…Beauty is in the eye of the beholder… but where do the beholder’s biases come from
My search for absolute morality has failed. My only conclusion was that morality is an evolved set of practices, allowing us to live in social groups. The next easy topic was an exploration of beauty. We all have a sense of beauty, the thing that evokes a strong emotional response, but what lies beneath the surface? What causes those chemical releases that draw us to beautiful objects? My conclusions? Like morality, we have evolved a sense of beauty over generations and that beauty is subject to change.
A brief enumeration of beautiful things would be certain women or someone of the opposite sex, a painting like the Mona Lisa, music, landscapes of majestic mountains or expansive beaches, sunrises and sunsets, architectural works, be they the Parthenon or the yet unfinished gaudy Gaudi Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.
Then there is soccer, using the “beautiful game” as a tag line. You know the reaction of many to that moniker, particularly in North America. In sport, many a play or action is usually described as a thing of beauty. The “immaculate reception” from the NFL in the seventies or Michael Jordan’s movements in the NBA (or Air Jordans). Unfortunately, based on fan applause, some might suggest a good fight in an NHL game qualifies.
For measures of beauty of the human form, psychologists believe they have an objective test, showing that waist-to-hip ratios of .7 and .9 for females and males respectively, is the ideal for attractiveness. The issue I have with the study is that we already have the narratives that fed our value judgment. If the same was done in the 1600’s that ratio would be very different, as chubbier people were the standard of beauty. Wealth seem to have quite an impact on assessing attractiveness.
My assertion is that beauty evolves through promotion. Music becomes more beautiful the more you hear it on some “trusted” source. Art becomes more beautiful when art experts wax eloquently about the composition, the strokes, the hidden meaning of the artist, as though they share the artist’s qualia. One also needs to look at the economic benefits that accrue over the long term. Promoting one’s beautiful possessions increases the desire of others to posses them.
Let’s take one artistic genius, Michelangelo, though one may look at Leonardo Da Vinci or a host of other renaissance artists. Each of them had patrons sponsoring their works and each of the patrons needed to show they had the best craftsmen. In the case of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the patron was Pope Julius II, as popes in that era controlled massive capital. There are many ceilings in many cathedrals around the globe that one may consider beautiful, but without promotion, they don’t seem to make the cut. Today’s billionaire class are the patrons of today. They pay hundreds of millions to acquire these items, which in turn raises their status in the eyes of the plebes, who just want a glance at the brilliance of days gone by.
This plebe had a chance to see the Mona Lisa and although I had seen pictures of it in the past, I remained unimpressed by the experience. The explanation could be as simple as that I trained as an engineer who never took an art appreciation course. As I age, I look back to things that impressed me in the past that don’t seem to have stayed with me. I “developed” a taste for Scotch Whisky and fine wines. I could tell the difference between Red and White varieties by just looking at them!
Today I question the value of “acquiring” tastes. I need to be told what is good, thus I’m acquiring a narrative of what is beautiful as opposed to something is just inherently beautiful. Over the years I have found many to be attractive that don’t fit the mold as defined by current society.
In Plato’s Symposium, he tells of Socrates encounter with Diotima. The Symposium was a narration of a dinner party where each speaker talked about love (not beauty). Diotima asked Socrates to compare making love to a beautiful woman and then to an ugly one. When he finds the beauty in the ugly one, he has then become enlightened and thus understands love. In this passage, what is the message regarding beauty? Although this is a crude paraphrasing of the original, what I read from this is the “visual” is not where you uncover beauty.
There is an inherent feeling of attractiveness within us towards the opposite sex, or same sex in current society, though I would argue that the feelings are informed by the narratives we have grown up with and thus are not universal and eternal. Maybe we should be looking more at Diotima’s understanding of love, which matches my view of the term respect. Pursuit of respect seems like a more noble undertaking.
