A Philosophy of Beauty

The first action of philosophy, the inital step, is to reduce uniformity to exception: what distinguishes one person from another is her/his beauty. Beauty is unreachable, not because it is impenetrable, but because it approaches the infinite. Each beautiful person hides an infinity. Beauty is deceptive, for essentially, we see ourselves in it, we never see the other person.

Beauty is concrete -- it rests upon its own reality. It only becomes abstract when we think about it. Thinking mutates beauty into an instrument or a concept -- it abandons reality. And by that I mean this: that a beautiful person cannot be turned into a thing without ceasing to be a person. For beauty is not settled in itself. Beautiful people are not a reality -- they create their own realities. The beautiful person is neither a person nor a thing, but perhaps a relation, or more precisely, a function: a solipsistic autonomy that alters in accordance with the perspectives of those that determine it. The victim of beauty is a function of the beautiful, not in the physioligical sense of the word, but in the mathematical sense: beauty has mutated into a number, a sign, a symbol. And mankind is seduced by numbers. Every number hides an infinity -- every number contains all the totality of all numbers, total enumeration. Beauty takes on a mathematical form. The reality of beauty is cerebral. It is easier, almost, to think of beauty than to see it. Beauty represents magnitudes of sensations. Beauty is a ceremony of symmetry and form that turns into a ballet -- a mathematical, mystical sacrifice to the organs of sense. A situation, or perhaps, a demonstration -- a theater of pulchritude.

But since beauty is mathetical, it cannot be destroyed because numbers are immortal -- it cannot be nullified by time or by age. The whole of beauty is greater than all the beauty it contains. And in that sense, beauty is unreal. Beauty is supermortal, that is, a mortal who neutralizes all else -- insensate in sensation. It is the mystical paradox: the wonderment of insensibility which has its foundation in sensibility.

Beauty is hyaline matter. It is the supreme pleasure, the most natural of pleasures. All of history, legend, memoirs, and medical observation prove the point: beauty is a ferocious copulation of viewer and viewed.

The recognition of beauty is a triumph of intelligence and sensation and emotion. Beauty is immense and unique -- wherever it is discovered. Beauty is a tyrranical philosophy. For beauty postulates a curious despotism over all mankind -- beauty does not liberate, it tosses mankind into dungeons, it binds, it imprisons, it compels, coerces and enslaves. And it enthralls. It is an incubator for a whole congerie of neuroses.

Although, what a way to go, huh?!

What, then, is beauty? What is the epistemology of beauty? In a sense, it is indefinable -- but it may be perceived: its only feature is that it is an exception, through this it may be isolated and determined. Beauty is an exception among the beautiful exceptions, a reflection among the beautiful reflections. A true consensus may be impossible.

Still, I will make an attempt: beauty is a miraculous concatenation which tittilates my soul when I look upon it.