The Containment Problem

Let us return to beauty and consider a possibility: Beauty unseen bestows on the world beauty in varying proportion, and the things of the world which we take as beautiful possess no beauty in themselves.  If this were so, then everything in the natural world would be perceived as an admixture in relative proportion of beauty and ugliness, even though beauty was not in fact an actual material ingredient of anything in the world.  I would now like to consider the definition of the beautiful.  How would we define the beautiful as we find it in the natural world?

We would have to divide the world into the beautiful things and the ugly things.  But we if have supposed that everything contains an admixture of the two, this would amount to the drawing of an arbitrary line somewhere on a scale of contrasts (like the definition of a color).  We would then define based on the relative difference, the ratio, between what we took as beautiful and what we took as ugly.  In so doing, we would treat beauty, which was a gift freely bestowed on all, as a possession, the property of the few.  There are two problems with this view.  First, another would undoubtedly draw the line differently, resulting in a new definition, a contrary definition from mine.  Second of all, one investigating this magical property of the few would be incapable of finding any specific property in the few which gave rise to the beauty.  For example, we could construct a physical description of the Mona Lisa, and perhaps program a three dimensional printer to make facsimiles of the Mona Lisa that are indistinguishable to the naked eye.  Yet nowhere in our description or the algorithm would be a description of the quality of beauty. One might conclude that the obvious, the beauty of the world, did not exist as it could not be defined or scientifically measured.  (You know what I mean, so don't tell me beauty is subjective.  The attribution of beauty in a particular context is a judgment call, similar to a strike in baseball.  It's not subjective when an Umpire makes a terrible call.)

Another problem is that our approach is static.  There are constantly emerging new forms of beauty in the world, and it is unclear whether they would meet our definition based on history.  We would then have fights about the application of our definition, even if we could agree on one, which I submit we can't.

This is the containment problem.  If beauty is a natural property of things in the natural world, then beauty should be definable and the subject of scientific investigation, like electricity.  The existence of beauty is both obvious, even to a little child, and a source of immense value to people across cultures and time.  To deny the existence of beauty sounds a bit like one's dogma ran over one's karma.  We can say that beauty is "subjective"--that most "subjective" of categories--but that leaves the mystery of why people are able to reach collective agreement on relative judgments of beauty such that the term has a stable collective meaning and can be understood across individuals and languages and cultures.

The only way to make the existence of beauty intelligible is to suppose that in fact its not the world that contains beauty, but that the Beautiful contains the world, and in perceiving beauty, we do not in fact witness the property of a thing, but the diffuse radiance of the source of all things.