What is beauty?
There might be a lot of explanations to that but what if you have a machine of truth? A machine that could produce reality. That would be very easy to answer. Since the emergence of machines, human tend to make machines for doing everything, even for reality. Religion was a machine of reality for many thousands of years and worked very well...until it got a competitor in the market by another powerful machine, "Science"... By widespread use of evolutionary theory, Science seems like having grown from a machine into a factory that produces such machines as "theory of evolution" that can explain everything with ease,
Dennis Dutton seems like to use "Evolutionary machine" in explaining beauty and he thinks it does efficiently answer that but he doesn't limit himself to beauty and thinks that even art can be explained in evolutionary perspective... That is really plausible but when I see at works of art (Art like Science is a factory to produce aesthetics) then I think, Picasso might not agree with this explanation. Art is not merely an expression of beauty (What would be the difference between the work of an artist and the work of an artisan? An artisan might produce much more skilled and beautiful artifacts). Art also serves two other distinct purposes, "An expression of wealth and social class" and "An object of rebellion; pushing for more freedom"... I don't see that these two values have rooted in beauty. Abstract and modern art came to rebel two aspects of modern society,
- Machines; that is capable of creating much skilled, accurate and complex works of art that can produce on mass scale and with very low prices.... So artists broke the lines and played with colors to distort the "beauty", "organization" and "perceived world" as an expression of their "humane feelings" that machines don't have and can't produce.... Now, the people with high class buy these abstracts arts at high prices to create a distinct culture from those of machine produced cheap works of arts that commoners can afford...
- Political and Social system; Arts that are used in political and social rebellions for more freedom are not usually the expression of beauty but of oppression, blood, pain and misery... This works of arts are not to seduce but to reduce the hold of power and influence over others....
Over the years, I have realized that two things can never be wrong and can find uncountable number of evidences to support them...so people who play around these two categories have a lot to play with...
"God-Centric" VS "Human-Centric".... One can easily trace the battle of "God-centric" VS "Human-Centric" even from Pre-historic times to our present day and I am confident that it will continue in the future....
"God" as an Almighty and invisible can never be "proved" or "disproved" because there is no way to do it. So all the efforts of proving and disproving is mere battle of words... It depends on the individuals whether to believe on Him or not...
"Human" on other hand, observe the world and understand it through themselves (Human is the observer and human is the judge), so it is not difficult to understand that linking things to human goes very well to human sense... In other words, it makes sense to some point to all...
So I would rather tend to limit myself to observations for "facts" and enjoy the "explanations" and "theories" as acts of "creativity and speculations" that have more to do with schools of thoughts than reality.....
Last words; If one says, according to this theory or faith, this is so and so, I would rather agree but if one says that this and that theory or faith represent the "facts" or "reality", I would rather say, it represent a school of thought and help us to satisfy ourselves in having some explanations for our observations...
Conclusion; Until now, Science has proved to be the best among "ways" that human knowledge proceeds and "evolutionary theory" is among the best to "explain" things very well but I think, we have to be aware of "working very well" and "presenting it as reality".... Who knows in near future or in distant future, we see another "competitor" in the market...
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