On beauty

There is a very famous argument between Socrates and another man, in which Socrates challenges the man to define piety. I think it was Crito, but I'm not sure. Regardless of the title, the dialogue consists of Socrates showing his opponent that merely referencing other subjects and objects is not sufficient for definition.

Which is why the beautiful is so difficult to relate if you have no common ground. What is it, anyway?

Ask an artist what "beauty" is, and you're likely to get an earful. If you ask Jackson Pollock, he might say that beauty is an event, an action that expresses something. If you were to ask Claude Monet, you might hear of a sunrise over the water. Were you to ask Louis Armstrong, you would get an entire songful. Old Satchmo made a lot of people happy just by singing about the very subject.

These days, all you need is the internet to access what others find beautiful. Regardless of the form of the content, be it audio, visual, some amalgamation of both, even written word, you can find forms of the joy people find in the world around us everywhere. Tumblr in particular is a common form of expression, as is DeviantArt.

Still, it's the curse of the writer to see beauty in places that others usually don't. The film American Beauty was based on such a book, and sticks in the minds of many a moviegoer because of the images that it evoked. Even a plastic bag, dancing in the wind. (I think this one is a bit blah, but I'm just jaded.)

A good question might as well be where isn't there beauty? I'd answer, but good questions make for depressing blogs. Socrates was executed for being a dick, after all, and all he did was ask lots of annoying questions. Since I don't want to drink hemlock any time soon, I think I'll stick to the positive.

What then, is beauty? There are some examples above, but is there more? Of course. Ask yourself what you see, hear, touch, taste, and love in the world around you. What makes it beautiful? Plato thought that the things we find beautiful were that way because they mimicked the real form of capital B Beauty off in la-la-land somewhere. In most cases, I think that Plato's idea of Forms was a bit off, but here he might have something. When put to it, I find beauty in too many things.

A little kid's evil laugh as he uses his Ninja Turtles to give G.I. Joe a beatdown, for example. When someone strange on the internet knows exactly what you do in the shower. 120 dogs howling in unison because all they want to do is run, and their brothers are out doing it while the sun is high and the wind is cold. Landscapes, canyons, caves, birds, life, and cute girls.

One of the lines from Lord of the Rings is also quite true - there are things beautiful and terrible at the same time. Tsunami, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes.... not just natural disasters. Lions hunting prey, space seen from the hubble, the cell structure of a killer virus.

There are a few people in this world uniquely acquainted with the beautiful, and we call them artists, entertainers, and the talented. Seers, oracles, and prophets, sometimes. Sometimes they are leaders, like his holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. Sometimes they are merely pedestrian, a strangely hirsute man who could be anyone else on the street, but writes like a god (Patrick Rothfuss, choff choff).

To Aristotle, capital V Virtue was beautiful. He believed that by aspiring and living towards Virtue itself, we would in turn be virtuous people, inside and out. The self-examined life, is how he phrased it.

Unless you find beauty in death (and sometimes there is), and insist on making things more beautiful by killing (shudder), pursue it. The more people who strive to find the extraordinary in ordinary life in this world, the better. Our lives could all use a little picking up sometimes, couldn't they? All to the better if we can do so in a way that others can see and recognize.

If you read this, I'm glad you're OK, and it was good to hear from you.