What is beauty? Is it there anything real/cosmic behind it, or is it wholly subjective and arbitrary? Or is it both/in between somehow, and how?
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what are your thoughts on it?
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I don't really know what to think. I was hoping someone could answer the "how" part for me in "is it both/in between somehow, and how?"
I think there is definitely a "cosmic"/"spiritual"/universal/"metaphysical" aspect to beauty, but it's odd, given that, that people's perceptions of beauty differ so much.. for almost anything that's ugly to one person or even to to most people, there's somebody who finds it beautiful.
I could reason that, while beauty is inherent in the object (or how the object reflects cosmic truths or something), different people have different abilities to appreciate beauty in different things. So beauty is everywhere, but no one person can see all of it.
I guess this could take two modes: 1) people seeing the same aspect or attribute of something being either beautiful or ugly (or neutral) depending on their sensibilities, and 2) one person just completely missing a subtle aspect or attribute of something that's actually beautiful that another person notices. Of course it can be anywhere in between the two things also.
There is a problem with the idea that beauty is everywhere, though, and that's that anything that describes absolutely everything describes nothing.
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it's worth noting that the sense of beauty is not 100% arbitrary. although there's endlness divergence, there's a lot of commonality in what people find beautiful.
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there's the evolutionary-psychological angle you could take on why we find certain things or at least people beautiful, i.e. evolution programmed it into us, but i don't buy that explanation. life is spiritual and not everything should be reduced to the most mundane/scientistic of terms. but there could be -some- level of truth to that idea.
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if we truly understood aesthetics we would have to understand the human psyche, spirituality and the cosmos so well that we would be sages. and yet this deep and rich mystery goes almost completely unnoticed..