News:

2020
Attempting to do something

Main Menu

So, we need a definition of beauty.

Started by The Good Reverend Roger, October 21, 2012, 08:06:21 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Juana

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on October 23, 2012, 06:09:19 PM
That sounds a lot like you're ok with a culture promoting the damage of the physical and mental well-being of half the population for the benefit of a minority.
This. I suggest you go observe people who are recovering from an eating disorder.
"I dispose of obsolete meat machines.  Not because I hate them (I do) and not because they deserve it (they do), but because they are in the way and those older ones don't meet emissions codes.  They emit too much.  You don't like them and I don't like them, so spare me the hysteria."

P3nT4gR4m

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on October 23, 2012, 06:42:36 PM
I think you said it better than I could, Pent.

Don't beat yourself up over it. On a long enough timeline the law of averages dictates it had to happen. Should be back to normal soon enough  :lulz:

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

Faust

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on October 23, 2012, 06:09:19 PM
That sounds a lot like you're ok with a culture promoting the damage of the physical and mental well-being of half the population for the benefit of a minority.

I'm not ok with it. I'm just saying beauty and well being aren't the same. the pictures of the self immolation. are beautiful and terrible and powerful but not healthy.
Sleepless nights at the chateau

The Good Reverend Roger

Quote from: Faust on October 23, 2012, 07:19:37 PM
Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on October 23, 2012, 06:09:19 PM
That sounds a lot like you're ok with a culture promoting the damage of the physical and mental well-being of half the population for the benefit of a minority.

I'm not ok with it. I'm just saying beauty and well being aren't the same. the pictures of the self immolation. are beautiful and terrible and powerful but not healthy.

I wouldn't refer to them as beautiful.  Beautiful is something or someone I like to see, or an idea that gives me some sort of gratification.
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Juana

Bile fascination. Grotesque. But yeah, not beauty imo. But the emotional distress that accompanies this sort of thing makes my stomach turn far too much for me to even see those.
"I dispose of obsolete meat machines.  Not because I hate them (I do) and not because they deserve it (they do), but because they are in the way and those older ones don't meet emissions codes.  They emit too much.  You don't like them and I don't like them, so spare me the hysteria."

Faust

Quote from: Man Yellow on October 23, 2012, 07:22:17 PM
Quote from: Faust on October 23, 2012, 07:19:37 PM
Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on October 23, 2012, 06:09:19 PM
That sounds a lot like you're ok with a culture promoting the damage of the physical and mental well-being of half the population for the benefit of a minority.

I'm not ok with it. I'm just saying beauty and well being aren't the same. the pictures of the self immolation. are beautiful and terrible and powerful but not healthy.

I wouldn't refer to them as beautiful.  Beautiful is something or someone I like to see, or an idea that gives me some sort of gratification.
Beauty is something that has (to use a word I don't really like) a profound emotional significance for me. It may not be something I want to see, it is something I have to see. There is the delicate beauty the ones I love, who's tenderness and kindness carries with them in a sort of grace that I find beautiful.
Then there is the girl who was in the car crash who used to come into the shop I worked in who despite having no fingers, one eye and a harshly scarred face carries this confidence about her that makes her incredibly beautiful to me.

Maybe the fire image was a bad example, the physical aspect of it isn't the beautiful one it's the significance of it.
Sleepless nights at the chateau

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: NoLeDeMiel on October 23, 2012, 03:38:49 AM
Quote from: Man Yellow on October 21, 2012, 08:06:21 PM
A request was made for a second thread, to cover the definition.

My personal opinion: 

Beauty:  Something or someone that I can look at that gives me pleasure by looking alone.  Alternately, a concept or other intangible that's damn near perfect.

Attractiveness:  As Garbo said, "fuckability". I'm not visually-geared, so in THIS case, beauty is a combination of pheremones and what's in the person's head.

Thank you for that. Reading through the quibbling in the other thread I kept thinking over and over why nobody had stipulated "visually". Sensually, smell plays a much bigger part than look in what I find attractive. I was beginning to think I was the only one.

Weird part is, the few things that really grab me visually, I could describe in perfect detail right down to my physiological response to them. Which smells attract or repel me, I couldn't even begin to generalize about even though when they hit me, they hit me like a fucking bar-stool. Probably has to do with being taught how to say, spell and identify colors in pre-K, and still not even being entirely sure if I could tell you what "acrid" means.

That also probably explains a lot about why I immediately wanted to jump on the OP in the other thread and start quibbling myself. My concept of visual beauty is so minute that I very, very rarely even think of it when I'm using the word beauty. My use of that word occurs much more in that alternate je ne sais quois sense, even when I'm explicitly using it to refer to sensual beauty.

