Mike Cavanagh's Blog - Posts Tagged "beauty"
Beauty and the Beholder.
It’s an oft used phrase: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Mostly we trot it out when we are confounded by someone’s choice or preference in art, interior decor or sexual partner. At this vernacular level all well and good, but if you think about the phrase as it stands it does lead to some interesting ponderings.
Is beauty really in the eye of the beholder? Let’s go sideways first. Another saying: ‘if a tree falls in the forest does anybody hear?’ Not if there’s no-one to hear it, but it still makes a noise, and having heard large trees fall I know you’d have to be quite some distance away not to hear it fall. In this example, the perception (hear) is easily discernible from the causative agent (tree falls). But ‘beauty’? Can something be beautiful even if there is no-one to see, hear, smell or in any other way perceive it?
One take on this is that we can each define what we think is beautiful, for example particular hues and textures in a sky at sunset that make a ‘beautiful’ sunset. Somewhere in the middle of the Pacific ocean a lone albatross soars across such a vermillion and mauve cloud rent sky, not giving a single thought to it (probably), but intent on where the next school of fish are likely to be in the dark, choppy waters below. As described in this way, this scene and this sky to me sound like things of beauty. But out there, none of ‘us’ who define beauty as we understand it, are around to see it. Is it still a thing of beauty?
To remove all sense of ‘us-ness’, imagine a sunset of green-blue skies on some methane-rich world light years from our solar system. Beautiful?
What it comes down to, I believe, is whether or not we believe things can be, and are, ‘beautiful’ even if we don’t perceive them, even if we never will, never can. We can extrapolate on our ideals of beauty and say ‘where-ever these aspects occur, beauty exists’. Yet beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so what if ‘we’ aren’t the beholders? If other sentient species exist in the universe their sense of beauty is bound to differ from our own. But we don’t need to go so far from home. The great apes, and chimpanzees, do they perceive ‘beauty’? Monkeys? Cats and dogs? Even if animals don’t conceive ideas as we do, I certainly believe animals with higher perceptive and cognitive abilities ‘get’ beauty, even though not understood or perceived as we do.
Is there a fixed viewpoint for beauty, or is it in fact where-ever we perceive it, which has to do with our perception, not its presence or absence? In which case, isn’t beauty everywhere, in everything?
What a thing to believe.
Have a beautiful day.
Is beauty really in the eye of the beholder? Let’s go sideways first. Another saying: ‘if a tree falls in the forest does anybody hear?’ Not if there’s no-one to hear it, but it still makes a noise, and having heard large trees fall I know you’d have to be quite some distance away not to hear it fall. In this example, the perception (hear) is easily discernible from the causative agent (tree falls). But ‘beauty’? Can something be beautiful even if there is no-one to see, hear, smell or in any other way perceive it?
One take on this is that we can each define what we think is beautiful, for example particular hues and textures in a sky at sunset that make a ‘beautiful’ sunset. Somewhere in the middle of the Pacific ocean a lone albatross soars across such a vermillion and mauve cloud rent sky, not giving a single thought to it (probably), but intent on where the next school of fish are likely to be in the dark, choppy waters below. As described in this way, this scene and this sky to me sound like things of beauty. But out there, none of ‘us’ who define beauty as we understand it, are around to see it. Is it still a thing of beauty?
To remove all sense of ‘us-ness’, imagine a sunset of green-blue skies on some methane-rich world light years from our solar system. Beautiful?
What it comes down to, I believe, is whether or not we believe things can be, and are, ‘beautiful’ even if we don’t perceive them, even if we never will, never can. We can extrapolate on our ideals of beauty and say ‘where-ever these aspects occur, beauty exists’. Yet beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so what if ‘we’ aren’t the beholders? If other sentient species exist in the universe their sense of beauty is bound to differ from our own. But we don’t need to go so far from home. The great apes, and chimpanzees, do they perceive ‘beauty’? Monkeys? Cats and dogs? Even if animals don’t conceive ideas as we do, I certainly believe animals with higher perceptive and cognitive abilities ‘get’ beauty, even though not understood or perceived as we do.
Is there a fixed viewpoint for beauty, or is it in fact where-ever we perceive it, which has to do with our perception, not its presence or absence? In which case, isn’t beauty everywhere, in everything?
What a thing to believe.
Have a beautiful day.
