Beauty

Today, I was asked about beauty by one of my friends who happened to be in the position to give a presentation on this topic. He was inquiring how it is possible that we can feel beauty to some certain things.
I suppose he asked this to me because he thought that I might have some adequate answer for this type of question, for I am regarded perhaps as someone who likes to think. So, however unprepared I was to answer, I started talking to him about my idea. And here in this article, I wish to share what I had talked to him.

Let us start from a questions. What is beauty first of all?
Beauty is a feeling or emotion produced by something external or internal which we interact with in our mind. When let us say you saw a picture, it produces this feeling that astounds you, leaves you with the impression of goodness and inspiration. It is supposed to make us feel good and moved. Thus, we can omit the possibility that something beautiful causes us the feeling of disgust and unpleasantness. It is almost a necessary condition for a beautiful thing to attract the individual or produce this feeling of goodness and inspiration. In other words, it has to be something good.

Now we have deduced by inquiry what it takes for things to become beautiful, and its implication and effect on our mind — it has to produce some positive feeling in our sense. But as a next step, I wish to say something about other conditions of beauty. This question might appear as something simple but it becomes of significant importance as we go deep into this inquiry. The question is: what does it take for a thing to be perceived. This is crucial because, if we cannot perceive that which is supposed to produce this feeling of beauty, we cannot even feel beauty precisely because it does not occur in our mind. We must be capable of perceiving this object or concept that produces beauty. Perhaps, it serves to give you an example. For instance, if a non-Japanese speaker was looking at the poem written in Japanese, it is impossible for the person to perceive the beauty which it is supposed to present. Therefore, there has to be something which allows them to experience the object or concept, which in this case, is language. Similarly, it is impossible for a blind man to be astounded by the beauty of something seeable — like paintings, mountains, lakes, ocean, colors, and so on.
So, what all these above facts tell us is this: for us to perceive the beauty, the object or concepts must prompts an image in our mind which corresponds to the object itself. In other words, there must exist some ideas in our mind a priori which allows us to recreate the image which corresponds to the object. This, I aware, must be explained clearly.
For a thing to be reproduced in our mind, our mind must have the concept of this beautiful object as a possibility of our potential experience, prior to our encounter. It is because, if this object which produces beauty does not lay in our mind as a possibility of occurrence, then when it happens, the idea is too foreign to us to be conceived and be understood. Before I elaborate on this, please be careful here for not mistaking my word choice: I said that it has to exist as a possibility, but the object does not have to be contemplated for it to exist as a possibility. What I mean is that we have to be at the level where we are not surprised when this particular thing presents itself before us. For instance, if one disappears from space and appear again as a pegasus, then our surprise wins the feeling of astonishment and inspiration because it is something too foreign to us and is not something that is existing as a possibility of our experience. Having said that, we can carefully proceed to say that the possibility of this beauty must exist in our mind a priori.

For the purpose of simplification, here I shall give names to this whole process of perceiving and understanding the object and its beauty. First of all, the object must be presented to us in our senses, so it must be representational. Second of all, the physical object, whatever it is, send its information by adopting some means — light, sound, and so on — which we call encryption. And finally, we must be able to perceive the object and be affected by the physical object by perceiving this encryption: to do that, we need to decode the encrypted information, which we call decryption.
If there is a beautiful chair in the space, it sends its information by means of light, so in this case, the information is encrypted in light. And if we were to perceive the object and be affected by it, we need to be able to decode this information with our eyes and our brain, using our mental faculty: this activity we call decryption. For instance, when I read the language, I have to somehow decrypt the information which is encoded: the decryption key in this case is the language itself. I must know the language prior to the observation so that the object can be decrypted.

Now that we are equipped with the tools for a meaningful and slightly advanced discussion of beauty, we wish to advance our discussion little more, but before we begin, I think it is necessary to review what we have already discussed.
In our first discussion, we come to know that beauty must produce some positive feeling to us. Then, in our second discussion, we learned that we have to be able to perceive of the object, and we must have a priori knowledge of this beauty existing as a possibility. And lastly, we developed the tools to describe and simplify the discussion by defining the representation process that occurs in the percipient: encryption and decryption.
Now finally we have answered how beauty is possible, in the proceeding discussion, we are ready for the advanced topic, such as a nature of beauty. Indeed, we want to know if there exists such a thing as an absolute beauty. To put it differently, we want to know: is there universal agreement on the concept of beauty? Or, is beauty a relative concept, depending on the individual?
Well, our instinct tells us that it is essentially up to us to decide what beauty is because it seems like, at first sight, there is no such thing as absolute beauty which is universally agreed. However, it is worth our effort to conduct an analysis to delve into this hidden thing, to know for sure the nature of this concept.
First, as we have talked in the preceding section that we need something a priori which allows us to appreciate the beauty when the object present itself before us; therefore, in order for the agreement to exist, we must have shared experience which causes us to feel the beauty — i.e., the object which causes beauty must be accessible and does not require higher standard of decryption. For instance, some individual cannot comprehend mathematics because first of all, the notations and the equations fail to produce the semantic images they are supposed to produce in the mind of the percipient and also the mathematical concept is too distant and foreign to him that, for him, it is just a combination of symbols. This is why he must have a priori knowledge of this mathematical object existing as a possibility of experience because otherwise, those math equations produce no meaning to him. To use the terminology we developed, the person must have a knowledge or necessary tool to decrypt the encryption —i.e., decrypt the mathematical expression encoded in the symbols. Thus, the universal and absolute beauty must be encoded in a way that allows all of us to decrypt it. To put it simply, the absolute beauty must guarantee a universal experience without excluding any individuals. This conclusion omits quite a lot of possibility — it excludes all that which demands higher knowledge.
However, as you have probably noticed, if we are all similar, then there would be more agreement in terms of what constitutes beauty. For instance, imagine a world where every individual is identical to one another in terms of appearance and also in terms of character. In such a world, because everyone is homogenous and equivalent, the taste, preference, and experience also is identical by definition.
Upon that supposition, it follows that there must be universal agreement on the idea of beauty. It is because the disagreement on what constitutes beauty violates our presumption that they are all similar and identical, for it indicates a difference in taste or experience. Thus, with care, we will make a general hypothesis: for universal and absolute beauty to exist, it is a necessary condition that each individual is homogenous. In other words, the universal agreement comes from homogeneity of taste, preference, knowledge, and experience. However, if there exists some individual who does not share the same experience — for instance imagine a person who was raised under a completely different circumstances — it would create disagreement and disparity between individuals, which in fact violates our general hypothesis. Therefore, we can make another conjecture: the absolute beauty does not exist if there is strong heterogeneity. For instance, it is hard to see the agreement of beauty existing between human and other animals. The conclusion as it becomes clear is this: we have to have commonality and the similar background to be able to appreciate the beauty, i.e., belief in absolute beauty presupposes a homogeneity of taste and character, when in essence, we share heterogeneity upon homogeneity. So, it seems like the answer is neither that beauty is absolute or that beauty is relative; rather, it is little bit of both. Hence, the inquiry has come to the conclusion that the agreement of beauty depends on how similar we are — i.e., beauty is always contingent on other factors such as prior knowledge.

The very reason I started writing this journal has to do with the fact that I found beauty in the activity of writing. And if you could decode this beauty, which is encoded in the language, then you will find it rewarding to do so. In fact, it is my utmost wish that someday you can appreciate this activity and write things you are interested.