Why we need beautiful people
Bongi D D M Radipati | Tuesday October 31, 2023 16:57
Being spring in our country, confident people will start to bare their flesh or at least flash it. Being the last springtime before our country's general elections, politicians will start to ‘speechify’ in earnest.
In both instances, their actions are intended to persuade us to take their side. Yet we must see beyond their flesh or their words; indeed, their self-assurance. For our own good, we must be interested beyond just the politics of appearance or the appearance of politics. For their own good, we must turn the lens on ourselves and explain what really moves us but is often ignored.
Human beauty is defined as symmetry and the correlating proportions between parts of the body visible to others, such as the face, waist and legs. But beauty on its own does not carry the same loaded meaning as what happens to us and how we react when we perceive someone as beautiful. To find greater understanding and sensitivity, beauty and perception must go together. What will move us is not what we see through the revealing clothes of a beautiful person (say a nipple or a navel) but the grace and enchantment of a beautiful person, or if you will, a woman beholden by a man caught between the pulsation of his heart and the clarity of his mind.
Anybody who has sat through a beauty contest or a fashion show (as a judge or spectator or reviewer) knows the vibrancy and vitality of the people parading before them. That person will also know the breezy cool, sometimes the breath of fresh air, of the contestants and models, which are really the trappings of everyone good looking enough to be selected to strut their stuff on the catwalk. At these events, we are never told much about the identities and characters of the contestants or models.
Instead, the contestants and models often reveal themselves by the way they carry themselves in the clothes they wear, and as those clothes caress them instead of controlling them, the way they do to the rest of us. Barely dressed may make them appear to us stark and odd. Having the confidence to be scantily dressed in public may make us wonder who they are. But that does not mean that the contestants or models are not beautiful!
In my view, beauty contests, fashion shows and other media have done more to bring femininity, sexiness and class to the masses than any book or lesson could do. They have shown us that beauty is not just some bourgeoisie, self indulgent, useless pursuit. In both visible and invisible ways, these events have shown us the practical use of beauty - to move us, to attract us, and importantly, to give us eros (the desire for wholeness leading to the love for knowledge or simply, philosophy). The dominance of these events in the realm of beauty and taste is now so ingrained that it is hard to know which came first - the events or the models and contestants. And we seem not to care about that sequencing. We are content accepting that when we love someone (eros) or something - as we love beautiful people and beautiful things - that affection tends to bring out the best in us.
It is a legitimate philosophical fantasy to visualize an encounter between beauty and serious matters of our time, such as inequality, injustice and intolerance. That has been going on for the last 250 years. But we must resist the inclination to always align beauty with other values, or worse, to subordinate it to some other values, such as morality, justice, etc. (That alignment may be necessary some time but not all the time.) To reckon best and fairly with beauty, we must always accept beauty on its own terms and as its own value just as we do so for goodness and truth. In any event, in the philosophy of beauty (aesthetics), there is a strong belief that the love for beauty is one way of attracting humanity to God, who is infinitely beautiful. In that sense, we may regard our discernment of the beauty that we see on earth, as a type of practice necessary for the experience we shall have as humans in Heaven, marveling at the beauty of paradise.
As a giant, tasteful cyborg raging against tastelessness and blandness, the world of beauty appears to sleep in the colder months of the year, but explodes to life in the warmer months of spring and summer. And when it does, it points us to a sense of discovery. First, it compels us to admit the onslaught against taste; actually, the vulgarity and slovenliness that still exists although we are getting more educated, wealthier or tech savvy. Then it summons beauty’s core ideas (of giving pleasure, attracting us, ennobling us) and presents them as a remedy for tastelessness. Thereafter, when we see someone beautiful or a beautiful thing, our reaction will probably settle somewhere between wonder and fascination and admiration. Because it exists in an orbit of actual people and things, beauty is real, physical and meaningful. Deductively, beauty is therefore not something that we just see in a vision or can explain merely as an abstract or a glimpse in an epiphany.
Over the course of life leading to middle age, I have come to acknowledge that a beautiful person and a beautiful thing are always so, despite the passage of time. If we were to look beyond the gutsiness of confident people or the effrontery of politicians, we would realize that over time, our own appearance and our views about them will change. But beautiful people and beautiful things persist across time, unapologetic, their essence distilled by time, concentrated by their appeal to us, and defiant to the downward slope of mortality common to all of us. This is the basis of our faith and the strength of our belief in aesthetics. It is also the realization that after a life of considering it, it is acceptable to be quaint and dainty. Finally, it is confirmation of how beauty continues to challenge and surprise us and consequently move us. We come to these acknowledgments more out of observation than ideology; the shadow of looking having helped us to appreciate the eventual light of grandeur.
*Radipati is a regular Mmegi contributor