“Beauty is not caused. It is.” —Emily Dickinson
Beauty — be not caused — It Is —
Chase it, and it ceases —
Chase it not, and it abides —
Overtake the Creases
In the Meadow — when the Wind
Runs his fingers thro' it —
Deity will see to it
That You never do it —
In the poem above, Emily Dickinson reveals human beings' weakness in relying on our senses to experience the most important phenomenon in life: beauty.
We make the mistake of considering our senses our strongest characteristic. They might make us strong in war, but they make us weak in achieving beauty. After all, beauty and not war are what we are striving for.
Our senses are an obstacle when we come to experience beauty.
When we don't try to experience beauty with our senses it is permanent.
Beauty and style are the most important objects in our lives because they determine all our choices.
Beauty and style affect how we will behave towards each other and objects in the universe.
I'm sure that at some point or another, every person has made mistaken judgments about people and objects and has suffered. It happens when we buy what we think is a beautiful or stylish dress and then find out it's not, and it happens when we choose a life partner who seems gorgeous, good, and trendy, and we find out too late that the person is the opposite.
Emily Dickinson must be right because it's absurd to think that a significant "thing" like beauty and style is only a vague, unknowable opinion and not something definite and knowable like an object.
The ancient Greek philosopher, Plato, regarded beauty and style as objects like tables and chairs and, therefore, as knowable objects, not as opinions and judgments that aren't knowable.
According to Plato, beauty and style are parts of all objects. They appear to be nonexistent because they aren't perceivable by any of the five senses.
Scientists have shown that all objects consist of particles. The smallest particle that the senses can observe is the neutron. However, they know that the neutron can be further divided but admit that they don't have instruments to see the smaller parts of the neutron.
We conclude from this that there is a smaller particle than the neutron in every object in the universe, which cannot be divided and is invisible to the most sophisticated sense-based instruments we have to date.
This means that Plato was also right to consider our senses unreliable for seeing the smallest particle of objects. He called that small, invisible particle the real object.
No one will agree that beauty and style don't exist. Therefore, we must perceive them using a mechanism other than the five senses.
Beauty and style exist in every object.
We need to ask ourselves: What mechanism do we possess that enables us to see beauty in every object in the universe?
It's a mechanism which every living object must possess.
Plato concludes that this mechanism is an object called "the good".
The good is like the beautiful, an object like any other object. All objects reveal each other only if we treat them as natural objects.
Only by relating to beauty and style as natural objects and applying the actual object can we experience the good.
The good and the beautiful mutually complement one another; by means of the good, one sees the beautiful, and someone who sees the beautiful applies the good and is called good or a good person.
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