What is beauty?
Posted in Educationon Apr 13, 2005
It is easy to say that the question which asks, what is beauty is not easily answered. To some, a particular object may appear beautiful, but to others is appears ugly. Is the object, then, beautiful? A common phrase is, Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but how much of beauty is truly individual perception and how much is universal.
Something beautiful or ugly should elicit some type of emotion in us. It is our interpretation of this emotion that allows us to judge is something is beautiful or not. Something which elicits no emotion is likely not to be judged as beautiful or ugly. However, all we have described so far is that beauty will cause emotion, yet we have not been able to define this emotion to any degree better than we were able to define the beauty which caused it.
I could simply recite and discuss some of the arguments made about beauty, and this would be a great exercise in linear creativity. I wish, instead, to use lateral creativity and try and answer this question using principles from a completely unrelated discipline: statistics and mathematics. I hope to explore the meaning of beauty by exploring what correlation it has to other terms which have a better connection to defined emotions. I also wish to explore an individuals view of beauty in comparison to the views of a larger collective group.
Suppose you are a person which thinks that everything blue is beautiful. The more blue something is, the more beautiful it is, while something which has no blue shade is not at all beautiful. There is a direct correlation between something being blue and something being beautiful, at least to you there is. If we could quantify the beauty of an object, its measure could increase or decrease uniformly with the measure of the amount of blue in the object. This would be a 100% correlation. If however, we see that some objects may be more or less beautiful independent of the amount of blue in the object, we would see a correlation of less than 100%.
Correlations greater than 80% or so are strong, meaning that there is most definately some sort of connection between the two quantitative measures. Correlations greater than 60% are still significant, yet not quite as strong. Even correlations greater than 20% merit notice, although should not be considered too seriously.
Now suppose we could find the correlations between the adjective, beautiful, and other adjectives: ugly, exciting, peaceful, mysterious, ordinary, complex, simple, virtuous, and valuable. The emotions connected with these adjectives is a little easier to understand, so by finding how these other adjectives correlate to the term beautiful, we can understand better the emotions that beauty invokes in us.
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