Michael Polanyi College
Diego Rivera
7th Two-Week Synthesis Essay
May 22nd, 2013
Diego Rivera
7th Two-Week Synthesis Essay
May 22nd, 2013
It’s a beautiful day!
There’s a mythical character in Guatemala called, La Siguanaba. According to the legend, she appears during the night and is especially seen by the late nighters. It is also said that she hunts for the Don Juanes or Casanovas, which find her in a pond or river or any other water source, washing her hair with a golden bowl and combing it with a golden comb. The men get immediately fascinated with her, instantly falling in love, so she proceeds by calling them and walking to a cliff. They follow. Finally, when they are up in the cliff, she turns and shows her true face. The face of a horse or, sometimes, of a dead woman. She is no longer beautiful, but so ugly and terrifying that her preys, paralyzed by terror, drop dead.
Were these unfortunate men wrong about what beauty is? They believed they had seen this beautiful woman, but appearances may deceive. Was she truly ugly or truly beautiful? Or both? How was her beauty changing over time? Was she inherently beautiful or ugly? If so, according to what standards and to whom? “Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.” Some attribute this quote to Plato and some others say it’s from Margaret Wolfe Hungerford. Who said it, is not important right now, but the validity of the statement. Is beauty subjective, then?
There are two things we should take into account about beauty. Beauty is both objective and subjective in human terms. Let’s first discover why it’s objective. Humans have the capacity to “discover” or “recognize” patterns in nature. This has been developed through the process of evolution, making us appreciate more the things in which we can find patterns than those that we can’t. For example, if we are trying to figure out what is beautiful in humans, one of the most important (or the most important) variables is symmetry. Symmetry is appealing to the eye, to us, and we think of that as something beautiful. That would be the objective part of beauty. It’s something that can be applied to all humans, since evolution made us that way. The subjective part is not applicable to all humans, but is something that varies according to the context in which we are. This explains why some people find something more beautiful than others, and the differences through time of the perception of beauty. Benjamin Franklin said, “Beauty, like supreme dominion, is but supported by opinion.” So, in human perspective, beauty is both objective and subjective.
Beauty has also played a very important role in our conception of truth. In our theories and models of the universe, we have seen great value of truth in something perceived as beautiful. For example, Copernicanism was successful in great part because of its aesthetic and not economic value. We think of truth and beauty as something linked. Something that appears to be beautiful is worth pursuing by the possibility of reaching the truth, as Kitty Ferguson constantly reminds us. And when pursuing truth, guided by aesthetics, we tend to believe it’s valid because we think of it as coherent with our view of the world. But, have we reached true truth? We are sometimes too easy in believing something is the way it is because we have been taught that these “things” don’t change, so it becomes very hard to change that paradigm. For example, we “know” that the universe is governed by physical laws, specifically the forces of gravity, electromagnetic, strong, and weak. In some sense, we have reached some bed-rock conclusion about how something works. So far, so good. But, when challenged by something out of our understanding, such as the existence of God and His possible interventions in our world, it makes our whole structure of knowledge and truth tremble. We are not going to talk about the many possibilities of the implications of this happening, but we are going to talk about one. That is the possibility of God intervening and we, thinking of His intervention as something breaking the laws of the universe and thus, His laws. This would make Him incoherent and irrational. But would it? If we have the premise that we can have a perfect and thus, coherent isomorphism of reality with our perception, then maybe God is incoherent and irrational. Unfortunately, that premise is of no use because it’s impossible since we are limited human beings. Beings that have created abstract concepts in order to understand the world around them, with a fairly good isomorphism with reality, or so we believe that.
Then, how can we think we have the standards to evaluate God? That would mean that our standards are superior to God, but those standards were created by us. Are we superior to God? After all, maybe the anthropic principle applies. I get a hard time believing this. Through the process of evolution, humans have had developed the capacity to gain a better understanding of the world and universe around them. This was possible because of the ability to make abstract concepts of the things that were observed. By doing this, humans have set a standard, a scale of values, that define something as good, beautiful, or truthful, but all of these are none but human made. These are creations by humans, which they and only they, make use of. The universe is; it’s real and not something we have created. The universe is what is, and it’s part of the reality. Unfortunately, we perceive it through our senses and mental process, which exists because of the abstract concepts we have created. These standards exist nowhere, but in our minds.
And just as men, foolishly trying to reach something that they found to be true beauty, end up dead by the terrifying truth about La Siguanaba, we can, too, end up believing we are reaching something we call truth or the objective truth, when in reality we are just walking to a cliff, confused by our inability to perceive what is because of our own creation of concepts. So, the next time you find yourself walking and talking with someone and casually say, “What a beautiful day!”, please think again and say, “What a humanly beautiful day!”.