Beauty as an object instead of an attribute

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

It would seem that if beauty were a general attribute, there would be a more precise logic to it. Now, it doesn't seem totally random, either, though. So, what if beauty is not, in itself, a description of another thing in itself, but is a separate object/thing that applies to another by a degree of connection? That is, an object is beautiful to the degree that it is attached (in some sense) to/overlaps the object of beauty. Our emotional/sentimental/attitudinal reaction to beauty is a form of perception/awareness/whatever of a specific object, as sight would be of specific patterns of color or the like.

There could still be rules of some kind for connecting objects in this context, but they would not be straight deductions such that we would end up with an overly formalized, narrow-minded aesthetic, maybe.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

If I may, I would recommend Hans Urs von Balthasar's theological aesthetics (which also borders on the philosophical domain) in which the Beautiful is essentially the unlocalizable "differential" interplay between the True and the Good. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics Vols I-VII. For a more summary, popular treatment, see his Love Alone Is Credible.

Also see the superlative work of the Eastern Orthodox, Balthasarian theologian David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth.

[Avatar]

Surely it would be less subjective if it were something tangible?

--A

[Ur Dead]

If beauty is only skin deep and ugly goes to the bone,
what would you do if you saw a beauty and had a paring knife?

[peter]

Is there both a subjective and an objective element to beauty? There are 'standards of beauty' that we all recognise, but which we overlay with our own personal subjective preferences to greater or lesser degrees. Is this what the post is getting at Mig?

[Orlion]

Sounds like Platonic Form Theory.

[Avatar]

Not into the Platonic Forms at all. Some sort of weird idealism.

--A

[peter]

Orlion has picked up on the same 'vibe' that I got from the op - but iterated it a hundred times better!

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

There is an affinity to the idea of the Form of Beauty, except that the logic of the exemplars here is not participation but adjunction. That is, individual beautiful objects are not "colored" a certain way, if you will, that is there is not beauty in itself that is "more" beautiful than any particular beautiful thing, but things are just more beautiful if their "aesthetic mass" is greater, so to speak. Beauty is not an internal/constitutive but an external/relational description, to that degree.

Also the Object of Beauty in question could just be a subjective essence, a mental commonality (like an abstract emotion), not a transcendent function.

[peter]

Hi Mig! Hmmm....... I'd need all this putting into Homer Simpson level explanation for me to get it I think! But who knows - a day at work musing on it may throw some light.......?..

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

I guess the idea is that an object is beautiful to the extent that it is part of the Object of Beauty. Exemplars of Platonic Forms are not parts of the Forms, however, and here beauty is not like the Form of Red, attributed to all red things, but is an individual, concrete thing to which all beautiful things are "attached" to form a whole.

The logic or dynamics of this object would be, to be sure, quite odd. It would be like a blob of consciousness that was impersonal, worse than a ghost perhaps, except it shines through in the perception of all perceptual splendor. Let's say it was a scalar field: how does it interact with the fields for other forms of physical matter? (Because I'm almost saying that beauty is like a different form of matter...)

[peter]

I'm thinking here of it as something analogous to Plato's shadows on his cave wall: that the archetypal beauty 'form'/object cast's it's reflections obliquely in myriad avatars at the level at which we are able to percieve, and overlapping to greater or lesser extent with the objects it encounters at the material level of existence?

[Skyweir]

It would seem that if beauty were a general attribute, there would be a more precise logic to it. Now, it doesn't seem totally random, either, though. So, what if beauty is not, in itself, a description of another thing in itself, but is a separate object/thing that applies to another by a degree of connection? That is, an object is beautiful to the degree that it is attached (in some sense) to/overlaps the object of beauty. Our emotional/sentimental/attitudinal reaction to beauty is a form of perception/awareness/whatever of a specific object, as sight would be of specific patterns of color or the like.

There could still be rules of some kind for connecting objects in this context, but they would not be straight deductions such that we would end up with an overly formalized, narrow-minded aesthetic, maybe.

But in a way beauty is an attribute isn't it? Smart, funny, beautiful? Or not because it is not skill-based?

Ok so if we look at beauty as sight or seeing how would that work? Are we really talking about finding an objective measurement of beauty? One that is not subjective and therefore inconsistent in its application?

[Skyweir]

If beauty is only skin deep and ugly goes to the bone,
what would you do if you saw a beauty and had a paring knife?

hahahahahahaha... not sure if I should express outward form of amusement .. cos that is quite sick! LOL .. and yet ...

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

I'm thinking of beauty as an object, in or part of the world, not an eternal standard against which things are measured. Just as a brick enters into all sorts of relations with everything else in existence, albeit mostly indirectly, so too does this "aesthetic object," and just as we would be able to judge objects in relation to the brick, as near it or overlapping it perhaps, the same goes for the Object of Beauty, and so rather than an object X being beautiful by exemplifying principles of beauty as an aesthetic process, X is so if it is simply "adjacent to" or "overlapping" the OoB. This is contingent and possibly as unmotivated as brick-juxtaposition; so everyone perceives the degree of beauty in things differently, depending on all sorts of circumstances. But the beauty itself is neither purely objective nor purely subjective, one might say.

[peter]

But the Object of Beauty would demand to be tangible in this scheme Mig, and it is (like for example the Boogeyman) on the basis of experience to date, not so. We might,granted, examine it's relationships with known other tangible objects as if it were, but any such examinations would always fall at the final hurdle of it's failure to be demonstrated as such. (Samuel Johnson would this time kick the pure air before his booted foot before crying "I refute it thus!" )

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

I suppose it would be reducible to the "sensation" of beauty, and its identity as an object would be inferred more than less. It is like what Wosbald indicated, in a place between the general and the particular, the abstract and the concrete.