This leaves kind of a tricky question, if the predominant understanding of "beauty" is visual physical attractiveness conforming to some objectively agreed upon standard, when I say "beautiful" in the sense I experience it, am I shooting off bad-signal without meaning to?

I said physically beautiful, but no, I never got all the way down into the completely autistic semantic level and stipulated "visually physically beautiful according to the cultural standards of the moment".
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Mesozoic Mister Nigel

When we start going "OK, but *I* define beauty as this other thing that applies to anything I like and not to things I don't like", I think it's barstool time, because I think that anyone who does not have a cognitive disorder who has spent any amount of time observing Western society is capable of picking up on what "beauty" means in the context I brought it up in, in my thread, unless they are engaging in deliberate interactional vandalism.

I am not saying there's no place for a philosophy-wank thread on the True Meaning of Beauty, as well, but realistically, thanks to the magic of context, I don't think my post was actually ambiguous to those of us who participate in and observe Western culture and speak English as a first language, and I think it is disingenuous to pretend the meaning or intention are somehow ambiguous because, wait, but beauty has many meanings and we are all beautiful snowflakes and what is attractive is different to everyone.

And then there are cultural norms and shared realities and fashion magazines in your face everywhere, and again, the very fundamental basis of the point I was making is simple:

Not everyone is beautiful, and  that's OK. It does not make someone fundamentally bad, wrong, stupid, or worthless if they fail to meet someone's, ANYONE'S, definition of "beauty". I would far rather see THAT meme spread than the idea that everyone has validity because they're "beautiful" in some way to somebody.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Faust

Quote from: Man Green on October 23, 2012, 10:13:50 PM
Quote from: NoLeDeMiel on October 23, 2012, 03:38:49 AM
Quote from: Man Yellow on October 21, 2012, 08:06:21 PM
A request was made for a second thread, to cover the definition.

My personal opinion: 

Beauty:  Something or someone that I can look at that gives me pleasure by looking alone.  Alternately, a concept or other intangible that's damn near perfect.

Attractiveness:  As Garbo said, "fuckability". I'm not visually-geared, so in THIS case, beauty is a combination of pheremones and what's in the person's head.

Thank you for that. Reading through the quibbling in the other thread I kept thinking over and over why nobody had stipulated "visually". Sensually, smell plays a much bigger part than look in what I find attractive. I was beginning to think I was the only one.

Weird part is, the few things that really grab me visually, I could describe in perfect detail right down to my physiological response to them. Which smells attract or repel me, I couldn't even begin to generalize about even though when they hit me, they hit me like a fucking bar-stool. Probably has to do with being taught how to say, spell and identify colors in pre-K, and still not even being entirely sure if I could tell you what "acrid" means.

That also probably explains a lot about why I immediately wanted to jump on the OP in the other thread and start quibbling myself. My concept of visual beauty is so minute that I very, very rarely even think of it when I'm using the word beauty. My use of that word occurs much more in that alternate je ne sais quois sense, even when I'm explicitly using it to refer to sensual beauty.

This leaves kind of a tricky question, if the predominant understanding of "beauty" is visual physical attractiveness conforming to some objectively agreed upon standard, when I say "beautiful" in the sense I experience it, am I shooting off bad-signal without meaning to?

I said physically beautiful, but no, I never got all the way down into the completely autistic semantic level and stipulated "visually physically beautiful according to the cultural standards of the moment".

I didn't bother reading that thread so I didn't see it.
Sleepless nights at the chateau

Faust

Quote from: Man Green on October 23, 2012, 10:23:17 PM
When we start going "OK, but *I* define beauty as this other thing that applies to anything I like and not to things I don't like", I think it's barstool time, because I think that anyone who does not have a cognitive disorder who has spent any amount of time observing Western society is capable of picking up on what "beauty" means in the context I brought it up in, in my thread, unless they are engaging in deliberate interactional vandalism.

I am not saying there's no place for a philosophy-wank thread on the True Meaning of Beauty, as well, but realistically, thanks to the magic of context, I don't think my post was actually ambiguous to those of us who participate in and observe Western culture and speak English as a first language, and I think it is disingenuous to pretend the meaning or intention are somehow ambiguous because, wait, but beauty has many meanings and we are all beautiful snowflakes and what is attractive is different to everyone.

