Is beauty worth commenting on?
(Hat tip sdferr in a test of my thoughts on putting comments into posts.)
Update! From our friend, Lee:
“When I was a youngster, my dad took an interest in botany. All well and good, except he wasn’t over his previous ( and perennial as it turns out) passion for photography, with predictable results.
I gotta tell ya, after looking at eighteen thousand pictures of the most beautiful flowers in the western hemisphere, one can get an itching to see a picture or two of a rock, or a dry patch of sand say. Something, anything, to provide some context, or perspective, or otherwise relief from an endless parade of exquisitely beautiful and diverse same old same old.”
Update! From our Darleen from our Heinlein:
“An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl she used to be. But a great artist–a master–and that is what Auguste Rodin was–can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is…and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be…more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart…no matter what the merciless hours have done to her. Look at her. Growing old doesn’t matter to you and me; we were never meant to be admired–but it does to them. Look at her!”
For myself, I think that beauty is worth capturing and commenting upon. It’s sorta the whole point of living.
Meaningful yes, even only when accompanied by drooling. Unashamed drooling.
Beauty tends to be a tad subjective, is the thing. Eye of the beholder, and all that business.
In the main, beauty is worth comment, in reality, a few pictures of your grandbabies go a long way.
Here I think we find a great discussion, Lee.
When we find beauty in the world it really does seem universal to us each individually. Something that we can all agree upon.
Babies are the same way even. I tend to think babies are generally cute but there are these off people who think they look weird. But, isn’t it weird that they think babies look weird? Isn’t that a bizarre and unnatural thought that babies aren’t aesthetically pleasing? That’s fucking weird.
It may be a parental thing, with associate memberships available to those who cared for and bonded with babies in their own early years.
I can see both sides on the babies question but have no doubt that a child or godchild of my own would end such impartiality.
Besides, I did look weird when I was a baby. That’s why I know my mother, who thought I was perfect, must have loved me.
VERY much.
Good times, McG.
OK, I know I brought it up, but I’m not really comfortable entering the weird looking baby debate. forgive me for taking a different tack.
When I was a youngster, my dad took an interest in botany. All well and good, except he wasn’t over his previous ( and perennial as it turns out) passion for photography, with predictable results.
I gotta tell ya, after looking at eighteen thousand pictures of the most beautiful flowers in the western hemisphere, one can get an itching to see a picture or two of a rock, or a dry patch of sand say. Something, anything, to provide some context, or perspective, or otherwise relief from an endless parade of exquisitely beautiful and diverse same old same old.
It’s quite the paradox.
Give me a sec here, that there is an update, Lee.
Updated.
~~From Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land about Rodin’s “La Belle Heaulmiere”
Updated!
Updated
Aww…,a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ux3-a9RE1Q”>beautiful…
Aww…beautiful… – See more at: https://proteinwisdom.com/?p=55609#comment-1165909
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I do Pinterest whenever I need a dose of beauty. It keeps me from playing with my toes.
Me?
I’ve merely to gape at my looking glass.
And then stand amazed.
At myself.
“Look at Me, I’m Wonderful”
yeah less is more with the photography i think
when I’m taking pics, every meal I go through and pick the *one* best shot among every discrete series of pics
then i use this so the pictures have a place to live
How about this, just for fun if not for profit? To take bh’s initial question a little further, from whether essential beauty is meaningful to the related if ancillary question by means of the preternaturally beautiful actress Rosamund Pike’s presence in the film Pride and Prejudice, which novel and film seems to assert in part that justice beheld is essentially beautiful? So, is justice beautiful and injustice ugly, or no?
justice can be very pretty in the right light but in the main it’s somber steely and industrial
with maybe an edge of flame for color
What is the right light in respect of human striving for either human physical beauty on the one hand or human justice in our relations on the other? What is that driving thing in us — a driving for the right light, or is the right light just an accident — a happenstance of the now and then — not an essential accompaniment of justice seen or beheld as we find it?
Ok.
What of the verificationists then, and of their heirs? What of P.W. Bridgman, of A.J. Ayer, of Bertrand Russell and of L. Wittgenstein, who each in his way would rule bh’s question itself as out of bounds, as meaningless at root? And who would certainly have under their principle said much the same about the absurdity of the question I take Austen to have proposed?
But do we not think that the verificationists proposed the most god-awful question beg in the history of question begs? Seems like, to me.
Golden Retriever shows the way.
Attsa good boy.
ClownDisaster: **Let’s pretend as a matter of our negotiating stance that Iran’s nuclear weapons development program is entirely peaceful at base**
Golden Retriever rejoins: **What, are you insane? Of course it isn’t peaceful, idiot! Why would we even be in negotiations with Iran were that the case?**
ClownDisaster responds: **You look like a tasty dinner to me. And so I will win the argument.**
would rule bh’s question itself as out of bounds, as meaningless at root?
How is beauty meaningless, I would ask. The human eye deals with it everyday and even if it is a subjective, there is a broad (and dare I mention, scientific) base of shared standards.
Whenever we find “beauty”, say in nature, we are looking at either something powerful (erupting volcanoes, tornadoes, waterfalls) or something of sublime symmetry (perfect flowers, snowflakes)
We move the beauty of power and/or symmetry we find in nature to ourselves as humans.
The beauty of justice is of the same root — the finding of balance or symmetry between two sides.
Whether beauty has an ontological existence apart from a mind to know it is not as important as the fact that it most definitely does exist in a mind which can know it. A cosmology which does not incorporate the human element may be useful, but is incomplete.
