example, is there beauty in a circle? Is there beauty in a gentle rainstorm? What contributes to the beauty of a flower?

    Perhaps if we give some thought about just what makes something beautiful, we might be able to detect some underlying themes that could be more objective than subjective. Perhaps the interpretation of those themes would be subjective, but the fact that those themes exist gives us some amount of objectivity.
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    Alright, I'll bite. Firstly, in order for something to be seen objectively you have to be able to quantify it. So let's say you are holding a beauty pageant where you give every oddity and deformity a value. You could then add up how many points a person gets and the person with the lowest number is the most beautiful. By doing this you could say that according to the system, this person is objectively more beautiful than another person.

    That's all well and good but who decides what value to give each deformity? Even if we all agreed on the values it would still be a matter of our opinions, aka subjective. There is no getting around that. This is why art forms like diving, gymnastics and synchro swimming are so hard to judge, because at the end of it all you are trying to say someone is objectively better than someone else based on a subjective view. That's why they have so many judges in these competitions to try and lessen the amount of subjectivity in the scoring.
     
    Kanzler said:
    But surely there has to be some objectivity to beauty. Can't we have a reason for believing something is beautiful other than other people already believe it to be?

    For example, is there beauty in a circle? Is there beauty in a gentle rainstorm? What contributes to the beauty of a flower?

    Perhaps if we give some thought about just what makes something beautiful, we might be able to detect some underlying themes that could be more objective than subjective. Perhaps the interpretation of those themes would be subjective, but the fact that those themes exist gives us some amount of objectivity.
    Click to expand...

    Well one thing that is common to most people is symmetry. The majority of people prefer symmetry and even in people more symmetrical features tend to be considered more attractive.
     
    Midnight shadow said:
    Alright, I'll bite. Firstly, in order for something to be seen objectively you have to be able to quantify it. So let's say you are holding a beauty pageant where you give every oddity and deformity a value. You could then add up how many points a person gets and the person with the lowest number is the most beautiful. By doing this you could say that according to the system, this person is objectively more beautiful than another person.

    That's all well and good but who decides what value to give each deformity? Even if we all agreed on the values it would still be a matter of our opinions, aka subjective. There is no getting around that. This is why art forms like diving, gymnastics and synchro swimming are so hard to judge, because at the end of it all you are trying to say someone is objectively better than someone else based on a subjective view. That's why they have so many judges in these competitions to try and lessen the amount of subjectivity in the scoring.
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    Objectivity simply means that something exists outside of personal feelings and interpretations - outside of the subjective. How do you quantify the sun existing?

    What you're talking about is having an objective scale that is, well, objective because some numbers are objectively bigger or smaller than others. But that's slightly separate from whether something is objectively true or not.
     
    gimmepie said:
    Well one thing that is common to most people is symmetry. The majority of people prefer symmetry and even in people more symmetrical features tend to be considered more attractive.
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    For people maybe the sight of symmetry is something people find attractive because it taps into some part of our brain that helped us survive in pre-human times. A symmetric face might have been a way for us protohumans to tell if someone was healthy or diseased or whatever evolutionary psychologists would say.

    But sometimes we like to break with symmetry. With art and music it's pretty common.

    Spoiler:


    And even with people we don't always like symmetry. The "beauty mark" people might have makes the face asymmetrical, for instance. I think symmetry might be like sugar. At first taste it's great, we love it, but after a while if that's all you eat it won't taste so good and eventually you'll learn there are other flavors and combinations of flavors that are just as good and often even better.
     
    Kanzler said:
    Objectivity simply means that something exists outside of personal feelings and interpretations - outside of the subjective. How do you quantify the sun existing?

    What you're talking about is having an objective scale that is, well, objective because some numbers are objectively bigger or smaller than others. But that's slightly separate from whether something is objectively true or not.
    Click to expand...

    Yes, you are right, and for questions like "does the sun exist?" you don't need to quantify to make an objective judgement. However, in order to compare 2 similar entities, more often than not you will need to quantify them in order to objectively judge which is better.
     
    I used to have a very apathetic and dismissive attitude towards any form of beauty. I did not like the superficial and subjective nature of it at all. As a teenager I remember disliking anything attached to fashion design for that reason.

    But now I appreciate the power it carries. We are all drawn to beauty, in some way at least. I think that experiencing something that is beautiful is a form of joy, and joy should be taken wherever possible.
     
    Some of you mentioned that symmetry is something that contributes to beauty, and some of you have also mentioned that asymmetry does so as well. I've thought about this contradiction for a while, and my explanation is that both symmetry and asymmetry appeal to purity. Things that are symmetric are pure in that they are somewhat uniform, and uniformity reflects perfection which reflects purity. But things that are asymmetric appeal to a different kind of purity. Asymmetry is something that often exists in nature and is pure in a "natural" sense.

    It seems that things that we find beautiful are "pure" in some way.
     
    Is purity a good word for it? Maybe integrity, which kind of implies an internal consistency, like a thing which is a good example of what things like it are supposed to be. 'Cuz you might have, say, a bonsai plant which is a 'natural' thing, but one which has its growth changed and channeled by people so that you get a kind of artificial asymmetry, but one that still evokes the 'natural' look of nature. It's not really "pure" because it's a mix of natural and artificial, so to speak. I dunno. I feel like what I'm saying makes sense to me, but that it sounds like nonsense.
     
    Esper said:
    Is purity a good word for it? Maybe integrity, which kind of implies an internal consistency, like a thing which is a good example of what things like it are supposed to be. 'Cuz you might have, say, a bonsai plant which is a 'natural' thing, but one which has its growth changed and channeled by people so that you get a kind of artificial asymmetry, but one that still evokes the 'natural' look of nature. It's not really "pure" because it's a mix of natural and artificial, so to speak. I dunno. I feel like what I'm saying makes sense to me, but that it sounds like nonsense.
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    Yeah purity and integrity both substantially describe what we're getting at here. There is a sense wholesomeness to whatever that is beautiful.
     
    Kanzler said:
    Yeah purity and integrity both substantially describe what we're getting at here. There is a sense wholesomeness to whatever that is beautiful.
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    I'm going to contradict myself now since I'm googling stuff and I'm coming across the aesthetic of 'wabi-sabi'. According to Wikipedia: "[t]he aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is 'imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.'"

    And that lead me to this thingy:

    Spoiler:


    So... maybe beauty is just really complicated and not easy to understand.
     
    Beauty can come from both perfection and imperfection. Gods and angels are seen as perfect beings, and are beautiful as a result, which is why people revere them so much. However, I am reminded of a quote from the film "Troy" staring Brad Pit. In it, Achilles says

    the gods envy us. They envy us because we're mortal, that our lives could end at any moment. Everything is more beautiful that way"
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    An interesting concept to be sure, and it brings up an interesting point. If you are walking down the street arm in arm with someone who you think is beautiful, and you glance across the street at someone equally as beautiful, chances are you will be more interested in that stranger than the person you are walking with. Why? Because that stranger is out of reach. Things that are out of reach or forbidden tend to be more attractive, but then if we obtain them, after a while they seem less beautiful.
     
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    beauty is the stuff you do not have the words for
    good stuff that makes you speechless​
     
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