Koggel - "Beauty" has substantial political/social and personal significance ... and some relation to "power" | |
Lord - The power, personal, and political/social significance of "beauty" is not invariant. It differs for different people, at different times in history, and at different times in individual lives. | |
Levine -
"Beauty" relates to the "unconscious" ... and to mystery/tension? | |
Albano -
One's sense of what is beautiful, and one's sense of its significance, can be affected by thinking and by experience/culture | |
Burgmayer -
Beauty relates to a creative force |
"Beauty" can be "localized" within the brain
From biology/neurobiology (leaving sex/gender aside for the moment)
Even if one could, one would probably not be wise to abolish the category since "beauty" as a discriminative category is a resultant of evolution and likely to have some value.
"This doesn't mean I agree with my parents' having me grow up with calli. I still think they were wrong; they thought getting rid of beauty would help make a utopia, and I don't believe that at all. Beauty isn't the problem, it how some people are misusing it that's the problem ... I don't know, maybe this wasn't a problem back in my parents' day. But its something we have to deal with now." .... "Liking What You See: A Documentary" in Stories of Your Life and Others, by Ted Chiang
For the same reasons, efforts to try and get people to feel/believe that "everything is beautiful" are both undesirable and likely to fail.
An alternative approach (accepting that the "REAL problem" IS related to human sex/gender/power) ... with appreciation for feminism (and, nonethless, trepidation)
And from feminism: women in the past needed "men's gaze" to achieve influence, found it easiest to do so by being beautiful, were subject to exploitation/opression for that reason
Currently (this symposium, but with head protected): women are much more concerned about "beauty" than men, who consider beauty one of a significant number of different desirable attributes. This difference is certainly abetted by culture but may well be to some extent both desirable and ineradicable.
Suggestion (if I survive this far): women might be better off if they developed the ability to treat "beauty" more as (viva la difference) one desirable attribute among many equally significant ones, in themselves, in others, and in the things they/others create (thanks, Em).