One or two.
(1) Can beauty be perceived apart from a recognition of one’s own transience?
(2) Is beauty the absence of excess?
(3) Is beauty a manifestation of health?
(4) Which sees beauty, the eye or the soul?
I’ll be back for the answers tomorrow.
Beauty can be seen as a relationship to symmetry.
Beauty isn’t just visual though. Music is also apart of beauty. I consider that part more interesting cause there isn’t really anything attractive about peoples voices. You could basically claim everything to be a means of attraction but sound? I think it mostly has to do with the curviture of figures but then there are square figures that also look nice. And puzzles too draw your attention which I also find odd. And also when you are exposed to something that gets boring and then you add a short change to anything the change seems to be the greatest thing but if you had just the change by itself then it would seem like crap. I’m more refering to music and more specifically a song by a band called refused (liberation frequency if you like rock you may like it 
).
What I don’t understand is whether you know why you like it or not you know what you like. Through the things that you like you should be able to peace together what you like. Or you could study other art statistics and see what other people like. However people study it doesn’t really matter what I’m wondering is why people don’t cash in on any of it. Do trends really have that big of an impact on what our preferences are?
Beauty is then when you recognize something exterior as being part of you. In this way it is about symmetry.
everyone brings up good points
Imagistar: for ur # 3 question i definitely know that beauty in a mate is directly related to health…there was a program on that… the main point was basically genetics and how if u have healthier genes ull be more “beautiful” ie. symmetrical face, women will have a certain ratio between abdomen and hip …
but like cba1067950 said… i didn’t exactly mean physical beauty in ppl, more toward beauty as an end in itself… i mean in music in, in a flower, or even in action. is there one ‘form’ of beauty and everything else we see are just poor reflections of this ideal form… or…as Aristotle would say, there is no “ideal” form of beauty
aaa i know im not being very clear o well, i hope u at lease understand some of what im trying to say…
i really like what h2o said <> and in that case there is no actual beauty, it becomes relative…
Actually, the concept of beauty as it relates to humans is biological. While exact ideas of beauty may vary from culture to culture and person to person, there is a general concept of beauty that’s pretty much universal. Basically, someone who is, in that general sense, beautiful, is beautiful (and therefore, attractive) because such beauty is almost always a sign of good health, and a healthy mate is essential to have healthy offspring that survive long enough to propagate your genes.
silver
I agree that h2o makes the critical distinction. I also think that cba offers an excellent example of it.
Comedy is objective; tragedy, subjective. A drunk is tragic if we identify with him, funny if we don’t.
If it happens to you, it’s funny. If it happens to me, it’s tragic.
In the same way (as h2o points out), something can be esthetic, even ideal, but until we personalize it, it does not become beautiful.
Beauty does not create love; love creates beauty.
When a man says, “My wife is the most beautiful woman in the world,” he’s right. He is talking about his love for his wife, not his wife.
That is why cba thinks Liberation Frequency is beautiful. That is why I think Depression-era photography is beautiful, even though, by objective standards, it is not pretty.
As Magius would say, that’s my take.
To address Silver’s point, I believe that beauty is a universal (like Plato did). After all, beauty is an abstract concept, in the same way that moral concepts are, or even mathematical concepts for that matter. Therefore, any particular case of a beautiful thing,or a moral action or a mathematical certainty, is only verifiable as so, because it is a representation of the universal idea of that thing.
then i would ask >> is the term “universal idea” actually universal or is that only a HUman concept ?
what im getting at is do dolphins or dogs see what we phrase as “beauty” in things (objects or other animals)
or is beauty just another way of describing a HUMAN chemical reaction…
I usually hate quotes, but this one sums it up nicely:
‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’
beauty is kind of instinctive, i think. you either like something or you dont kind of thing.
lol… i just finished doing a reflection on why beauty is in the eye of the beholder… oh god i dont want to get into it, took forever!
anyhoo thanks to everyone who replied
id like to look at it from a sociological view… if one looks at paintings from the rennaisance period they will see women as plump full figures (sorry i have to take this as a male perspective 
). what i mean is, that when idea or trend becomes popular it in a sense becomes “beautiful”.
a great example would be the barbie style figure that has plagued the states and wherever else… but that isnt true for everyone, because we all have our own interpretations or “tastes”, im just saying that popular believe has a profound effect on us.
beauty is imposed upon us by our culture, and society. It also has to do with the indivdual and sexual desire. In art the human from is beauty though it ihas been recored in many ways over the centuries, so beauty is essentially a concept made for the world to be explianed.
That which you are talking about is merely a manifestation of beauty. What I’m trying to say is that beauty is that which triggers the desire to be whole. And that has many faces expressed in all cultures and societies.
I like this thought. It implies that beauty is our desire for perfection or completion. We see something and we call it beautiful because inside we are jealous of it’s perfection. Not in a negative aspect but a jealousy or desire to be percieved in the same light. We all want to be unique and to be percieved as beauty. Sort of a self actualization kind of thing. Anyways, that’s my take.
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objective beauty is 1:1.618…
Could you be more specific, fimwat?
What’s the meaning of that?
It’s the golden mean/ratio/section. It exists in nature (formation of shells for example), music, architecture, and all that. I think it’s the best proof for the existance of objective beauty.
fimwat,
I must say that I am still confused by your theory on objective beauty and it’s natural ratio. Isn’t beauty relative? so how can there be any common ratio? Please further your explanation or provide us a link. I am interested to hear more about this concept of objective beauty.
I think beauty can be relative, but within an objective framework. The best example is perhaps the existance of the Golden Ratio in the human face. We can all recognise a beautiful person, yet we may have different preferences. I think there are a couple of variables here. One is the degree of flexibility of the ratio (due to its complexity, especially in a human face - a hansome man and a beautiful woman may both have well-proportioned faces, yet we can all tell a man from a woman). The second is phychological, and this is where the subjectivity comes in. For example, a woman may not be perceived to be particularly beautiful, yet a man may still find her attractive, due to personality, or some associative thinking (“this person reminds me of someone I liked”).
Of course, this is just a theory, and it’d be wrong to draw a conclusion, but the Golden Mean seems to me to be a good evidence for the existance of objective beauty.
As for links, I wouldn’t want to restrict you to the information that only I can give… try searching on google.com for “golden mean”, “golden ratio” or “golden section”. Happy hunting 