And then there are cultural norms and shared realities and fashion magazines in your face everywhere, and again, the very fundamental basis of the point I was making is simple:

Not everyone is beautiful, and  that's OK. It does not make someone fundamentally bad, wrong, stupid, or worthless if they fail to meet someone's, ANYONE'S, definition of "beauty". I would far rather see THAT meme spread than the idea that everyone has validity because they're "beautiful" in some way to somebody.
The way the modern cultrual norms and fashion magazines define beauty is with boring looking people with boring looking features.
They aren't beautiful they are vaguely fuckable.
It's ok not to be physically like them, but it has very little to do with anything resembling beauty.
Sleepless nights at the chateau

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: Faust on October 23, 2012, 10:29:51 PM
Quote from: Man Green on October 23, 2012, 10:23:17 PM
When we start going "OK, but *I* define beauty as this other thing that applies to anything I like and not to things I don't like", I think it's barstool time, because I think that anyone who does not have a cognitive disorder who has spent any amount of time observing Western society is capable of picking up on what "beauty" means in the context I brought it up in, in my thread, unless they are engaging in deliberate interactional vandalism.

I am not saying there's no place for a philosophy-wank thread on the True Meaning of Beauty, as well, but realistically, thanks to the magic of context, I don't think my post was actually ambiguous to those of us who participate in and observe Western culture and speak English as a first language, and I think it is disingenuous to pretend the meaning or intention are somehow ambiguous because, wait, but beauty has many meanings and we are all beautiful snowflakes and what is attractive is different to everyone.

And then there are cultural norms and shared realities and fashion magazines in your face everywhere, and again, the very fundamental basis of the point I was making is simple:

Not everyone is beautiful, and  that's OK. It does not make someone fundamentally bad, wrong, stupid, or worthless if they fail to meet someone's, ANYONE'S, definition of "beauty". I would far rather see THAT meme spread than the idea that everyone has validity because they're "beautiful" in some way to somebody.
The way the modern cultrual norms and fashion magazines define beauty is with boring looking people with boring looking features.
They aren't beautiful they are vaguely fuckable.
It's ok not to be physically like them, but it has very little to do with anything resembling beauty.

OK, but even disregarding the effects of social programming, even given variances in individual taste, why is so much value being placed on beauty, that even the attempt to argue that human value is not dependent on beauty and that a person who is not beautiful is still a valid and valuable human being, is met with so much pushback?
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Faust

Quote from: Man Green on October 23, 2012, 10:44:22 PM
Quote from: Faust on October 23, 2012, 10:29:51 PM
Quote from: Man Green on October 23, 2012, 10:23:17 PM
When we start going "OK, but *I* define beauty as this other thing that applies to anything I like and not to things I don't like", I think it's barstool time, because I think that anyone who does not have a cognitive disorder who has spent any amount of time observing Western society is capable of picking up on what "beauty" means in the context I brought it up in, in my thread, unless they are engaging in deliberate interactional vandalism.

I am not saying there's no place for a philosophy-wank thread on the True Meaning of Beauty, as well, but realistically, thanks to the magic of context, I don't think my post was actually ambiguous to those of us who participate in and observe Western culture and speak English as a first language, and I think it is disingenuous to pretend the meaning or intention are somehow ambiguous because, wait, but beauty has many meanings and we are all beautiful snowflakes and what is attractive is different to everyone.

And then there are cultural norms and shared realities and fashion magazines in your face everywhere, and again, the very fundamental basis of the point I was making is simple:

Not everyone is beautiful, and  that's OK. It does not make someone fundamentally bad, wrong, stupid, or worthless if they fail to meet someone's, ANYONE'S, definition of "beauty". I would far rather see THAT meme spread than the idea that everyone has validity because they're "beautiful" in some way to somebody.
The way the modern cultrual norms and fashion magazines define beauty is with boring looking people with boring looking features.
They aren't beautiful they are vaguely fuckable.
It's ok not to be physically like them, but it has very little to do with anything resembling beauty.

OK, but even disregarding the effects of social programming, even given variances in individual taste, why is so much value being placed on beauty, that even the attempt to argue that human value is not dependent on beauty and that a person who is not beautiful is still a valid and valuable human being, is met with so much pushback?
I see people being valued on how pretty they are, and those bias and value judgements exist there, to me that's ugly v pretty. There plenty of ugly beautiful people who get their value considered lower and it's not OK. I agree the its ok not to be pretty meme should be pushed, ok not to be beautiful means something completely different to me.
Sleepless nights at the chateau

tyrannosaurus vex

Approaching this discussion from an alternative direction, the phrase "beautiful on the inside" clearly means "not physically beautiful." It could be said that it is trying to validate something that normally would be considered valueless because of a lack of physical beauty; but it is also translating "beauty" from a physical attribute to a spiritual one. It maintains that value is based on beauty, but it redefines beauty so that it is not a physical thing. In that way if you really believe someone is valuable because they are "beautiful on the inside," then unless you're talking about their internal organs, you have already moved past physical beauty as the main indicator of that person's value.

