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The "sacred" aspect of the beauty

tony_goth

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I think, everything that is beautiful beyond the ordinary is sacred.

Even things or people that don't look religious.

What do you think ?
 

Lark

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Well I've read some authors who think that the human conception of beauty is one of the divine proofs, along with mathematical concepts like infinity and a few other things, in humankind there seems to be an innate sense of beauty and its unique to humans and seems not to serve any evolutionary or other utilitarian purpose.

Burke wrote a good book, depending on who you ask, which discusses the sublime and the beautiful, the sublime I think is a concept which is kind of more beautiful that beautiful but could also be terrifying too.

There is also a secular version of this too which philosophers have written about, the best book that I remember was called The Good, The True and The Beautiful, which basically says that in order to qualify as any one of those things whatever it is has to have at least an element of the other two, its a good book because it strives to make clear how its not just a subjective judgement but an objective standard.
 

tony_goth

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the sublime I think is a concept which is kind of more beautiful that beautiful but could also be terrifying too.

You think the same thing as me. Everyone fears of messing with the top of psychological hierarchy because of its impact.

When I see a beautiful obese woman, I have a "sacred" feeling. For me, messing with the most beautiful women is very hard.
 
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I think, everything that is beautiful beyond the ordinary is sacred.

Even things or people that don't look religious.

What do you think ?

Although, "sacred" is synonymous with "holy," both words convey an image of being "set apart" from the profane. The profane is as described in Mircea Eliade's book, The Sacred and the Profane, as anything that is not set apart or sacred from ordinary life. For example, your sex life with your wife would be a personally sacred topic to openly discuss in a profane space like the office, so most decent and socially intelligent people would avoid mixing the two. Or, another example, virginity being preferred over a sullied person for marriage. Beauty, being an objective measure is set apart from the ugly, so yes I do believe there is a sacred aspect to beauty. In ages past, works of art were beautiful because the people believed in there being objective values. In the modern/post-modern West, very little of the traditional views of beauty are left, but sacrility can be found in your own sacred spaces, like your bedroom or hometown or nation, and when these boundaries are crossed a feeling of sacrilege is experienced by those who value those spaces as being "sacred."

Conversely, there are the "people of Wal-Mart" who value the profane and for them it can be said that "nothing is sacred," or rather the inferior is elevated as sacred. In those communities, you'll see a decrease in objective beauty. When the Notre Dame burned, although France being overwhelmingly secular, tears were felt by those who watched a historic and beautiful structure burning to the ground because rationally, even if they believed the cathedral to be outmoded for their lives, the death of a sacred space of that scale would indeed generate a feeling of sorrow. Maybe to the citizenry it symbolized a death of a parent, say, that no matter how much you rebelled, you could count on your parents to be there when you F*'d up and bail you out. And, now they're gone.

As Nietzsche wrote "God is Dead" at the turn of the century, it isn't surprising to me that in the following centuries we would be witness to the erosion of objective beauty in most aspects of our lives. So, what happens when there is no longer a sacred objective to aspire to? Nihilism.

A "Wal-martification" of life.

For some reason, this video kept popping up on my feed, and my lamenting girlfriend who is voice trained in the classics shared it with me, and it is an example of the comparison of music past and present:


Even if I believe Jordan Peterson to be a unsubstantiated goofball for the most part, a broken clock is right twice a day:


Very good topic, Tony.
 
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The Death of Melody video, which I saw about a week or so ago, awakened me to why I find so much modern music to be truly repugnant. Beauty is in the ear of the listener in this case I suppose.

To me the night sky is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever beheld. Not just because of it’s physical beauty but because of it’s ability to conjure thoughts about existence, infinity, extraterrestrial life, time, countless other worlds orbiting stars in other galaxies across the cosmic web. It’s one of the few things that I can look upon after almost a half century of life and still feel the same sense of wonder about it that I did as a child.
 
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