Musings on Beauty: Part II

Ok... Several questions to answer here. It is my hope that I can touch on them all, even if it is not systematically, and I think that such an exploration begins with the question: How do we reconcile the subjectivity of beauty with what seems to be more objective?

Somehow, beauty has an objectivity as something woven into being itself, outside of cultural inventions. But on the other hand, on the human level, we are always filtering through senses and contexts that can distort the light like coloured glass. This is not a rebuttal to the idea of a universal concept of beauty, but it does give us an impossible number of variations to consider-- like trying to name every colour and texture of every possible surface, to figure out the colour of the sun.

The Colour of the Sun

But then I wonder... If one was to otherwise do their best to peek their head above the clouds, what are the main factors that colour our perceptions? Like, let's say there are two very different races in the world– way beyond say, what a black person looks like compared to a white person or vice versa, but something more dramatic like Humans versus... A Zora, or something. Some other humanoid creature (Klingon, say, I don't care). There is definitely a "perfect" Zora and there's definitely a "perfect" human, especially when one considers, say, practical or utilitarian markers, but if one is going entirely by aesthetics, then "perfection" itself might not neatly fit into either of those categories at all-- though they both may be beautiful in their own way, maybe even to each other. (I'm thinking about how elephants think people are "cute" and cats have so many infantile traits that we are drawn to them in different ways than to other animals). 

But here, the category of evaluation itself seems to define the metrics. And while well-organized systems can be very attractive, they are not "beautiful" except through their satisfaction at their utility and perhaps even a comparison to dysfunctional systems... I hope that makes sense.  

But that, too, is subjective, insofar as it is us who defines the categories for evaluation. But... what if the objective human beauty is actually nothing like anything we are able to achieve? What if beauty itself, that light that tints the pieces of glass, is something far beyond anything we see or experience? I wonder if humanity itself has the capacity to envisage something beyond itself that is even more beautiful even if it is nothing like what we are?

Transcendent and Untouchable

The fact that we can imagine and long for beauty that serves no utility at all suggests there’s something more at work, pointing us to a form we haven’t met yet. And the fact that we can feel this gap, that yearning for something beyond even human perfection, might be the surest sign that such a beauty exists at all.

... But it is an interesting idea to imagine that our yearning towards something implies its pre-existence. This is something that could go all sorts of directions… 

But I wonder... if one stripped the utility and forms of things that we experience... If there is some perfect beauty that exists that would just melt our minds if we were to ever lay eyes on it?

It's kind of silly, but as an example, there is an episode of Rick and Morty when Rick creates a square that is so level, that everything else is just mind-bendingly wrong in comparison. In this way, I wonder whether the face of God is generally considered something that we can't look upon for something like this reason. And is it beauty? What is it supposed to be that makes God's face so radiant? Is it a kind of unbearable clarity of many factors finally made one, and too intense for the human mind? Is our undoing when we look upon His face related to the fact that it would just be impossible to un-see the perfection, to the extent that our psyche would be destroyed by how profane everything else would be by comparison?

Horrifying, exciting. 

Tentative Hypotheses:

1- Maybe this is all why so many theophanies in scripture involve light and trembling, or covering of the face: God gives us glimpses of clarity so that we can move forward, but never enough that we will be destroyed for this world. 

2- Maybe what we call "beauty," then, comes from a single source, which we may approach by degrees, but only insofar as we are still bouncing between the glass and our inner walls, never really being able to see what lies behind it. 

3- Perhaps God's radiance is undimmed harmony of all that is right, all at once: ultimate truth, without fracture, love without limit, justice without crime. Otherwise, our minds can only parse in fragments, which accounts for the wide array of ways that beauty appears to us and is otherwise manifested.

And is this somehow related to recent meditations on Joy?

Yes... I think so. At least, based on my exploration earlier this week. I said that joy was a reaction to other factors that give us a glimpse of rightness. But beauty doesn't directly give one joy. Beauty seems to be a glimpse of perfect form, where Joy seems to be related to perfect process...?

I may need to sit with this a bit longer. I need to look for holes before I move further.