Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Beauty Part 1 - The epistemology of beauty
This is a first in a series of posts by which I will attempt to define and convince myself of the truth of the definition of what beauty is. I wish to do this because beauty is what I value most in life, be it visual, musical, mathematical, etc. Maybe this is due to my being very passionate about certain things. This leads me to relate beauty to passion, the former being a manifestation of the latter. Once again I notice the reccuring theme of one type of information - beauty being the representation of another - passion. Often times, beauty seems to represent many different things, the concept itself being so abstract, yet I still feel it can be defined and its concept can be put onto solid ground. Offcourse I can always say that beauty is that which one is attracted to, but that to me does not truly encompass its essence. Moreover, I believe beauty can be defined in fairly objective way, so that what someone can be attracted to may not be beauty. I keep some conviction in the phrase 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder' but I also think many of these beholders do not know what beauty is, or hold plagued views of what it is. They are plagued by the same forces that create those qualities of mankind that all regard with contempt, those forces which give birth to minds who do not create, but instead destroy. Beauty is universal by the same means that the laws of mathematics are, and to that extent I believe it possible to convice those who have defective views of the ones that are true - just as someone can prove to another a mathematical theorem, by stepping through the elementary laws and concepts. To this end, I behold the creed that all human beings share a certain degree of understanding, through atomic rules of logic which are inherent from the physical laws that govern our biological existence. One such universal rule might be the common understanding that a set of 3 things combined with a set of 4 things, forms a set of 7 things, countable not neccesarily by a number, which is offcourse a far more developed concept, but by means of matching the elements of this set with something else, and getting a consistent result. So, given this collection of elementary principles, I am further assured that beauty can be defined.
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3 comments:
you said... "Often times, beauty seems to represent many different things, the concept itself being so abstract..."
yeah, beauty "over-arches" many things, and those things can be described or defined or expressed in terms of it, but not, i think, the other way around.
and in this sense, i think beauty is almost a means, a vehicle, a ~formula~, like i described, and the proper application of this formula primarily results in the consistency between the many objects that beauty "over-arches" and the expression of them.
of course, just because it is a means, does not imply that one cannot pursue it or use it for its own sake. like, power is generally regarded as a means to some end, but it can also be the end itself: power for power's sake.
see?
where's part two? the critics are raving, the reviews are magnificent, the public demands a sequel!!!!!
Wow you are really really smart! You practically a genious! just wow! amazing work
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