So, beauty. A subjective thing right? Whatever you feel like is beauty is beauty. So there is no one beauty or true beauty, just whatever you perceive something as. Well, nothing is purely objective or subjective, and since beauty is so commonly seen as purely subjective, I'm gonna put the objective back into it.
Beauty comes in patterns. People tend to find one thing beauty over another. This lends to some things being beautiful in a higher percentage of subjective experiences. At that, these subjective tendencies and generalizations are not just coincidence. There are patterns and tendencies that are objective. And I do believe that if we all searched our whole life for the greatest and highest beauty we would find the same beauty. The same objective possibility for beauty. When people find ugly things beautiful it is because they do not yet understand what beauty can be.
Look at music. It's so clear by just looking at the democratic opinion of music that there are objective truths of which beauty tends to be held. There are chordal patterns, tonal realities that, when broken, the success rate in communicating beautiful diminishes. You can argue that this is all conventional and people just like their subjective conventions. But you are wrong. They are somewhat conventional and that is because beauty is stronger shared between people and few if any people actually find beauty independent of any longing for commonality in perspective between people.
I could go on this tangent but I won't. My argument is that, though people come to different understandings of what things are beautiful, the experience of beauty is one thing all humans are together in its pursuit. And in us all being human we will have objective tendencies that exist as truths across humans. Even if you don't ascribe beauty to the common thing, there still is that common thing. The enjoyment of art, music, and food is not completely arbitrary in its discovery. There are patterns left to the artist, musician, and cook, that they must oblige. They may like to complicate the hell out of what they do but they must respect what people find beautiful and share that with them.
About Me
- Jon McDuffie
- Minneapolis, MN, United States
- I seek for peace, goodness, god-ness, something like this. Sometimes I’m closer, sometimes I’m further away. Sometimes within me, always outside me. Yet, still I am seeking.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
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