Beauty is that which is true

Local celebrity Xander Ford’s “Big Reveal” a couple of weekends ago actually triggered a subconscious discussion among the populace on the nature of beauty. Which is far from an inconsequential thing.

What a nation perceives as beautiful (and, consequently, what it considers ugly) is actually both revealing and profound. It tells us more about the one doing the determination than the one being judged.

Like moral truths, beauty escapes the complete dominion of science. Though measurable in some ways, as we shall see later on, what actually constitutes beauty is somehow a matter of philosophy and belief more than anything else.

Nevertheless, as philosopher Alain de Botton would posit, that doesn’t mean beauty (like, as I would assert, moral truths) is subject to mere relativism:

“The phrase ‘beauty lies in the eye of the beholder’ is in reality almost always unwarranted and deeply troublesome. It should, in our view, be avoided at all costs. For a start, no one really believes in it to its core. We may well accept that there can be legitimate differences in taste within a reasonable spectrum; but we don’t actually think that all tastes are equal. If beauty simply lay in the eye of beholders, then it would presumably be sane to stand up and assert that a rubbish dump smelling of urine and decomposing fecal matter was a lovely place,” while “modern canal side houses in Amsterdam were hideous.”

Indeed, I used to have an officemate who’d refer to every woman in our office then as “pretty” or “ganda,” and she really meant it. But despite the presumably good intentions, it left one with a bad taste in the mouth. There was the nagging thought that what she’s actually doing (and she was not what I would consider myself as attractive) is subvert beauty itself (at least in the physical sense).

After all, if everyone is beautiful, then beauty per se would have lost all meaning.

Can beauty be manufactured?

Before you answer, that only the natural (i.e., not made by man) is beautiful, consider the Ferrari. Or Benz. Or the Sistine Chapel. Or an appropriately opened bottle of a fragrant pinot noir.

And Mother Nature herself can be such a slob: up close, unfiltered, any picturesque forest is just a mass of tangled leaves and vines, dead branches or the corpses of animals, the miasma of decayed or stale water floating up the humidity like some primordial soup.

And yet, what is beautiful (at least in human beings) can take a different meaning and hence on the question of it being capable of man’s construction, author Vironika Tugaleva has this to say: “If you want to feel naturally beautiful, you have to let yourself be naturally beautiful. You have to leave yourself alone and learn to accept what is there — warts, stretch marks, and all. It won’t be easy, but compulsively trying to fix yourself isn’t easy either. The difference is that self-acceptance will one day heal you, while self-judgment never will. And you aren’t the only one you’ll help. By accepting yourself, you will be another image of real natural beauty in our culture.”

Scientists, however, wouldn’t be so poetic. Beauty can be found in some measurable metrics, as Alison Pearce Stevens reports in (Science News): “Such as symmetry. Faces that we deem attractive tend to be symmetrical, they find. Attractive faces also are average. In a symmetrical face, the left and right sides look like each other.”

As for average, such does not mean “so-so.” Instead, “average faces are a mathematical average (or mean) of most people’s features. And, in general, people find such faces quite attractive,” such as “the distance between the centers of a woman’s eyes affects whether she is considered beautiful. People find her most attractive when that distance is just under half of the width of the face.” Also, “the distance between a woman’s eyes and mouth. It should be just over one-third the height of her face.”

And yet, the foregoing is misleading.

For every talk of mathematical symmetry (or even Aristotelian harmony), such does not account for the endearing wrinkle or dashing scar. There is such a thing as the gravitas of Gregory Peck, the intensity in Al Pacino’s eyes, or the glow that Marilyn Monroe or Marion Cottilard exudes.

It’s easy to be dismissive and say “I know beauty when I see it.” But that ignores the fact that one has the capacity to “see.” Which indicates that since there is a need to achieve capability, perhaps the appreciation of what is truly beautiful is related to the attainment of virtue.

Beauty, therefore is not trivial and not for the trivial. One would prefer to think of beauty as something of a mystery, better unexplained but certainly real.

For me, there has to be beauty, as there will be the ugly. There has to be; otherwise, life becomes relegated to merely existing.

Jemy Gatdula is a Senior Fellow of the Philippine Council for Foreign Relations and a Philippine Judicial Academy law lecturer for constitutional philosophy and jurisprudence.

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