The Winding Path

We perceive beauty in many ways, and in many things. The most common is seeing the beauty in another person whom we love. We might also consider a particular piece of music beautiful, or the smell of a flower garden in full bloom, or the feel of silk against our skin, or the complex and interesting flavours of an unusual dish. As mentioned in my previous post on the topic, our perception affect what we consider beautiful, and it’s every one of our senses that contribute to our perception. And as Jenny just pointed out, even when our naked senses aren’t enough we can enhance them to perceive an even deeper level of beauty than we previously thought existed.

But what about other kinds of beauty that we don’t experience through one of our senses alone? Michael mentioned narrative beauty; the beauty of a story, which may be told in words, dance, song lyrics, music, or pictures. It adds another layer of beauty and creates a more powerful impression.

The concept of narrative beauty hints at the reasons why we consider a certain thing to be beautiful. Adding to what I said in my last post about beauty, the stories we hear and tell ourselves grow over time, and the greater our understanding of the stories that appeal to us, the greater our experience of their beauty, and the greater their appeal.

This process of increasing understanding, deepening experience, and greater appeal sounds familiar doesn’t it? It’s the same as the process of falling in love. Or as Michael defines it, love itself, since love is a process, not just an abstract concept describing an emotion.

Perhaps this explains why we love the things we consider beautiful, and believe all the people we love are beautiful. No matter how plain a baby is, the mother will always see him or her as beautiful. Perhaps it’s a survival mechanism, but it certainly involves very strong emotions and I bet someone experiencing such emotions would find it hard to define them as either beauty or love, or an inseparable mixture of both.

Just as we can’t completely define love, and just as different people have different opinions of what love is, so do we have differing opinions of beauty. It’s possible that this is because not only do we experience a large range of emotions, but we interpret each of our emotions and levels of emotion differently. We then try to communicate our interpretation to each other but inevitably use words that match with a different interpretation in the other person.

So it the end beauty can’t be clearly defined, but that’s ok; it doesn’t make anything any less beautiful.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Philosophy, Psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.