How is beauty meaningless, I would ask. The human eye deals with it everyday and even if it is a subjective, there is a broad (and dare I mention, scientific) base of shared standards.
On grounds of a simple recognition of the impropriety of a standing prejudicial judgment (I quote myself: ” . . . the verificationists proposed the most god-awful question beg in the history of question begs? Seems like, to me.”), I think I would not be the one to ask. But I can refer you to those named above as some among the men who originated the doctrine (there are many others), and their answer is in their books. It possible to attempt a summation of that doctrine, but truly (since the doctrine is itself about the search for truth in every sense of the term) it is best to go to the source.
I read a novel a couple of years ago that I’d highly recommend named A Soldier in the Great War, about an Italian student of aesthetics that, you guessed it, goes to war. Anyway, a quote or two:
Possibly on the subject for a case in point, though there may be very good dissent to the contrary I suppose: The Emptiness of Empathetic Judging
One of my all time favorite books is The Whimsical Christian by Dorothy Sayers, wherein is an essay titled toward a Christian esthetic. Recommended.
And another: Life, Death and the New Orthodoxy . . .
. . . from which, a taste of the flavor: *** To have learned from that experience would have been to develop a prejudice; and there is nothing worse in the contemporary moral universe than to make a judgment based upon prejudice. By going to the monster’s room on the faintest of acquaintance with him, knowing or strongly suspecting him to be an ex-prisoner, she was demonstrating not foolishness but a virtue: that of being non-judgmental. Granted that going with him may not have been the most prudent of decisions, but at least she was not prejudiced.
Alas, life, or at least human life, is judgment. Yet this was not something that commentators were prepared to say out loud—they having done so much in the past to disguise and discredit this obvious consideration. ***
Granted that going with him may not have been the most prudent of decisions, but at least she was not prejudiced.
Who is the one touting the virtue of non-judgmentalism in that gruesome case? Did she go with him because she had her judgment wrecked by the wider culture that says, “just because he LOOKS like an axe-wielding murder doesn’t mean he IS. Mustn’t judge!”
More likely, she was one of those chicks who has no judgment in the first place. She didn’t have any judgment to withhold, consciously or otherwise. She was probably starved for male affection or a good female role model (0r both) and had no internal narrative to say “no” to anyone who hadn’t already burned down her house.
The obscene practice of not treating dangerous people as dangerous, OTOH, does go back to the “Don’t judge!” movement, as well as the therapeutic approach to crime, which insists only that people make mistakes rather than are impossible to reform and must be put down like rabid dogs.
To me, what makes anything beautiful is as much its context as the thing itself. Take the thing out of the context and I am likely to find it transformed from something sublime, to a bauble by comparison.
also if you remember it’s like a million times easier to get great shots in the morning and late afternoon you can save yourself a lot of deletings
Mr. Ritts talked about a golden hour and he knew a lot about taking pictures
Beauty is something more than appearance, be it a visual appearance, an audio audio appearance, etc..
It is a combination of qualities that are mixed together just right [ie: McGehee’s ‘context’]. Beauty is, as the poet said, Truth.
To proclaim a Woman Beautiful, for example, is to say that she possesses a kind and merciful heart, a love of Life as it is, a natural intelligence.
These qualities are reflected in her face – in how it is animated [watch the eyes, especially]. It is also reflected in the way she carries herself, in the ways she interacts with other people, in the sound of her voice. And all of these reflections emanate from the Soul, from who she really is.
We’ve all seen the gal who is physically very attractive in a picture, but who we sour on once we see her in action, even if the sound is mute. The face distorts [in the neutral sense that all movement of it distorts] and we immediately understand in our Souls that this particular person is not worthy of being described as ‘Beautiful’.
And then there are those women who would not be considered very attractive, but who, upon watching them in action, we would develop a very warm appreciation for them, which, when further experience shows us that they radiate those qualities we admire, would cause us to say they are Beautiful.
The same goes for such things as music, which, when it hits some positive, some Truthful, emotional chord within us, we often describe as ‘having soul’.
[The above are just some thoughts I’ve been working out these past several years.]
[…] been a discussion going on over at Protein Wisdom on Beauty that is worth your […]
I am not arguing against the proposition, but simply saying “Beauty equals Truth” is not convincing in itself. You need to flesh out the definitions of both terms and illustrate how they relate. I could say that some truth is ugly so by your calculus: beauty, in its traditional usage, equals its opposite.
I think the concept that equates beauty with some ideal “loveliness” constitutes a narrow aesthetic understanding.
And God Created Man in His Own Image
-If you notice, I wrote that ‘Beauty equals Truth’, but did not claim that Truth equals Beauty.
Beauty is but one aspect of Truth, for Truth can be many things, sometimes combined, sometimes wholly one aspect.
-I did not mean to imply that the attributes that make-up Beauty are Ideal – although Hope for such lies in every Human Heart, I think. None of those attributes mentioned come with an expectation of Perfection, which is something reserved to The Almighty.
The possession of a kind and merciful heart, of a love of Life as it is, of a natural intelligence, all these things do not command that they be fully possessed – although I can see how what I wrote above may be taken that way.
In fact, I would argue that, just as it is the small defect, the ‘flaw’ in the design, that can add to the intensity of one’s belief that someone is physically attractive, so a lack of Perfection, Human Fallibility, add to the belief that another Soul is Beautiful. Why this is so, I am not fully sure.
This was a subject of interest to Edmund Burke.
Chopin Nocturnes.