Towards a Metaphysic of Beauty
The sheer level of crazy in my life can be deduced from the fact that the following post was written in early December, and is only actually getting copy/pasted into lj now, in late May. Aye, yi, yi.
When I was a boy in college, most of my friends were girls. I take very little credit for this; male bonding simply made no sense to me, and so by default I spent most of my time with females. However, it did (and does) strike me as significant that the women in question accepted me - I was treated with a degree of emotional honesty that I gradually understood was not at all the expected norm for adolescent cross-gender relationships. My situation felt special, and I felt special to be in that situation, and I therefore spent a lot of time thinking about how to maintain and deepen those connections in the face of the endless societal push towards more conventional interactions. At the time, the clearest articulation of an answer that I could find took the form of a question: “How can I appreciate beauty without objectifying the beautiful?”
That question has percolated quietly away in the back corners of my mind ever since, and I believe I am finally beginning to arrive at some clarity. I work in education, and the vast majority of my coworkers are female. That’s part of why I work in education; and while it’s true that I still find it easier to relate to women than men, it is also true that I like living in a world with women for exactly the same reason that I like living in a world with flowers. I like living in a beautiful world.
Having now explicitly compared women to flowers, it’s worth considering what I mean when I talk about living in a world with flowers. Flowers do not exist for my benefit. They have their own purposes and their own goals, to which I am essentially irrelevant. I am thankful to live in a world with flowers precisely because I understand that I might not be. That the world of a particular flower happens to overlap my own is a gift, and the correct response to a gift is gratitude - and perhaps a gift in return. If a flower is a source of beauty in my life, then I want the flower to regard me as a source of beauty in its life. Thus, the most meaningful interaction I can have with a flower is to allow, and perhaps assist, its achievement of its own purpose - and the extent to which I can do this is the precise measure of the depth of my relationship with it.
So it is with women. Women do not exist for me, and the fact that I find women beautiful is ultimately irrelevant. They have their own purposes and their own goals. My task is to recognize the beauty women bring to my world, and to respond correctly - with an intention to allow, or (if appropriate) to assist, in their achievement of their own purposes. It isn’t about me; which is perhaps what my teenaged self meant when he spoke of appreciation without objectification. The world isn’t about me - and isn’t this a beautiful world?
When I was a boy in college, most of my friends were girls. I take very little credit for this; male bonding simply made no sense to me, and so by default I spent most of my time with females. However, it did (and does) strike me as significant that the women in question accepted me - I was treated with a degree of emotional honesty that I gradually understood was not at all the expected norm for adolescent cross-gender relationships. My situation felt special, and I felt special to be in that situation, and I therefore spent a lot of time thinking about how to maintain and deepen those connections in the face of the endless societal push towards more conventional interactions. At the time, the clearest articulation of an answer that I could find took the form of a question: “How can I appreciate beauty without objectifying the beautiful?”
That question has percolated quietly away in the back corners of my mind ever since, and I believe I am finally beginning to arrive at some clarity. I work in education, and the vast majority of my coworkers are female. That’s part of why I work in education; and while it’s true that I still find it easier to relate to women than men, it is also true that I like living in a world with women for exactly the same reason that I like living in a world with flowers. I like living in a beautiful world.
Having now explicitly compared women to flowers, it’s worth considering what I mean when I talk about living in a world with flowers. Flowers do not exist for my benefit. They have their own purposes and their own goals, to which I am essentially irrelevant. I am thankful to live in a world with flowers precisely because I understand that I might not be. That the world of a particular flower happens to overlap my own is a gift, and the correct response to a gift is gratitude - and perhaps a gift in return. If a flower is a source of beauty in my life, then I want the flower to regard me as a source of beauty in its life. Thus, the most meaningful interaction I can have with a flower is to allow, and perhaps assist, its achievement of its own purpose - and the extent to which I can do this is the precise measure of the depth of my relationship with it.
So it is with women. Women do not exist for me, and the fact that I find women beautiful is ultimately irrelevant. They have their own purposes and their own goals. My task is to recognize the beauty women bring to my world, and to respond correctly - with an intention to allow, or (if appropriate) to assist, in their achievement of their own purposes. It isn’t about me; which is perhaps what my teenaged self meant when he spoke of appreciation without objectification. The world isn’t about me - and isn’t this a beautiful world?