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Originally Posted by Michael Chui  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.) |
Don't worry you're not alone in failing to grasp something I'm trying to get across. It happens fairly often. I'm working on it
There is a layer of abstraction there, but I don't think it's false; in my mind beauty is an abstract concept of which the emotional response is one part. The other part is our perception of the object we label as beautiful. The reason I think the emotional response is part of the concept of beauty, is that without that emotional response something wouldn't be considered beautiful.
Consider someone who has an aversion to everything green; they feel sick whenever they see a tennis ball because it's green. But if they saw a tennis ball in very low light, it would just be grey, so they wouldn't be nauseated. The tennis ball itself does have a property which makes it nauseating for one person, but not for anyone else, and when that person's perceptions are altered (the ball looks grey), it is no longer nauseating for them. So what real link is there between the colour green, and being nauseated?
To isolating?
When I said what you quoted I was trying to reconcile our different views of beauty. I tried to consider beauty as something that just is, but also incorporate my own experiences of beauty.
But the more I consider it the more it seems I can't reconcile beauty as distinct from perceptions and feelings, with my own understanding of what beauty is.
I think part of the problem lies in the language that we use. We generally say something
is beautiful, not that it
looks beautiful. We imply that beauty is inherent, yet as you've said, we don't/can't define exactly what it is that makes something beautiful. Could it be partly romanticisation? Saying something
is beautiful is much more of a compliment than saying it merely
looks beautiful. In the latter case it's an opinion, in the former it's an observation of fact. "I think you're beautiful" as opposed to "you are beautiful and everything should think so!"
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Originally Posted by Michael Chui 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. |
I think it's relevant. Perhaps it's the reason there are so many differing opinions of what beauty is, and of what is beautiful. Not only do we experience different chemical responses, but our interpretation of those responses is also different. And as this thread shows, our interpretation of our interpretations also differs
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Originally Posted by Michael Chui 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. |
We feel an emotional response to our perception of something, and in this case since it's similar to the emotional aspect of love, we call it love instead of beauty?