The Purpose of Beauty
The purpose of beauty
What is the purpose of beauty?
The purpose of beauty is to attract us to certain values.
When we look at the things around us in life, there is one aspect that we keep coming back to: we are attracted to beautiful things. We love beautiful people, beautiful works of art, beautiful cars, beautiful houses, etc.,
What’s with this constant attraction to beauty?
To answer this, think of a honeybee that’s trying to find some nectar as he’s buzzing around the meadow. As the bee flies high into the air, it starts to register all the things he sees. As he scans the meadow for the nectar, he sees something that startles him: he sees a flower. What does he notice about the flower? Its beautiful colors, beautiful symmetry, beautiful shape, etc., The bee, after scanning the whole meadow for what he needs, can find the flower quite easily because of the flowers beauty.
It’s like a lighthouse guiding the boats into the safety of the harbor. In the same way, the flower, by its beauty, guides the bee to itself. Once there, the bee finds exactly what he’s looking for, and the flower gets the pollen from the legs of the bee. The bee is attracted to the values of the flower (the flower’s nectar) because of the flower’s beauty.
In the same way, nature has given us a guide to follow in order to find things that we need. Beauty is the guiding light that draws us to things that will benefit us. Instinctively, we are attracted to beautiful things because, like the bee, we have a natural understanding that when something is beautiful, it should be followed. The beauty will lead us to certain values like the light house leads the boats to safety in the thick fog.
So, what is the purpose of beauty?
The purpose of beauty is to attract us to certain values. Usually in nature, those values will lead us to life and survival.
However, we live in a day and age when beauty can be manipulated and used. We can see in our modern day advertising how beauty has been manipulated in order to get us to buy or follow a certain product, which may or may bot be useful to us at all. But because it is beautiful, our instincts tell us to look and see if it’s something we might need.
Understanding the purpose of beauty helps us to be mindful of our instincts. And that, in turn, can help us to decide whether or not we really need that new bottle of shampoo with the beautiful model on it, or the latest version of our favorite car.
Very interesting, Daniel!
I loved how beauty is like the flower and the bee.
I really enjoy your thoughts!
on a more subtle level:
the purpose of beauty, seen or unseen, is to please the soul within. the value it brings is joy, and happiness. this is the greatest need of any person or society
Actually, anon, beauty is not an end itself. The sense of beauty is an animal instinct that causes us to gravitate towards things that will help us survive: good food, strong people, etc. Joy is not a need, or we would be permenantly joyous. It is a device to attract us to, as Danny says, valuable things.
Correction: Beauty is not an animal instinct; it is an instinct of all eukatiotic life, from paramiciums to people. (BTW: paramiciums find CO3 beautiful)
But we find a lot of things beautiful that don’t biologically benefit us. Why would we find a sunset beautiful? It doesn’t much benefit us. Indeed a lot of the most spectacular sunsets precede bad weather. Deserts are very beautiful, but you wouldn’t want to have to live in one. The way afternoon light might hit a factory wall? The patterns in the shell of a dead sea urchin? Artists like van Gogh saw beauty in things that others might find awful, or of no consequence: a poor man, a chair, the halo of a streetlight. Music can be beautiful, even if it is really sad.
I really think the question goes much deeper than just evolutionary advantage or “animal instinct”.