In Defense of Beauty

Apr 26, 2015 //
0

There is a surprising amount of disdain for physical beauty. It’s only skin deep; it’s what’s on the inside that counts; sexual objectification is bad; fashion is vapid, etc. There is a condemnation of beauty standards, typically within progressive circles, that suggests that everyone is beautiful and to say otherwise is patriarchal oppression. To be fair, unhealthy beauty standards that require unrealistic weight and body imagery are certainly oppressive, but that is not the only standard, and to rid the world of beauty through the leveling of attractiveness into a wash of monistic equality is asinine.

It’s like someone purposefully never learning to read because they ‘don’t adhere to society’s rigid intellectual standards,’ and claiming that they’re just as smart as everyone else because ‘who gets to decide what “smart” means anyway?’

And this is true, to an extent. The validity of intellectual accomplishments could be argued to be just as subjective as what constitutes someone’s beauty. But not having something and claiming to have it is ignorant when pursuing it can allow you to achieve a portion of it. Just as you can develop your intellect through listening to the news, reading, discussing ideas with other people, etc. you can develop your beauty as well: exercise, a healthy diet, taking care of your appearance through hair styles and grooming, fashion and accessories, or even well-designed tattoos can all improve someone’s physical appearance.

As I said, there are as many avenues that one can trace in order to find beauty; just as there are many for intellectualism. There’s the business-y, sharply dressed look, just as politics is a field wherein one can hone their minds. There’s the nerd-chic hipster look which could be likened to the hard sciences. The heavily tattooed Suicide Girls-esque display could be comparable to the intellectual pursuits within psychotherapy. There are many, many ways to be beautiful.

However, those who claim that the overweight, unhygienic, unshaven, gluttonous blob of a man with his hairy ass hanging out the back of his pants is just as beautiful as anyone else is the same as saying that the man who genuinely believes that if the woman is on top she can’t get pregnant because of gravity is just as smart as everyone else. If the height of your intellectual peak is knowing all there is to know about the shape-shifting lizard lords that run our government, you can claim to be smart all you want, and you may even find that a couple people might agree with you, it’s just that most people won’t.

Beauty and intellect have their subjective sides, (with all the ambiguity that that implies) but if one’s aim is to pursue them, recognizing the views of the majority is a necessary step in being taken seriously within them.

But why pursue beauty? Beautiful people are often considered more charming, persuasive, trustworthy, likeable, healthy and confident than their uglier counterparts. As Goethe says, “Whoever beholds human beauty cannot be infected with evil; he feels in harmony with himself and the world.” It seems that beauty is an incredible social benefit for people. The difference between a romantic gesture and a creepy one is the attractiveness of the suitor, after all.

Of course, the benefits to beauty seem to be somewhat superficial, since a beautiful person is quite likely to be just as trustworthy as an ugly person, despite how they may be perceived. However, Plato tells us that “physical excellence does not of itself produce a good mind and character: on the other hand, excellence of mind and character will make the best of the physique it was given.” This suggests that to optimize one’s other capabilities, it helps to be pretty.

If we insist on the universality of beauty, all we are doing is reinforcing its universal importance. There are many fine qualities outside of beauty, and to emphasize beauty over the rest of them is just as absurd as discarding it as unimportant. One is not obligated to pursue beauty, just as one is not obligated to pursue academia. But if one is looking to improve themselves, ignoring the physical aspect of the self is detrimental to that process. It is a personalized art form, and our unique beauty is typically an expression of our character and our values. Denouncing beauty standards, and flattening its effects to include the entire populace is a rejection of art, and is ignorant of the importance that beauty has for us all.

We are not all beautiful. Some of us are ugly as shit.

Categories Social Criticism

The Conundrum of Identity

Apr 22, 2015 //
5

One of the common philosophical tropes is asking what makes us who we are. We all have a sense of Self; we all have a sense of Others, but what actually makes up that essence of Self? There are usually two answers that are given: either the body or the mind.

Let’s start by looking at the body because a lot of people who are trying really hard not to be superficial want to say the mind. The body actually has a great importance when it comes to identity. It’s how we recognize people. I look at you, and I see the way your eyes crinkle when you smile your crooked smile, I hear the sound of your voice, etc. If I see you walking down the street, it is because of the physical make-up of your body that I am able to say, “That is you.” The Christian tradition says that when we are resurrected after God finally gets bored letting us play around, it is our physical body that we inhabit within the heavenly realm. 2000 years of tradition is not easy to dismiss. Lastly, the absolute worst “Would you rather?” question makes us really ponder the essence of a person, be it body or mind, by asking us, “Would you rather have sex with your girlfriend’s body inhabited by the consciousness of your mother, or your mother’s body inhabited by the consciousness of your girlfriend?” If you prefer boyfriends or others, make whatever substitutions you need to until you realize that it’s gross either way. If body was unimportant towards identity, this question would be significantly easier to answer.

So, if body is important to identity, what happens if someone loses a leg and requires a prosthetic? And then an eye and needs a glass one? And then an arm and gets a chainsaw, Evil Dead-style? If the body represents identity, and the body is replaced, (keep in mind that the body has completely new cells every seven years), how can we say that it is still the same person? If I am A, and then later I am B, how is that consistent since A ≠ B? It doesn’t seem logically sound. When we see two clones fighting to the death in a movie, one is typically the normal version, and the other is usually evil. We accept them to be different despite their identical bodies, and it is their minds that separate them.

