Friday, April 6, 2007
Beauty is an Illusion
While browsing through the class blogs, I found myself interested in Sereta's post entitled "Beauty is truth, truth beauty". While this lovely sentiment has inspired romantics through the ages, I beg to disagree with the idea the beauty and truth accompany one another. Life sings a different song than that of Beauty and Truth hand in hand. Consider for a moment that art, essentially a representation of beauty, is merely a facade. The painting depicting a breathtaking sunset is not actually a beautiful scene at all, but merely brush strokes arranged in such a way to create the illusion of beautiful three dimensional space. A gorgeous photograph is no more that light activating sensitized film and paper. New love, one of life's most spectacular emotions is fueled by the deliberate overlooking of an other's flaws, so that only beauty and perfection remain. True beauty exists in the way that we choose to understand something as "beautiful". In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies". Truth is merely the illusion that we have a clear understanding of the world around us, and this may indeed be lovely, but is it really truth if you are the only one who perceives it as such?
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1 comment:
I am going to disagree with you somewhat. While a painting is only a painting, the beautiful sunset itself is actually a beautiful sunset. Beauty is a subjective thing, and true love that goes beyond infatuation involves not overlooking the flaws but finding the beauty in them. Illusion is certainly present in our experience of the world, but who's to say that beauty (or the feeling evoked by it) isn't the most real thing we encounter?
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