WONDERINGS: For The Love Of Beauty

For the Love of Beauty

I wonder what beauty is. What is it that makes something beautiful? Everyone knows something beautiful, but what is that all-too-often-unspecifiable property that makes something beautiful? And, if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, can there exist any one thing that all eyes behold as beautiful? Would it be a sight, sound, or thought?

Isn't it curious that only two of our five traditional senses are typically used to identify beauty? There are beautiful things to see and beautiful music to hear, but can you imagine a beautiful smell? More likely, smells are lovely or wonderful rather than beautiful. Tastes are more appropriately "delicious." And finally, we are hard pressed to use "beautiful" with our sense of touch.

But then there are beautiful ideas to contemplate - like beautifully played games of chess, or scientific theories that are called beautiful for their genius and elegantly simple explanatory powers.  How do these things fit in? Thinking or pondering isn’t technically a sense. Yet we all seem to have a sense of beauty. Regardless of the fact that our brains are used to process information and input from our sense organs, we still experience beauty there. And a beautiful idea that arises from something other than sensory input is a testament to our sense of beauty beyond that which is connected to the physical senses. Is this just word play, or is beauty really a sixth sense?

The duality of beauty is another source of wonderment. We usually associate beauty, whether material or not, with good, pleasing, or beneficial things. But stop for a moment to consider the beauty of tragic, terrible things. The atomic bomb makes a beautiful mushroom cloud that spells death and utter destruction to those to near a blast.  It seems the context of some things is what determines whether we view something as beautiful or not. When the space shuttle Challenger blew up only moments from liftoff, much of the watching crowd “oohed” and “aahed” at the spectacle in the sky - they hadn't instantly known the awful truth of the tragedy. Perhaps afterward, when they realized the malfunction, they felt ashamed for having expressed joy at the sight. Does this make the exploding shuttle less beautiful? Can the beauty of the sight and the lives lost be separated?

Nature herself presents a paradoxical duality, often beautiful while at the same time cruel and merciless. Lightning bolts, tornadoes, hurricanes, and volcanoes inspire a great many people to attempt to capture their beauty on film. But were you to fall victim to a capricious bolt of power, a havoc-wreaking wind, or a blazing-hot flow of lava, wouldn't you would know fear and loathing rather than beauty? A roaring African lion on the plains of the Serengeti at sunset makes a beautiful picture, but that same lion can be terribly lethal and anything but beautiful in an attack on a person. Isn't one of the beauties of "beauty" its ability to coexist with it opposites?

As mentioned previously, beauty also lives in realms beyond the physical senses and outside world - like dreams, feelings, memories, and life experiences.  But again, these things are subjective; not everyone could agree on or share the particular beauty of them.  Love is a beautiful thing, and though wonderfully varied with each love being experienced by only one (or perhaps two in a "love shared"), perhaps it is the only thing that everyone could agree is beautiful.

But what is love? I wonder!

© 1999-2009 by Gary D. Timothy

--------------------

For more of my work:  Eclectic's Universe blog **  Eclectic Universe website

Eclectic Universe forum (new members needed!) **  Thinking With Reason