Beauty is a riddle

“Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Have you ever considered what beauty is? So have many philosophers. Let me give you three definitions, each one listed in the Wikipedia:

• Beauty is a characteristic of a person, animal, place, object, or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning, or satisfaction.
• Beauty is studied as part of aesthetics, sociology, social psychology, and culture. An “ideal beauty” is an entity which is admired, or possesses features widely attributed to beauty in a particular culture, for perfection.
• The experience of “beauty” often involves the interpretation of some entity as being in balance and harmony with nature, which may lead to feelings of attraction and emotional well-being. Because this is a subjective experience, it is often said that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” In its most profound sense, beauty may engender a salient experience of positive reflection about the meaning of one’s own existence. A subject of beauty is anything that resonates with personal meaning.
• The classical Greek noun for “beauty” was, kallos, and the adjective for “beautiful” was, kalos. The Koine Greek word for beautiful was, horaios, an adjective etymologically coming from the word, hora, meaning “hour.” In Koine Greek, beauty was thus associated with “being of one’s hour.”

One of the reasons that there are these several definitions is that humans cannot seem to be able to define what beauty is. To use the opposite concept, that of ugliness, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once wrote an opinion on a pornography case. The opinion has come to be summarized with the phrase, “I can’t define pornography, but I know it when I see it.” This is the dilemma in which we all find ourselves. It seems impossible for us to either define beauty or to define pornography. And yet, we know both when we see them. And so, as Dostoevsky says, beauty is a riddle, a riddle set for us by God in order to pull us beyond ourselves.

And, in fact, contradictions abound in beauty. Both Rococo and Minimalism are beautiful. If Pointillism ends up giving us a very lifelike image, Surrealism is the opposite of realistic paintings. All that we can say about the different types and styles of art is that we look at them, and we recognize the art behind the styles. Mind you, this is not to say that all art is beautiful. Frankly, we can generally recognize bad artists! But, we cannot always explain why this one is bad and that one is good.

So, at the end, Dostoevsky is right. “Beauty is a terrible and awful thing!