Beauty
Beauty: ‘That quality or combination of qualities which delights the senses or mental faculties; esp that combination of shape, colour, and proportion which is pleasing to the eye.’ – New Shorter Oxford Dictionary ISBN 0-19-861271-0
Beauty or aesthetics is a subject very dear to my heart, but I will not go into it here in detail because it would be too much of a digression (I will be publishing a book about this and similar topics). I would just like to make one simple point: without necessarily being able to define it, most of us appear to agree on what is beautiful – be it a landscape, a piece of music, flowers, a caress, etc. We have remarkable agreement in what we consider beautiful in human faces and bodies – even across cultural and ethnic boundaries. That is not to say we don’t have our own individual tastes and favourites, but our general agreement on what we consider beautiful is considerably stronger than our disagreement. The same applies to disgust and pain… I suggest therefore, that beauty has some deep biological and evolutionary basis, and that it has an objective quality – contrary, I think, to popular belief…
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Michael Autumn
Cambridge, UK
January 2006
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