Why Beauty Matters? There is a psychological effect called “beauty is good”. Humans tend to associate beauty with other positive qualities. From birth to the grave, it seems, beauty equals every advantage. From birth, cuter babies receive more attention and care from adults and die less. At school age, beautiful children are also more likely to be recognized by teachers. They are punished less when they make mistakes and are more likely to be appointed as leaders. When it comes to adult society, more attractive people are perceived as more competitive. Being social, being more likeable, being more professional are all imposed judgments. Therefore, good-looking people are more likely to get higher salaries and faster promotion. In any case, a beautiful child receives more goodwill from the world than an ugly one.
How do we define beauty? There are many kinds of beauty in different cultures. That’s why we see these kinds of arguments all the time on the Internet, but there’s such a high degree of unanimity in the human taste for faces. We have an innate ability to quickly pick out which faces are more beautiful. In the 20th century, scientists proved this fact, mainly with unworldly babies. For example, babies were shown pictures of faces that adult judged to be “beautiful” and “ugly.” It turns out that the faces that babies stare at longer are the ones that adults find beautiful. The babies’ reactions to faces were not influenced by culture. Moreover, the aesthetic preference was independent of the race or gender of the face. This suggests that there is an innate mechanism by which humans judge faces to be beautiful or ugly. Evolutionary psychology suggests that humans developed a preference for faces during long-term competition for mates. And there may be a universally applicable formula behind the judgment of beauty. So what exactly is this “formula of beauty”? Research on “appearance levels” has been around since the 1970s, with scientists trying to figure out what beauty is.
The level of appearance, corresponding to a professional term – facial attractiveness. It refers to a positive and pleasant emotional experience induced by the face, and drives others to have a desire to approach. The higher the level of attractiveness, the more pleasurable and approachable it was. Sir Francis Galton gave a stunning lecture on beauty in 1878. During his talk, he demonstrated a new technique called composite photography. The method is to project photographs of different people’s faces onto the same photographic negative to obtain a composite, average face. His original goal was to visualize different “types” of people in order to find common traits. Galton, for example, thinks that by combining photos of criminals, he can reveal their true colors. He expects his technique to be used in complementary medicine or criminology. But to everyone’s surprise, the resulting face, far from being ugly, was strikingly handsome. He did the same with another batch of vegetarians, again producing a more attractive face.
On the social psychological level, as a kind of value, the perceptual world acts on the objective world through practice, which has a very important influence on individuals and society. And practical functions such as feeding, planting, manufacturing tools, beauty and beauty is only on this one aspect to sustain life less essential, but with the overall perspective view a survival all humans, there is reason to believe that we will find beauty and beauty is more important than the practical functions and plays a role. Take an example, if human beings did not have the aesthetic impulse to separate the objective world from its image, not only would music and art not appear, but all the utensils in our daily life would lose their uniqueness and become weird: why do we bother to make the cloth that keeps our body temperature different colors and thicknesses? Why do we use more complex and incomprehensible language to describe the same thing (if the purpose of our language is only to refer to objects)?
It can be seen that apart from religion and language, the pursuit of beauty is the purpose and motivation of most of our human behaviors. If it were not for the invention brought by the pursuit of beauty, we would have considerable material left in the history of human tools, but at the same time, human beings would become survival-oriented beasts. Language is the howl of coitus and hunting. Religion is simply the question of existence (no churches, no frescoes, no classics). Therefore, beauty and aesthetic feeling are indispensable and important both at this time and at the time of primitive human evolution. Aesthetic feeling is a kind of abstraction of the objective world, and the action of abstraction must come from the animal-oriented living practice, coupled with the existence of the unique tool creation behavior of human beings in the living practice. Therefore, Beauty is beneficial (either to Kant’s “free”, is also useful to survive), is by accident in the long-term objective practice accumulation and the formation of a “the humanization of nature”, the balance of the tool and the abstraction of objective world practice mix after mixing, the passage of time we will mix together, good and beauty On feeling at the same time will also be good feeling confused and beauty with the family (for example: a woman for hips were abstracted to “womanly beauty” and confusion to the biological and beauty), that is to say, we are in pursuit of France, on the one hand, we in the pursuit of good, on the other hand in respect in this a long flowing in the abstract rules in our genes.
From different perspectives, there will be different beauty. Everyone can enjoy different beauty of the same thing, the same Mona Lisa, some see sadness, some see happiness. This diversity is also beautiful. Beauty is the definition given by human beings. Beauty is defined only when it is pleasing to our eyes, pleasing to our hearts and pleasant to our hearts. The opposite is defined as ugly. Then of course humans are looking for beauty, because that’s how our species defines itself. (Philosophical notions about beauty versus ugliness are off the table.) Human beings have an instinct to pursue what pleases them, not only human beings, but everything in the world. All creatures in the world are in pursuit of beauty. Flying in the sky, swimming in the water, running on the ground. Some are beautiful with fur patterns, some are tall, and some are shrill. Although individual human beings have different standards of beauty, everyone expects their own beauty, so they are willing to dress up and wear nice clothes. If you don’t expect to present yourself in a good light, then things are already serious. In the same way, people always like feeling beautiful, and art is feeling. At least until modernism, art was dominated by feelings of beauty. Human beings define what human beings pursue as beauty. Not just to eat, and definitely not to perpetuate (many individuals in humans do not have a desire for perpetuation).
In nature, beauty is the manifestation of vitality, because in the universe all matter is pursuing “existence”, and the way of existence of living things is “life”. According to the principle of life energy, all life will acquire energy to the maximum extent, consume energy to the minimum, and develop in this direction to the extreme, the external expression is beauty. People, too, must develop towards beauty, and the purpose of people’s perception of beauty is to stimulate their inner life vitality. Therefore, the elements of beauty are sunshine, power, simplicity, purity and breeding. To give beauty a general statement: ignite the spark of inner life. Why are flowers beautiful? Because flowers bloom for pollination, for fruit, and flowering is when plants are at their most vigorous. Why are girls and boys beautiful? For youth is the age of life. Why are old and old people no longer beautiful? Because life is getting old and dying. In nature, all things of beauty are most vigorous. Why do people experience beauty? Why beauty? Why is beauty defined? For all things are beautiful, and all creatures live for beauty, and this is the gift of life. As a kind of higher intelligent creature, the life itself requires people to pursue beauty. In order to survive, it is necessary to have a strong vitality, and the vitality itself is reflected in the form of beauty. Beauty is the necessity of human inner vitality. When vitality is stimulated, people will naturally feel beautiful.
Aesthetics covers all fields of human life, the beauty of art, architecture, human body, science, soul… And so on. In simple terms, all beauty is to make people happy. Harmony, balance and symmetry are essential elements of beauty. Beauty can only be felt with the heart; Beauty is the secret of nature. Why does the golden ratio 0.618 bring people the feeling of beauty? Why does Maxwell’s electromagnetic equation strike so deep into the soul? Why do the paintings of Leonardo Da Vinci and Ingres fascinate people? Why Spinoza said that “the universe is God” makes people feel enlightened. Everything is the mystery of the universe. People’s feelings about beauty, like sunshine exposure, warm feeling lies in the heart, language can only speak a little of its whole.
