XIV - BEAUTY

The concept of beauty is worldwide and found throughout history. People frequently disagree on what is beautiful, but rarely claim that there is no such thing as beauty.

Beauty can be anywhere. A person can be beautiful, so can an animal, or a plant, or an object, or a place, or an action, or a thought or feeling, or a symbol, a sound, or just about anything else. Some things nearly everyone will call beautiful; others are hard pressed to find even one admirer.

But what is beauty, the quality in and of itself? Is it a quality inherent to the object such as mass or temperature, or does it exist as a relationship with something else? There are things out there that nearly everyone would call beautiful, just as there are things nearly everyone would call massive, so beauty might be thought of as a similar sort of quality as mass. But a more careful examination will show that unlike mass, which is a stable quantity in the conditions of normal human existence, massive is a comparative quality dependent on a relation to something else. Calling things massive only makes sense if there is something non-massive around to compare them to. Does this mean that nothing can be beautiful without ugliness? Or at least plainness? If everything were beautiful, then would nothing be beautiful? I don’t think so. I have an idea of what beauty is, in and of itself, beyond any particular case of something beautiful.

Beauty looks good. We are attracted to beauty and feel enhanced by its presence. We think of beautiful as the way the world should be. Beauty seems right.

Ugliness seems wrong; ugly looks bad. We are uncomfortable with ugliness. We feel threatened and repelled, although it may hold a risk-associated fascination for us. But usually we want ugliness to change or go away.

In addition to the beautiful and the ugly there is the great undistinguished middle ground of plainness, which goes largely unnoticed. We are moved little either way.

But merely to say we like beauty, dislike ugliness, and mostly ignore plainness is not enough to understand aesthetics.

Why do we have an aesthetic ranking sensibility that we apply to a world full of things of every possible description? Because everything in life is part of our myth. We are always on the lookout for mythic progression and moral confirmation through demonstration.

When we experience beauty we are in the presence of an expression of mythic ideals. In our myths, we demonstrate the moral package of our role in the world as we see it to be. Beauty is a moral demonstration of how we would like it to be, long for it to be, discover that maybe, just maybe it could be. Beauty offers hope. It gives us a shift of mythic progression to a better direction. It helps relieve a myth forced to deal with an imperfect self in an imperfect world.

Beauty may express ideals of either group myth or personal myth, or both. If the beauty is just in terms of the group myth, we will notice and respect, but if it is in terms of our personal myth, we will be moved.

Ugliness represents a negation of mythic ideals, thus we dislike the ugly. Plainness is a quality of things irrelevant to our mythic ideals, thus the plain only weakly holds our attention.

Beauty is associated with alpha, for the promise of higher mythic quality and association with ideals makes it desirable as a mythic source. Beauty helps close the gap between what we would like to believe and what we are forced to believe. Also, since the alpha state is a common mythic ideal, whatever is alpha is seen by most people as beautiful.

Beauty is a common strategy for becoming alpha. It may take the form of being beautiful, creating beauty, surrounding yourself with it or otherwise drawing it to the attention of others. Being associated with mythic ideals makes you attractive as a source. It convinces you of the validity of your own myth. You feel secure as an alpha. Your myth seems inspired to others, who will be attracted to your orbit and reinforce your position. You will have the nerve to go forward. The future is always unknown territory into which our stories move in a mixture of extrapolation and creation. Beauty helps show us the way.