The perception of beauty in modern world
Beauty is such a thing that we can witness in many things, whether it is a flower, a landscape, a lamp, painting, architecture, songs, music, attractive human face etc.
Beauty can give us comfort and awaken hope inside us. Some beauty can fill us with disgust, and some can hypnotize us for a while.
But no matter what the feelings, no one can ignore beauty. Many great philosophers of the past, like Plato, Socrates, and Immanuel Kant, have written their views on beauty in great detail, which has always been a topic of discussion. Even millions of years ago, our ancestors spent a lot of their time and energy making their tools and weapons symmetrical and good to look at.
Even though beauty has no functional purpose, we pursue beauty near it and make it a part of our lives because beauty instils hope. Beauty reminds us like a judge that we are still nothing in front of it, and if we want to have this beauty, we have to improve ourselves. Whenever we experience or see a wonderful thing, it forces us to think about something.
In his book Beauty, English philosopher Roger Scruton says, “wanting to get something for its beauty means just getting that thing and not using it in some way”.
Even after getting such a beautiful thing, your desires won’t be satisfied because you are trying to get that beautiful thing to contemplate. You won’t be looking for any information or satisfaction point of your desires.
After all, beauty is a desire with no goal, i.e. a wish that can never be fulfilled. Roger Scruton is basically suggesting that beauty is not so simple that you keep a beautiful physical thing to yourself. Your desires related to it will vanish because beauty is metaphysical, which goes beyond physical reality.
Human beauty refers to health and sexual health, and beautiful objects indicate a golden proportion of fractal patterns or symmetry. We do not limit the feeling emanating from them on a physical level.
When you look at your spouse or listen to some beautiful music, you will have a powerful feeling which can make your experience of time and space disappear.
Focusing on beauty can lift our spirit above the mundane reality of only sensory and concrete things that meet our idol and give birth to beautiful things.
In this way, we can capture beauty not physically but metaphysically. Although sometimes we see a photo of an older person, a child or a woman who is not physically attractive, that picture of them seems to us quite deeply meaningful and beautiful. But why?
Here we have no desire to process the beauty of these people, nor are we attracted to them in the way. We aspire their beauty by listening to classical music or seeing a renaissance painting.
But still, these faces are full of meaning because these faces again put us in a contemplative mode where we ourselves find meaning and knowledge in these pictures.
We can witness the beauty of the people we love because whether our parents, spouses or siblings may not be the most beautiful people in the world, we feel their beauty on a much deeper level.
People who are important to us can make us feel the gravitational pull of their existence because their personality acts as an object of contemplation. From time to time, we stop at their presence and try to digest how we got this person, and now it has become a part of our story, and this sentiment is quite similar to the sentiment of beauty. As we share our favourite songs with others, we support these people whose spirit shine on their faces and behaviour as beauty shines through in a piece of art.
We know the importance of beauty on an instinctual level. But today, we have become so far from our instinct that we are destroying the beauty of the world without thinking, because of which today’s painting, architecture, song and even the thinking of people is hideous. Modern art is a joke in the name of beauty, and the lack of beauty has created a spiritual void in the hearts of modern people.
Every person feels a longing for something. Something that comes to him and raises him above his mundane everyday life and reaches the house of God, but as long as the ability to make beauty and beautiful things in our society is rejected as useless, then our sickness and the existential void in us will continue to grow.
