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Originally Posted by Mark Lapierre  Could it be that love and beauty are different interpretations of the same thing? Or could love be what beauty becomes once our conscious awareness deepens the experience of beauty? |
Hm. I might think that love is a possible (the only?) deepening agent. Remember that I conceive of love as a process, not an emotional response. As an emotional response, I allow that love is the same word used, and in that case, I might consider beauty to be occasionally synonymous with love... but not always. But I'm not sure why.
I've lately begun to wonder why I separate discrimination from compassion and I've realized that it was wrong of me to do so. I would consider love now to be when there is more compassion than discrimination. But I'm off-topic now and I'll have to revise my definition sometime.
It's interesting to note that various aspects pertaining to love have often been described as beautiful, from the object to the process to the emotions.
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Originally Posted by Mark Lapierre Perhaps it is that beauty itself doesn't exist in degrees or levels, but our appreciation and experience of it does. As our understanding increases, of the context within which we and the beautiful thing exist, so does our feeling of its beauty. |
Hrm. Yet this notion disagrees with the idea that beauty is the emotional response itself. If beauty simply is, and our emotional response changes such that we gain a deeper appreciation of it, then beauty is not the emotional response; it's something which our emotions respond to.
And I think that applies a layer of false abstraction. Though, maybe that's not what you're saying. I'm not sure now.
(This is why it's taken me so long to respond. It's hard to really grasp what you've said.)
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Originally Posted by Mark Lapierre Unless I'm hugely mistaken, there's no doubt that we're born capable of experiencing emotions. We can't understand or interpret them, but we still feel them (and apparently remember them at some deep level). |
True, but I wonder... is emotion the chemical response, or is it the interpretation of it? Can happiness be mistaken for sorrow? Or anger for indifference? It seems so; the phrases "tears of joy" and "passive-aggressive" come to mind. But then again, perhaps it's more accurate to say that there are simply no words for the emotions described by those phrases.
I don't know. This might be excessively abstract as well.
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Originally Posted by Mark Lapierre And then not long after we hit puberty we start combining the two. "I love you, you're so beautiful!" And things really start to get confusing  |
The reason beauty and love are easily intermingled is because of the
creative nature of human beings. Learning is recursive. The reason a relationship of friends is stable is because there are frequent discoveries about each other, but nothing so excessive that expectations are smashed. (There are billions of stories of discovery of WTF moments. Had this discovery occurred more gently, over the course of perhaps a year, the relationship is generally more likely to stick. Because it would slowly enter the field of expectation.) Back to moderation, I guess.
I'm off-topic again. But I have long argued that you can love, for example, a painting or a piece of music. It's much simpler to find them beautiful. It would make sense... yes, it would make sense.
*ponders*