I thought the discussion in class about beauty went very well. I hadn't thought about what beauty could mean until the question was asked. It isn't exactly an easy answer, but it can be answered. I think a more difficult question would be what is not beauty? Like discussed in class, a rotting animal carcass would most likely be considered something that is not beauty. But if someone were to look at the corpse and think about what will become of it that idea would be considered beauty. The animal was once living and will eventually decompose and its remains will become apart of a cycle that makes our earth exist. In its place something more appealing to the eye may then grow. That is beauty. Beauty can be an idea or thought of what may become of something.
I also believe beauty is internal. Each person sees things differently. More than one person may consider the same thing to be beautiful, but each has their own reason why. When one person looks at a sunset they may be reminded of a moment spent with someone special. While someone else may think about how there is so much more in this world to explore.
Beauty is everywhere and in everything. But it takes a mind to see it or understand it as beauty.
1 comment:
It seems to me that inasmuch as we reached anything like a conclusion, we found that beauty is a mental construct -- something like your conclusion about fact. Yet this mental construct should not be capricious or fantastic if it is going to be anything like "normal". For one, "beauty" is not simply ANY mental construct, but one having to do with sensual experience. Even if one says "that IDEA is beautiful", one speaks to an experience of the idea which has a certain quality to it analogous to that experienced through an encounter with the physical world.
Generally, aesthetic theory relates to ideas which may even be ultimately reducible to mathematics (curves, for example, or repeating patterns), but the direct experience of beauty is not mathematical but sensual.
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