What is Beauty?

Ren said:
Oscar Wilde is awesome, but I don't think what you are referring to here is truth in the sense in which @Deleted member 16771 / John Keats meant it.

When we say that sometimes "truth is ugly", I think what we mean is that what's ugly is that certain facts are true. So it's not technically truth that is ugly, but the facts — which are the case. I can't see how Truth with a capital T could be considered ugly.

I think the suggestion that beauty is truth is somewhat akin to @Pin's associating beauty with harmony; with the very fact that truth 'ensures' a holding, a kind of link between the world and what we say/think, rather than an absence of such a link (a dis-harmony).
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Then you can't really say that the truth is beautiful either... But facts, the same as ugliness. Or?
 
BritNi said:
Perhaps beauty is not something external: something which we can see our touch. Maybe beauty exists within ourselves and coincides with our ability to see or find beauty in all things?
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I like this idea. It sounds like what you're saying is that beauty is not this thing we call "beauty" and that we can't agree about, but the very fact that we are all capable of making aesthetic judgments about beauty, even if we disagree about what counts as beautiful and what doesn't — that we are all sensitive to something we call "beauty", but that it's more an experience than a content?
 
Pending further contributions, here is what Chelsea Wolfe has to say on the matter — in the form of a great goth rock album:

 
Ren said:
Not sure about that, mon petit coquin! ♥
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Lolol ok, you got me.

So where does beauty rest? Some place between a standard and an experience? Beauty is and must be experienced, but can all things be beautiful? I say yes. Beauty is an idea.
 
Wyote said:
So where does beauty rest?
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I have no idea! Or rather, I'm not sure... hence why I created this thread — to get inspiration from the forum's luminaries ;)

Wyote said:
Some place between a standard and an experience? Beauty is and must be experienced, but can all things be beautiful? I say yes. Beauty is an idea.
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My current lead is that beauty is a feature of the experience of certain events. (By "event" I mean event unity, which includes things). I don't think all things can be beautiful, but I do think that many more things can than usually conceived. If you take any one thing, and relate to it by default as not instrumental to your ends, but purely in light of what it is, then perhaps you experience that thing as beautiful...?

That's the area where I currently am with regards to beauty. I see the fact that it does not refer to sensual/sensory enjoyment as an advantage.
 
Ren said:
If you take any one thing, and relate by default as not instrumental to your ends, but purely in light of what it is, then perhaps you experience that thing as beautiful...?
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That's how I got to my "everything is beautiful" conclusion. Can you give an example of something that can't be beautiful, based on any kind of paradigm shift?
 
Wyote said:
That's how I got to my "everything is beautiful" conclusion. Can you give an example of something that can't be beautiful, based on any kind of paradigm shift?
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That's a very good question... Right now in my research/notebook, I haven't really arrived yet at any kind of definition of the "not possibly beautiful". In theory at least, it would have to refer to event unities that one cannot experience otherwise than primarily instrumentally or 'practically' by default.

You could object that, for example, anything could be taken out of its ordinary context and artistically re-contextualized, like Marcel Duchamp's Fountain. (In my understanding, the urinal featured in Fountain qualifies as beautiful.) But in my ontology, even things do not limit themselves to material things. For example, although I do believe indeed that the statement: "This urinal is beautiful" can make sense, as in Duchamp's Fountain, I am less convinced that the statement: "The air is beautiful" can make sense — and yet from a certain perspective, the air is something, too. Another example would be one's own body, including one's body organs.
 
Wyote said:
More and less spoony air
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Silly boy :P

Wyote said:
I like this term btw
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Yay, thanks! :) I use "event unity" all the time these days in my notebook, or its synonym, "situation". My use of these terms is somewhat idiosyncratic so I have to remind the reader from time to time of what exactly they mean in OM terms. An event unity is the realization in the actual world of a fact in virtual space :)
 
Ren said:
An event unity is the realization in the actual world of a fact in virtual space :)
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Ren said:
I don't think all things can be beautiful, but I do think that many more things can than usually conceived.
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I agree with this completely. For me, beauty is revealed when I'm at peace of mind and heart. When I'm worked up, or a cranky douche, things are by far less beautiful, even ugly. Those times when I feel filthy inside, I have to try to find beauty, if I even give that much effort. When my way of being is top shelf, it's nearly impossible not to recognize it. Like, what is outside is a reflection of what is inside.

Perhaps, if we take an apophatic approach to beauty, or describe what it is not, we will begin to identify what it is? Or maybe we'll just give up and say it's subjective. I'm ok with that too.
 
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