How do you know what is beautiful?

I've seen many beautiful men. I see them every day (drooool).

I can also appreciate a beautiful woman. I know one when I see one, though my opinion of beauty will not necessarily be the same as the next person's.

I believe beauty is universal. It is not limited to visual either. Anything can be beautiful.

Beauty and sexual attraction are not the same thing. I can find something sexy but ugly (Good old ugly-sex), and vice versa. Some people just get off on beauty more than others.

A healthy appreciation and dose of beauty is good for the human soul (or machine, however you think of it).

Beauty is universal; appreciation of it is not.

Beauty is relative to how a perception sees things.

It is,
1) A characteristic of a scenery or object perceived by sight that is in-depth, easy to look at, or appealing to the emotional state of a conscious creature.

2) something that inspires awe

Ray writes


A good start. But can you explain how that tribal person isolated in a remote corner of the earth sees the same thing as beautiful that you do? Why it inspires awe in both?

What I think I'm shooting for here is a determination of whether beauty is a learned experience or something that is inate in humankind.

Do all infants, before they can walk or sit up, delight in the color red for instance? Or is it just the infants that I have known who do that?

Oh, and in response to Spendius, yes, the native peoples found many of the things beautiful that we consider beautiful.

Fox, I once read a study where babies were 'tested' to various images and people. The babies cooed and gravitated to the more attractive/beautiful ones. Of course, how did they determine who/what was more beautiful to begin with? I was just an isolated study, but still it was interesting.
It suggested that we are born with a universal sense of beauty.

Thanks flushd. That's the conclusion I think I've come to, but I've never found more than that one comprehensive study I paraphrased from memory that would confirm it.

Foxy-

I presume you have studied the subject here as it is dealt with by Aquinas,Joyce,Flaubert and Proust,to name but four of the better known ones,and have found their conclusions unsatisfactory.

Do you find unacceptable my comparison of a designer blossom to an empty tin can.If you do then you might have concluded that Andy Warhol was not a front rank artist like,say,Constable,who depicted a man made arrangement of the topography.

Followers of the I.A.Richards school will always find the tin can more beautiful on the basis of its usefulness to thirsty members of the species whereas blossoms as aesthetic objects are only useful to certain casts of mind.The manufacture of billions of tin cans is a process which throws into high relief the ingenuity and resourcefulness of men of dedication but the blossom cannot help itself but appear as it does as is the case with daisies and clumps of grass.

Interesting take on it Spendius and I will think on it, but it isn't quite what I had in mind. What people SAY is beautiful due to cultural conditioning and that beauty that moves us in indescribable ways are two separate things I think.

For instance, the daisies you mentioned are pleasing to me and I enjoy them in my garden, but I do not see them as particularly beautiful in themselves. The blossoms in the photo, however, are beautiful to me. Why the blossoms and not the daisies?

It's an affectation I'm afraid.It has social value in some circles and creates guffaws in others.I suppose you restrict your socialising to those who have similar tastes to yourself but on a world wide forum you have to take what comes.

Just study a modern beer can closely and think of the engineering and economics of it.It was once a part of the earth's crust.After that you can move on to motor cars and operating theatres.

Well I would think that children are more more easily attracted to bright and shiny things. I remember I used to like baloons when I was little, and marbles.

Be careful Ray.The trick-cyclists will be pondering that.It's amazing the associations they could conjure up from balloons and marbles.

exactly. sometimes when you see something beautiful you just grab it. you don't analize it or remark on how it compares to other things. most of the time beuaty is so complicated it can't be completely analized and put into one category, you can work to figure it out, but you know that you'll never get completely there.

How do you know that you're not just attracted to bright and shiny things because they're different? Because they stand out?

look at your avatar

Slick! man.

Way back on page one Mills75 mentioned the importance of symmetry to beauty, at least in regards to mate selection. It's been discovered that symmetry is a very important factor in the selection of a potential mate, and not just in humans, apparantly in many, if not all, species of animals. The factor of symmetry in mate selection was first studied in scorpionflies.
It was found that female scorpionflies preferred to mate with males with the most symmetrical wing lengths—right and left.

Female birds select the males by their beauty of their plumage and song. We now understand that the condition of the plumage reflects the genes, that is, the ability of the male bird to get food, resist parasites and disease, and, in general fend for himself, all desirable qualities to pass on to one's offspring. Now, the female bird—and the female scorpionfly too, I suspect—doesn't consider the male's plumage and think about his genes; she just thinks, "wowsa! I want him." To her he's beautiful. Essentially, I believe it's the same for all animals in regards to mate selection.

Humans have the ability to perceive beauty outside of mate selection, and we may be unique in this. As others have suggested, the mystery of beauty will always remain so, although it probably can be killed with over-intellectualization, just as the mystery of poetry and music can be killed by over-analyzing them.

With that in mind, and since the thread began with a photo of blossoms, I'll give a short lesson on the flower's reason for being. We must remember that showy flowers began, that is, came in existence, to help potential pollinating insects find them. The shape, color, and odor of flowers—the same factors that attract us—exist to attract the insect and act as signposts in contrast to the bland and mixed-up background of leaves and such. The symmetry and color of the petals allow the insect to see the flowers in a sea of leaves. Insect sight is something like our sight when standing too close to a mosaic on a wall; not that good and bold symmetry and color make it easier to pick out patterns. The insect, rewarded with a meal of nectar and pollen remembers that particular flower species and is wont to return to other members of that species, and, in the process, transfers the pollen.

The insect is not interested in the beauty of the flower, but in the contrast with the background, perhaps not unlike our own response when walking through a prairie of monotonous grasses and coming upon a showy flower. We appreciate the beauty of the single flower in contrast to the thousands of identical grass plants. But should that same species of flower pop up in our backyard bed of tulips, we may pull it up as a weed.

So Foxy fancies the blossom.Is that it?

That's kinky.

At least I only fancy beer cans and I think that's quite normal.

Well then, I haven't been called 'kinky' in years. I'm flattered, I think. But it's normal to get mushy over a beer can? Heck, who am I to say? Whatever floats your boat.

Foxy-

The beer can has beer in it and I'm attracted to beer like millions of others.The gentle narcotic effect of alcohol is pleasureable.

Does the blossom have a narcotic effect which can be separated from a narcissistic effect.With "fine" wines both effects are present but with blossoms is there a specific narcotic?

lol, well there's a good starting point for "what is ugly"?

I'd say it's something that we see as disturbing or that is unpleasant to our sight.

From these premises, we can also derive that beauty is something that we know to be "non-disturbing" and that is pleasant to our sight.

In this case we have an experience attachment to something, and a perceptual factor. I think that the combination of both might be what we usually consider as beautiful. Also, by experience I would also include a rational analysis of the experience.