Is beauty imaginary?

It just popped in my mind, and kind of ruined things for me, but is the meaning and grandeur and majesty of life really just us projecting things onto the world that aren’t there? Like am I not really “connecting” to anything but just imagining I am? I mean it would make sense since not everyone reacts in the same manner to the same image or experience. It just makes me sad that the beauty and majesty I see in nature is really just me imagining things. Makes it feel cheap, and sometimes I just wanna cry from it.

Well, yes, but no more “imaginary” than how good food tastes delicious, or an aromatic smell smells good, or how a lovely piece of music sounds lovely. If you want to claim that “it’s all in our heads,” you’d be right, but that “imaginary” stuff is of enormous tangible consequence. It’s the reason attractive people can earn millions as models or movie stars, why musicians can have world-famous careers, and why Michelin gives restaurants star ratings.

Yes. Beauty is a human construct.

Although, science has shown there appears to be a correlation between symmetry and beauty.

I guess. But let me paint a picture, lol.

When I would look at art or drawings I could feel it in a sense. Picture the cold if here was snow, the heat and dryness of deserts, if it had a roaring wave I could almost hear and feel the water. In a sense such things came alive to me and it became more that just paint on canvas (or whatever medium) and it felt like I was connecting to something outside of me. But now I’m beginning to see that “connection” was just in my head, my imagination, the same with all the rest.

All those times I got lost in the woods or the wilds (not literally) and just felt myself being swallowed into the surroundings, it just hurts to think that feeling, that “melding” (for lack of a better word) is just my imagination and not an actual phenomenon. It hurts the most with the ocean because being in the water is my favorite past time (mostly the ocean, but the pool at the gym works too). I loved the feeling of diving deep and being surrounded on all sides by the pressure, the cold, the water. Now I’m just sad that it’s going to feel wet because anything more than that I just “made up”.

The world is gonna seem less magical I guess is what I am saying.

The world is more magical due to subjectivity, not less magical. The way you perceive something and the way you frame it in context and in its relationship with its environment is unique to your own being. Cherish it.

What did you think before, that you would look on the Periodic Table and find Truth and Beauty crammed in there somewhere amongst sodium and beryllium and rubidium?

The world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain. And we are here as on a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night. (I just made that up!)

Why?

Why do you think that the way you experience something is any less valid, or to put it in your terms, less real? If you experience a sense of wonder and wholeness in the water, then that is real. Trying to argue that it is not is the false proposition.

I sometimes wonder if our ability to see beauty in the most mundane things is just a byproduct of our brain hardwiring. I can definitely see how creativity would be adaptive; perhaps the tendency to see/feel beauty is a tag-along trait to creativity.

Or perhaps our vocabulary is limited in such a way that we call anything visual that pushes our buttons a certain way “beautiful”, when really there are nuances. Like, when I’m taking long walks I’ll catch myself staring at the ground and I’ll be mesmerized by the features of the pavement I’m walking on. Is that beauty? Well, I’m tempted to say yes, but the feeling I experience isn’t the same as what I feel when I see a gorgeous animal or an impressive sculpture. My cat also seems to be mesmerized by rando things. He’ll stare at something for a long time…right before he pounces on it. Is he appreciating the beauty of those things? Or is it that our brain has a tendency to fixate on certain patterns (maybe an object subconsciously reminds us of something pleasant, like the baby blanket we were attached to as a toddler), and to explain our fixation we tell ourselves that we must be responding to beauty?

Seems to me that certain stimuli make your brain react by producing certain chemicals or firing certain neurons. Whether that result is you feeling wet from the ocean or feeling happiness from the ocean isn’t all that important to whether or not it’s “real”.

Imaginary? No. Arbitrary? Yes.

This is an example of why I don’t trust people who never read fiction.

The question itself is important, the potential answers profound.

Closely woven in it, linked to it, is the question of whether or not meaning exists anywhere in any real sense, as contrasted with being arbitrarily and randomly created by social deterministic factors (in short, “notions of meaning” or “concepts of meaning” – things that come into existence and could be studied by sociologists or social psychologists, “how did these people come to believe that such-and-such has this meaning?”, with the strong implication that if “these people” had had different background experiences they would attribute entirely different meaning to those same things). Does anything mean anything, or are all beliefs and thoughts just artifacts of how we were brought up and what we were exposed to, and could vary all over the map? Is anything “good”, “noble”, “beautiful”, intrinsically better than anything else, or is there nothing but people’s highly variable notions of something being better than something else?

And if you wish to argue anything other than the latter – if for example you wish to argue that equality is better than the privileged few enjoying the resources while the vast majority are deprived, or that freedom is better than being coerced and exploited, that being kind is a better thing than inflicting pain upon people on purpose – then where does the “goodness” reside, and by what processes do we authentically know it, and how do we distinguish it from culturally and historically embedded notions thereof that may have serious flaws? How, for example, do we see past culturally embedded short-sightednesses akin to the beliefs in the 1800s in the US that miscegenation between the races is intrinsically sinful and wrong, or the beliefs from the 1970s that sexual behavior and sexualized relationships between people of the same sex is sinful and wrong, if we aren’t going to discard the entire notion that anything whatsoever is truly worse or better than anything else?

I liked Robert Pirsig’s assessment of how we recognize quality (see Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in particular); it’s a good start for such a discussion. Essentially his notion is that quality, and indeed the meaning of all things, exists not objectively in the thing nor subjectively in the viewer, but in the relationship between them.

I actually do find truth and beauty in the periodic table. Because it reflects the order and structure of part of the universe. And that reassures me that the universe isn’t something that is just inside my head. I can perceive that there is an order larger than myself. I could not possibly have come up with the periodic table, yet seeing it, its truth becomes immediately apparent. And “Beauty is Truth, and Truth is Beauty”. That isn’t “all I need to know”, but it leads me to the other things that I need to know.

Maybe I’m just weird that way…

OTOH the weekend is coming.

Regards,
Shodan

Aw, man, that’s beautiful.

Finding Truth and Beauty in the Periodic Table is not finding Truth and Beauty on the Periodic Table.

Beauty is how you experience it. The feelings you get when you experience art are exactly the whole point of art. Art is a way to communicate something that can only be communicated through art. That is why you are feeling a connection. That connection, though, is part of your subjective experience and not some kind of new-agey energy-thingy connection.

I happen to think the human perception of beauty is an evolved adaption, but I have been called a biomechanical reductionist.

Or in other words, you used to believe in magic, and now you don’t. That is not what most people will think of when they read your thread title.

Did someone just see The Matrix?

I’m not sure I understand that last paragraph.

I don’t care, and will enjoy it while I can.