Tylor Alexander
Sunday August 30th

What is Beauty?

Original Thought

Beauty is a word used to describe things, moments, events, sounds, etc. that cause a sensual/emotional response with an underlying factor of good.

Original Example

A symphony (from the perspective of a listener).  The symphony produces a sound that is vast and large.  Its many instruments dwarf the listener with its tsunami of sound.  It stirs both tension and resolution to the very core of the listener.  As a listener, though you can understand some, there is a large lack of understanding about what is before you, yet you are still overtaken by a goodness that you do not understand.

After Thoughts

Following our discussions in class and hearing the different perspectives of what Beauty is I am left with far more questions than answers, however I also feel a bit closer to the core of it than I did before.  Some questions I have are: 

1. How do we encounter Beauty? 
2. What kind of foundational understanding is required to recognize Beauty (if any)/Can an infant differentiate between Beauty and something else?
3. What is not Beauty (if anything)? 
4. Is Beauty in everything?
5. Have we as humans become so blinded by ego building activities and gone from Humans Being to Humans doing, that we cannot see that Beauty is in everything?

In our classroom discussion we began to reach an agreement that there is a unifying factor about Beauty that it cannot be absolutely subjective, but that there is something that connects Beauty together (Good? Mystery? The Holy?)

1. Does that mean that the things we have thus far equated as beauty a mere mimic or an imaginative expression of something beyond the true Beauty/Good/Mystery/The Holy?

I feel Beauty can not be outside the bounds of something expressed (example: music or art being aesthetic or non-representational).

I am leaning towards the idea that things "concrete" such as the ocean or mountains or trees or people that we consider to be beautiful, they are somehow not fully realized actuals, of Beauty/Good/The Holy which is why there is a mysterious element because if they are not fully realized Beauty, what is the actual and when does it come?  Man-made things/Art are an imaginative reflection/expression of the previously mentioned "concrete" things to unravel the mystery they reflect.