I think it's possible to use the phrase without being condescending or cynical, but i think specifying that they are "beautiful on the inside" is suspiciously redundant. Why not just describe the person as "beautiful," and let people who don't understand be confused until they figure it out? This happens quite often, where people are described as beautiful people when they are, at least in my opinion, not physically beautiful at all. I also think it may be important to continue to use the word "beautiful" in this context, in order to change the general associations of that word. Using semantics to sidestep the definition of "beauty," no matter how you do it, will always end up equating to some word or phrase that means "valuable but not beautiful." I'd rather there be no room for that kind of distinction to exist in language.
Evil and Unfeeling Arse-Flenser From The City of the Damned.

Anna Mae Bollocks

Quote from: Man Green on October 23, 2012, 10:23:17 PM
When we start going "OK, but *I* define beauty as this other thing that applies to anything I like and not to things I don't like", I think it's barstool time, because I think that anyone who does not have a cognitive disorder who has spent any amount of time observing Western society is capable of picking up on what "beauty" means in the context I brought it up in, in my thread, unless they are engaging in deliberate interactional vandalism.

I am not saying there's no place for a philosophy-wank thread on the True Meaning of Beauty, as well, but realistically, thanks to the magic of context, I don't think my post was actually ambiguous to those of us who participate in and observe Western culture and speak English as a first language, and I think it is disingenuous to pretend the meaning or intention are somehow ambiguous because, wait, but beauty has many meanings and we are all beautiful snowflakes and what is attractive is different to everyone.

And then there are cultural norms and shared realities and fashion magazines in your face everywhere, and again, the very fundamental basis of the point I was making is simple:

Not everyone is beautiful, and  that's OK. It does not make someone fundamentally bad, wrong, stupid, or worthless if they fail to meet someone's, ANYONE'S, definition of "beauty". I would far rather see THAT meme spread than the idea that everyone has validity because they're "beautiful" in some way to somebody.

Thanks for bringing it back on track. It was almost getting to "inner beauty".
Scantily-Clad Inspector of Gigantic and Unnecessary Cashews, Texas Division

Anna Mae Bollocks

Quote from: Man Green on October 23, 2012, 10:44:22 PM
Quote from: Faust on October 23, 2012, 10:29:51 PM
Quote from: Man Green on October 23, 2012, 10:23:17 PM
When we start going "OK, but *I* define beauty as this other thing that applies to anything I like and not to things I don't like", I think it's barstool time, because I think that anyone who does not have a cognitive disorder who has spent any amount of time observing Western society is capable of picking up on what "beauty" means in the context I brought it up in, in my thread, unless they are engaging in deliberate interactional vandalism.

I am not saying there's no place for a philosophy-wank thread on the True Meaning of Beauty, as well, but realistically, thanks to the magic of context, I don't think my post was actually ambiguous to those of us who participate in and observe Western culture and speak English as a first language, and I think it is disingenuous to pretend the meaning or intention are somehow ambiguous because, wait, but beauty has many meanings and we are all beautiful snowflakes and what is attractive is different to everyone.

And then there are cultural norms and shared realities and fashion magazines in your face everywhere, and again, the very fundamental basis of the point I was making is simple:

Not everyone is beautiful, and  that's OK. It does not make someone fundamentally bad, wrong, stupid, or worthless if they fail to meet someone's, ANYONE'S, definition of "beauty". I would far rather see THAT meme spread than the idea that everyone has validity because they're "beautiful" in some way to somebody.
The way the modern cultrual norms and fashion magazines define beauty is with boring looking people with boring looking features.
They aren't beautiful they are vaguely fuckable.
It's ok not to be physically like them, but it has very little to do with anything resembling beauty.

OK, but even disregarding the effects of social programming, even given variances in individual taste, why is so much value being placed on beauty, that even the attempt to argue that human value is not dependent on beauty and that a person who is not beautiful is still a valid and valuable human being, is met with so much pushback?

(As an aside, the social programming is still there. LMNO pointed out in one of these threads that we might like a different genre than what's presented as the dominant commercial images of beauty, but we still look for a lot of the same things. It gets ground in our heads.)

And I've caught myself feeding into it more times than I can count in just the last few days. Cheering up a woman whose boyfriend was chatting with somebody else by having a bitchfest riffing this other womans appearance to shreds (totally negates the "good intentions" points), randomly seeing pictures of unattractive people who have achieved things and thinking things like "beautiful mind"...this shit runs DEEP, it's going to take the forever to root it all out.
Scantily-Clad Inspector of Gigantic and Unnecessary Cashews, Texas Division