Motes Posted March 30, 2013 Posted March 30, 2013 "The power of beatury will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness. This was sometime aparadox, but now the time gives it proof." - Shakespeare I have heard Stef speak before about how it is hard to be pretty. The point being, I believe, that it is easy to become conceited and believe you are better than others. It's tempting to live life through manipular means, which lead to sorrow and strife when beauty becomes haggard and the personality is found to be hollow. To qoute Emerson "I have not found that much was gained by manipular attempts to realize the world. Many eager persons successively make an experiment in this way, and make themselves ridiculous." I evidently hold the position to be true, that beauty can distort principles. However, I have never heard Stef discuss this topic with the beautiful Dayna Martin, a guest host and friend of the show, and thought it would make a great conversation.
RestoringGuy Posted March 31, 2013 Posted March 31, 2013 There is also the notion of beauty in mathematics. It does not have much broad social relevance, but it is a microcosm to study that helps explain what is going on I think with beauty in general as a mental process. There is a certain aesthetics and elegance in beauty that sometimes gives one the feeling of relief, that some problem is really challenging and almost impossible, and now it is so simple and the mind has been made free.
Jose Perez Posted March 31, 2013 Posted March 31, 2013 However, I have never heard Stef discuss this topic with the beautiful Dayna Martin, a guest host and friend of the show, and thought it would make a great conversation. I am not surprised you and many have trouble reconciling beauty and virtue if you consider Dayna Martin an example. Virtue produces a completely different kind of beauty, found most often in children.
Rob_Ilir Posted March 31, 2013 Posted March 31, 2013 Beauty isdifferent in the state that you feel it, imo. As a physical person,I used to think that pace, agility and balance were beautiful. Today it isabout non aggression that I find beautiful in people.I think when people characterise something as beautiful, it is more like a longterm target to aim for.
fractional slacker Posted March 31, 2013 Posted March 31, 2013 When I first heard Steph talk about the effects of beauty and the distorted reality it leads to, especially in females, it made sense to me. Humans, especially males, are visual creatures. The primary means to making a first impression is beauty or lack thereof. I have found this idea useful in how I interact or my expecatations from "the beautiful people." Based on their beauty I try to ascribe them a rating. I call it their DRS - distorted reality syndrome (1-10). A DRS is directly correlated by their DRM -distorted reality mechanism. Many females have a beauty based DRM. Many males have a money or power DRM. All of us have to some degree a psychological DRM based on our past. We can have different levels of DRM at play at any given time. I don't know if any of that makes sense, but that's what I took away from Steph's insight on beauty and distorted reality. Philosophy is the primary method in keeping our DRMs in check.
RestoringGuy Posted April 1, 2013 Posted April 1, 2013 Does it seem beauty itself is necessarily a problem? If there is "distorted reality", my feeling is it is not the fault of beauty, but the incorrect assessment. If we perceive beauty and act irrationally on it, does it not seem the error is that that there was cloaked (or denied) ugliness, and beauty as a goal in itself was not a problem. We do this sometimes with truth. If somebody brings forth some self-defense scenario, they might say the truth of integrity (or NAP,etc) is debunked. But many of us will know it's not truth that is faulty, but there are hidden criteria, purposely being ignored by the truth-hater. We remind they must consider these objective things before discarding truth, and not just rely on a mental surface impression. Similarly, when there is a beauty-motivated error we see, then maybe we see a flawed inner beauty and should not just discard beauty as a concept.
Metric Posted April 1, 2013 Posted April 1, 2013 I imagine it's not terribly different from other forms of power, which also tend to corrupt. The un-earned nature of it, and the fact that it tends to fall disproportionally onto young women not long out of childhood probably means that it has an easier time corrupting, and is more brutal on the corrupted person when it eventually leaves them.
RestoringGuy Posted April 16, 2013 Posted April 16, 2013 I imagine it's not terribly different from other forms of power, which also tend to corrupt. The un-earned nature of it, and the fact that it tends to fall disproportionally onto young women not long out of childhood probably means that it has an easier time corrupting, and is more brutal on the corrupted person when it eventually leaves them. When I was in high school, I thought the girls in calculus were hotter than the girls in basic math. I wonder, half-seriously now, whether I was corrupted or not.
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