Max Russell

English 110-C

April 8, 2018

Can Genuine Beauty Make Us Better People?

In our society today, the concept of beauty is twisted and distorted. People’s perception of beauty is often attached to the concept of wealth, splendor, and surface-level attractiveness. If you were to ask any 18-25 year-old young woman if [insert female celebrity here] is beautiful, they would immediately agree that she is. But if you were to dig deeper, what makes people perceive that person as being beautiful? All too often, people get caught up on physical, monetary, celebrity-status, or on other surface-level perceptions of beauty. If we want beauty to make us better people, we need to first fix people’s perception of genuine beauty.

Beauty exists in many forms, but how does society define such an abstract term? Oftentimes, the only working definition of beauty we have is what our magazines, television, advertisements, and mass media in general tell us it is. Unfortunately, mass media generally presents only one side of beauty: the perfect, airbrushed, size two model. The most obvious symptom of this is increasing self-confidence issues among young women. Humans naturally compare themselves to others in areas such as intelligence, physical traits, athletic ability, and many other nuances. Because of this distorted view of beauty, many young women are left feeling depressed and alone, since they feel that they can’t compete against surgically-altered, photoshopped models. This is a horrible truth, and something needs to change.

In his work La Bella Vita, John Armstrong relates the human perception of beauty as a spectrum, opening with,

“The only popular thought about beauty today, the one that has the widest currency in the world, is the idea that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. It’s a kindly notion. It seeks to make peace between people who have very different tastes. People are delighted by wildly variant things and that’s how it should be, the thinking goes – so don’t get worked up trying to figure out which things are beautiful.”

Beauty does truly lie in the eye of the beholder. Armstrong touches on the fact that each individual carries their own definition of beauty, which makes it difficult to clearly define the term. According to Armstrong, that’s the way it should be, and we shouldn’t try to make a safety-net description or definition of such an abstract concept. In 1795, the German dramatist and poet Friedrich Schiller published a book titled On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. According to Armstrong, “it contains some of our most useful insights into the nature and value of beauty.” Schiller analyses the human condition and hopes to make us understand our delight in what we find beautiful. As Armstrong puts it, “instead of asking which things are beautiful, Schiller is curious about what is going on in us when we respond with this distinctive, intimate thrill and enthusiasm that leads us to say, ‘that’s beautiful’.” He then touches on the fact that different things provoke this response in different people.

Schiller describes human longing for beauty with two psychological drives. The first of these is the Sense Drive, which he describes as a craving for contact and possession. Schiller associated the sense drive with his friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who, according to Armstrong, “longed to see things with his own eyes. Goethe was a direct observer, a natural empiricist who immersed himself in practical detail.”

The second drive identified by Schiller is the Form Drive. Armstrong defines it as “the inner demand for coherence over time, for abstract understanding and rational order.” Think about when you solve a complicated math problem. After shuffling through many steps, you finally render a concise, realistic answer. It feels good, and it gives you a small sense of accomplishment. These are the kinds of beauty that Schiller understood as the Form Drive. For many people and especially for myself, order, structure, and organization give a feeling of happiness and accomplishment. This underlying desire to make things orderly and neat fulfills Schiller’s Form Drive. Armstrong touches on this when he writes “We are loyal to the abstract, general idea of due process.”

Paragraph/Point- “What is Art For”, Going over some of the main points, cite a few quotes

Paragraph/Point- Review someone’s Art Project, cite a few quotes, and pull out a video or picture

Paragraph/Point- Fixing Society’s View of Beauty, cite another article

Closing