Beauty is the smile of a child, the scent of my garden and the vista from the hill where I live. Beauty is a concept we hold, an unattainable yet noble pursuit to appreciate all the world's bounties. Beauty is the thought of comfort for the sick, food for the starving and peace for the war ravaged innocents who gain nothing from it. Beauty is when just the right moment comes along, and you are there in it! So many more, but I've got beautiful flowers to go attend....and that's a beautiful thing.
What of mathematical beauty? Fractals? Nature? Why are we attracted to these things? In the case of nature, is it emotion [the need for peace; equilibrium] that drives us to seek beauty?
how does beauty equate to truth....wouldnt this imply that all beauty is true and thus beauty would be objective. Beauty is interpreted differently by different ppl... look at the greeks, where the male body was considered espeially 'beautiful' or in certain tribes fatter women are considered beautiful neither one really fits the modern (western) view of beauty Aesthetics is a very difficult topic of philosophy for me to grasp...there doesnt seem to be any explanation at all. Aesthetics seems to recognize things as beautiful but has yet to explain why we find these things beautiful
I draw a distinction between objective beauty and relative beauty. Objective beauty equates to truth ie a beauty in mathmatics is in equations that make a true statement about reality. Relative beauty is something more trivial as is "damn that big booty is beautiful". People can believe things are beautiful and be wrong just like people can believe in an opinion and be wrong.
but isnt finding beauty in mathematics subjective not every society has found an interest in mathematics
idk maybe ive been looking at all this the wrong way....but i still dont understand objective beauty in order for somn to be objectively beautiful, you must define beauty as a property of that object and thats the part i have a problem with you cant just make final, universal rules on beauty. idk if im still missin somn, if so, maybe some1 can explain it so i can understand better
mathematics represent something in its truest form. Sooo the math says an equation is a chair, The Chair. The ultimate sitting device that cradles your ass, doesn't fall over, hold your drink, etc. Since that is the embodiment of chairness, its what all other chairs should be compared to. My God, its one beautiful chair. Now if someone fucked up the equation, the chair would have a hole in the seat, three legs or worse, spikes. eek! That chair is in poor likeness to The Chair and isn't beautiful since it doesn't embody chairness, just bad math. Now with that stupid example of chairs out of the way (what the hell was i thinking) anything can be represented by an equation. numbers can describe the perfect nature of something, even if the perfect version doesn't exist in reality. Beauty embodies our ideal perfect version and ugliness increases when we move away from the ideal. We seek patterns, and math conveys the rawest, stripped down truest patterns we know. If looked at that way, math can only be beauty.
im thinkin i may just accept defeat and say i dont get aesthetics.... so you are sayin that you dont have to think something is beautiful for it to be beautiful... for example you may not find the chair beautiful, but you acknowledge that it is the 'ideal' chair i guess i dont see 'ideal' as 'beautiful' what would be the ideal/most beautiful (human) body?
subjectively i'd say that something that embodies the characteristics of its nature fully is beautiful. That may sound stupid but in a world of pretense, there are a lot of objects that just don't act, look, or function as they should and it detracts from the beauty. Pure beauty seems to exist outside the realm of humanity, just as pure good and evil lie on extremes outside, spiritually speaking. The ideal is never achieved but ever sought. Its representation is never static, its cobbled together from countless other flawed objects made before it. when we see or make something comes close to that ideal, we find we've transcended our normal lives for a brief moment, even just metaphorically. its really hard to say whats physically beautiful but it can be said without a doubt that symmetry, linear and geometric patterns, hue's and pitch's (in music) respective relationships that can all be described mathematically have much to do with it. one could quantify it eventually, given thousands of years to work on the equations. aesthetics are hard to work with philosophically. i should stop because i keep on coming up with extra scenarios that don't fit with my own rules of beauty as i try to write a coherent response.
I have the ugliest chair in the tri-county area, but it is so comfortable that it's like sitting in a warm vat of leathery heaven, so it's beauty to me is apparent, but not at all to someone who has never sat in it, or to whom it is not perfect. Aesthetics are totally different from beauty, beauty is not always skin deep, sometimes, it's hairy, spiny, covered in warts, and smells like a mule. But beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, for example, a vulture likes to find a place where everyone has just died, it would look like our vision of heaven, to a vulture. That's why Dick Cheney visits Iraq so much, it's actually beautiful, to the old buzzard. As for the Ideal body, let's go with the Halle Berry edition, you got to have some fun!
when i say 'aesthetics' i mean the philosophy of aesthetics - the philosophy of beauty Thanks Med i was startin to buy this idea of ideal/objective beauty, you came and smashed that this way just makes more sense
beauty is not just physical, it's about inner qualities and personality more. For example, Mother Teresa, such a beautiful woman who has showcased beauty in all her works. Who can be so beautiful from within? This beauty should drive humanity and if this type of beauty would have been pursued by people, this world would have been heaven.
I personally cant believe no ones brought up a young ladies breasts yet... lol just kidding really - but besides beautiful young women, what I personally find beauty in is nature - it is amazing what you can find taking a walk through the woods on a late spring day - a fern unfurling, a simple flower, various minerals, an oddly shaped tree, glowing mushrooms at night - its never ending. j