What Is Beauty, Really: Wrestling with the Unanswerable

have you ever been stopped in your tracks by something just beautiful a line of music the way light hits a building a sentence in a book it just arrives uninvited and for a moment nothing else matters mhmm it's a strange kind of authority isn't it last week were wrestling with justice and price gouging something with such hard edges a clear right and wrong we were trying to find but this feels softer and maybe more powerful exactly with justice in a crisis you want an answer with beauty the question itself feels like the point so what is it what is beauty is it actually in the sunset or is it just something

happening inside my own head that's the ancient tug of war really plato would have said the beauty is definitely in the sunset or more accurately the sunset is a shadow of a perfect eternal capital b beauty that exists in a realm of pure forms oh right so a beautiful thing is beautiful because it's a good copy of the real thing i mean that feels a little dismissive of the sunset itself and what about things we disagree on i love a particular gnarly dissonant piece of music and you can't stand it which one of us is seeing the form of beauty more clearly that's the problem isn't it if it's an objective quality we should be

able to measure it people have tried you know the golden ratio symmetry certain harmonic frequencies there are patterns that show up again and again in things we tend to call beautiful but it's the exceptions that get me the things that break all the rules and are still somehow breathtaking it feels like the moment you make a rule for beauty a great artist comes along and proves you wrong so it has to be subjective right just in the eye of the beholder or maybe it's not about the object or the beholder but the space between them okay what do you mean by that the space between them well think of the philosopher kant he had this idea of disinterested judgment he thought that when we

experience true beauty it's because we're appreciating something without any personal stake we don't wanna eat it or own it or sell it we just appreciate its existence disinterested i like that but i'm not sure i believe it's possible when i see something beautiful i do have a desire a desire for the experience to continue a desire to understand it that feels like a stake it feels very personal it is and that's maybe closer to hume who said beauty is not a quality in the thing itself but a feeling a sentiment in the mind it's a purely subjective experience see that feels more true to me it's my feeling full stop but then why do we argue about it why do we have

art critics or architectural awards if it's all just personal feeling then saying i like it is the beginning and the end of the conversation and it never is we want to persuade others we want them to see the beauty we see so we're caught if it's objective we can't agree on the rules if it's subjective we can't explain why it feels so universal and important we are caught and maybe that's the right place to be i keep coming back to that first feeling that moment of being stopped it doesn't feel like i'm making a judgment or accessing a perfect form or even just having a personal feeling it feels like a kind of surrender you stop analyzing and just perceive

you're not the subject and it's not the object for a second you're just part of the same picture yeah maybe beauty isn't a thing to be defined maybe it's a direction a reminder that there's something more than just the useful the practical the day to day it doesn't give you an answer it just makes you ask a better question and what question is that i don't know and maybe for tonight that's beautiful enough