Beauty is a ceremony of symmetry and form that turns into a ballet

A Philosophy of Beauty Emil Michelle

The first action of philosophy, the inital step, is to reduce uniformity to exception: what distinguishes one person from another is her/his beauty.

• Beauty is unreachable, not because it is impenetrable, but because it approaches the infinite. Each beautiful person hides an infinity.
• Beauty is deceptive, for essentially, we see ourselves in it, we never see the other person.
• Beauty is concrete -- it rests upon its own reality. It only becomes abstract when we think about it. Thinking mutates beauty into an instrument or a concept -- it abandons reality. And by that I mean this: that a beautiful person cannot be turned into a thing without ceasing to be a person.
• For beauty is not settled in itself. Beautiful people are not a reality -- they create their own realities. The beautiful person is neither a person nor a thing, but perhaps a relation, or more precisely, a function: a solipsistic autonomy that alters in accordance with the perspectives of those that determine it.
• The victim of beauty is a function of the beautiful, not in the physioligical sense of the word, but in the mathematical sense: beauty has mutated into a number, a sign, a symbol. And mankind is seduced by numbers. Every number hides an infinity -- every number contains all the totality of all numbers, total enumeration. Beauty takes on a mathematical form.
• The reality of beauty is cerebral. It is easier, almost, to think of beauty than to see it. Beauty represents magnitudes of sensations. Beauty is a ceremony of symmetry and form that turns into a ballet -- a mathematical, mystical sacrifice to the organs of sense. A situation, or perhaps, a demonstration -- a theater of pulchritude. But since beauty is mathetical, it cannot be destroyed because numbers are immortal -- it cannot be nullified by time or by age.
• The whole of beauty is greater than all the beauty it contains. And in that sense, beauty is unreal. Beauty is supermortal, that is, a mortal who neutralizes all else -- insensate in sensation. It is the mystical paradox: the wonderment of insensibility which has its foundation in sensibility.
• Beauty is hyaline matter. It is the supreme pleasure, the most natural of pleasures. All of history, legend, memoirs, and medical observation prove the point: beauty is a ferocious copulation of viewer and viewed. The recognition of beauty is a triumph of intelligence and sensation and emotion.
• Beauty is immense and unique -- wherever it is discovered. Beauty is a tyrranical philosophy. For beauty postulates a curious despotism over all mankind -- beauty does not liberate, it tosses mankind into dungeons, it binds, it imprisons, it compels, coerces and enslaves. And it enthralls. It is an incubator for a whole congerie of neuroses. Although, what a way to go, huh?!
• What, then, is beauty? What is the epistemology of beauty? In a sense, it is indefinable -- but it may be perceived: its only feature is that it is an exception, through this it may be isolated and determined. Beauty is an exception among the beautiful exceptions, a reflection among the beautiful reflections. A true consensus may be impossible. Still, I will make an attempt: beauty is a miraculous concatenation which tittilates my soul when I look upon it. posted by Emil Michelle at 8:43 AM Saturday, January 13, 2007