Thursday, December 10, 2015

Beauty? Emotion?

Hellen Keller said, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart”. That is the beauty I believe in. Emotional response is an essential part of my concept of beauty. It does not matter whether or not you see, touch, hear, smell, or even taste one thing; what matters most is how we feel after we see, touch, hear, smell, or taste it.
Toward beauty, we would feel fear, wonder, enthusiastic, sympathy, etc. Some of those examples can be the sublime and the wabi-sabi we learned the other day in class. Toward the sublime photos, I feel fear but excited, while I feel calm and peaceful watching a wabi-sabi photos. Both of the sublime and the wabi-sabi are beautiful because they give me emotional responses!
Besides emotional beauty, I’m also interested in the evolution of beauty. From the TED talk we watched in class about the evolution of beauty, I start to realize that our ability to see beauty is actually like a natural selection. We evolve our ability to observe beauty in order to feel pleasant in our lives for survival. We are continuously finding and creating new things that are beautiful in order to satisfy not only ourselves but also others. For example, a house designer always places the furniture to a certain places in order to make us feel comfortable.

Beauty is an evolutionary result for us to feel pleasant.

9 comments:

  1. Yes. I very agree with what you say about the beauty of evolution. I mean the beauty of life is to see how flexible it is to adapt to the environment. Evolution reflect the vitality of life. Also, beauty sometimes make us alert and excited and meanwhile make us calm. For me, I like the beauty which make me calm, because beauty always share a sense of satisfaction.

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  2. I agree with your point that beauty can be associated with a variety of emotions from fear to excitement. However, I think the ability to identify the beautiful is more culturally influenced other than simply the result of evolution. I think beauty has more to do with one's own understanding of oneself and the world, rather than a selected fitness for survival and reproduction.

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  3. It is true that emotions can be regarded as beauty. Yet I believe that some emotions are not beautiful at all. For example, greed and lust are not something of beauty. For me, it is important that we differentiate the good emotions from the bad ones in order to live a better life.

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  5. I like how you start with the quote. It is so true that what we feel and our emotions are more important than other things. I also really like how you mention the ted talk about the evolution of beauty. However, things aren't that simple. There are too many informations coming from outside world that makes us think that we are not perfect.

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  6. I find it interesting that you described beauty by having the emotional response. I agree that it is a very important factor in what we find beautiful because it elicits such a strong response from us that makes us remember it, and we associate it with beauty. I really liked your take on what we find beautiful and why, it is an emotionally driven feeling.

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  7. I really liked your perspective on beauty. I think lots of people tend to view beauty from only the visual perspective, but I really liked how you touched on how all senses can create an experience and feeling of beauty.

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  8. I really like your idea of evolution beauty, which I have never thought about, and I agree that the evolution is actually beautiful because that human beings never stop pursuing the new concepts of beauty in order to make our society progress and our surroundings better.

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  9. The way you perceive beauty is really interesting and it is so true. We need to feel the beauty. If we do not have the emotion and to view the beauty in a objective way, the value of the beauty is not same as before. With emotion, people may view the beauty in a sympathetic way.

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