Beauty itself existed before there was a word for it. The compulsion of language, the need to communicate beyond the simple "hey you give me that stick," drove us to name it.
Beauty itself, I don't beleive, could ever have been tied to one thing. Not in the beginning. A beautiful thing is beautiful because it makes us feel a certain way. We have a reaction to it. The phrase that beauty is in the eye of the holder is redundant if this is understood. The creation of the word and words like it is based in this. It is inherent. We wanted to say that those flowers, that sunset, that other person pleased us aesthetically, attracted us emotionally in so strong a way we felt the feeling needed physical form.
Yet, once something has a name, our need for clarity interferes with the pureness of the experience. We need to simplify to teach, to learn, to expand. We begin to define beauty by physical attributes based on the object's type and category. It loses it's meaning. We no longer experience beauty so much as we recognize it.
Flowers are pretty- whether we feel so or not.
This "new" idea that people can find a "strange" thing "beautiful" isn't really new at all. It is simply the acknowledgment of the original instigation.
Something we must re-embrace.
Beauty itself, I don't beleive, could ever have been tied to one thing. Not in the beginning. A beautiful thing is beautiful because it makes us feel a certain way. We have a reaction to it. The phrase that beauty is in the eye of the holder is redundant if this is understood. The creation of the word and words like it is based in this. It is inherent. We wanted to say that those flowers, that sunset, that other person pleased us aesthetically, attracted us emotionally in so strong a way we felt the feeling needed physical form.
Yet, once something has a name, our need for clarity interferes with the pureness of the experience. We need to simplify to teach, to learn, to expand. We begin to define beauty by physical attributes based on the object's type and category. It loses it's meaning. We no longer experience beauty so much as we recognize it.
Flowers are pretty- whether we feel so or not.
This "new" idea that people can find a "strange" thing "beautiful" isn't really new at all. It is simply the acknowledgment of the original instigation.
Something we must re-embrace.
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