The perception of beauty

One may say that beauty fills a vacuum, in which it is like love (love being its most common expression). It is not love but precedes love, although it is not a necessary condition for it. In a sense it is the inverse of love (but not its opposite), in that it propels an unborn self into an unrealised and novel universe, attempting to embrace it.

To understand the beleaguered subject's experience is to fathom that s/he is entirely creating this universe into a context where the object of beauty is the only reliable cue. One can therefore say that it demands love and that it is a matter of survival. To perish is almost certain, but a residue of life may not be out of the question. One speaks of this as memory - often of the best kind.

An analytical understanding of this phenomenon puts one onto dangerous ground almost immediately. The solipsism of its perception is almost complete and one is practically forced to think of every beauty as a kind of original, self-enclosed: what s/he has in common with others is little more than a reification and generalised beautification or decoration. Beauty for the masses - pop art.

But that is going too far. If the subject is in the freest state to perceive, so too is the object (who becomes subject by thereby having its dignity restored) to behave, and it is the subject's misapprehension of beauty as responsiveness that results in transgression.

The perception of beauty is the experience of freedom.