To those reading this, you know my identity through my mind. My body does not register for this one-sided conversation. If my body was destroyed through a lab experiment gone wrong, and my mind was transferred into a machine that could transmit my thoughts into text, those who know me best would likely be able to ascertain that it is in fact my mind within that machine. They would get my jokes, recognize my allegories, and know enough about my patterns of speech that they might eventually accept that this machine was now me. And of course everyone knows that it’s not what’s on the outside that counts, but what’s on the inside!

But what about someone who suffers brain trauma and whose whole personality changes? Or someone suffering from PTSD and whose mind has been altered because of it? Are we a totally different person when under the influence of narcotics? Or when suffering from Alzheimer’s and Dementia? We might think, “oh, the real them is in there somewhere!” We reject that this new mind cannot be the real them, but we maintain their identity because we accept that the body gives a person the consistency of identity even when we have no other evidence outside the body to suggest this. For example, we continue to love our elderly with Alzheimer’s because we recognize a sense of identity beyond the mind.

So is identity some combination of the two? An amalgamation of body and mind? The astute observer might notice that these problems of identity that I have been going over all take place from the perspective of an observer, not the person themselves. It is the understanding of the identity of the Other that has so many flaws in it, and here is why.

The identity of the Other is not any sort of combination of body and mind, it is based on memory. We remember what someone looks like, sounds like, smells and maybe even tastes like, and that is how we define their body. We also remember how they behave, and how they interact with us, and that is how we define their mind. The only dilemma in identity becomes apparent when the memory of a person does not coincide with how we presently perceive them.

If the identity of the Other transcended memory, everyone would know that Batman is Bruce Wayne. No matter how much he hid his body through costumes, or his mind through his billionaire playboy persona, his identity would transcend these memories people had of Bruce Wayne, and Batman would instantly become recognizable due to the connection of identity that he would necessarily possess with others.

If identity is memory, what does this mean? The most glaring consequence of this revelation is that one can only love the memory of a person, as that is the only way we can ever know them. Before you dismiss this, keep in mind that those who are adopted young enough, who form childhood memories with their adopted siblings, will never love them “in that way” based on those early, developmental memories. In contrast, genetically related siblings, meeting for the first time as adults, frequently have sexual attraction towards one another, as the memories required to counteract this superemely gross encounter are nonexistent. Those with Alzheimer’s are notorious for not recognizing their loved ones in the present, but will recall them fondly within their memories of the past.

Is the love of an abstract idea created from memory as powerful as the traditional sense of love that romantics poetically describe to us? I would argue that it is. Created values will always have the strength that we assign to them.

This does also mean that if you lose a loved one, literally everything that you love about them is still with you, so long as you remember them. I can’t tell if this is consoling or not, but… maybe?

Anyway, I feel that I should probably outline the identity of the Self as viewed by the Self. The identity of the Self should presumably go beyond simple memory. Descartes’s cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) concludes that there must at least be a receptacle for thinking, or a receptacle for memory, in order for a being to exist. If memories are lost, the identity of the Self is not lost, as the receptacle has just been emptied, it has not disappeared.

Are we just unique cogitos running around? A thinking beacon? We are not necessarily our consciousness, as the being of consciousness is the consciousness of being (which means that we can only be conscious of something. If we self-reflect, we are conscious of our self; if we reflect on anything else, we are conscious of that thing). However, there must be something projecting that consciousness. There is also a neuroscientist named Raymond Tallis who points out that we know all about the input of sight: light enters into our eyeballs, hits a bunch of eyeball parts, and this information is transferred into our brain, but that doesn’t explain the output: what is looking out. The thing that projects sight in theory would be the same thing that projects consciousness.

Whatever it is projecting these aspects of Self, if you were to ask me, is our identity. I don’t want to use the term Soul because that implies a holiness and an eternal nature which I don’t believe necessarily follows from this theory. I like the term cogito though just because it sounds fancy, or the Subject is another way you could put it. Is it a dualistic ghost in the machine, or a creation of the physical brain? It’s hard to say. The nature of consciousness is another blog for another day.

Finally, for those that think that we are our DNA mixed with cultural and environmental factors, then we would have no identity at all. That would be materialistic determinism, and we would only be cogs, no different from all the other cogs mindlessly plugging through our predetermined roles. You’ve obliterated all meaning, freedom, identity, and value from the world. I hope you’re happy with yourselves. Also, quantum probability and the observer paradox have thrown a few wrenches into those deterministic gears, so you’re probably also wrong, but this blog is already long enough.

Post-Script: we can never access the Other’s Subject/cogito, that is why the connection between beings is based on memory.

Tags , , , , , ,
Categories Philosophy

Critique of the Social Being: People as Product

Apr 20, 2015 //
2

Humanity today is considered “plugged-in”. We have, and some claim to even need, constant access to our phone. Most people have laptops, iPads, desktop computers, and many other electronics on top of their phones with which they can access basically the same technology, and the largest trend within this technology is Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tinder… all the social media conglomerates that make up the contemporary lifestyle. It is considered bad business to not have a social profile in today’s economy, and individuals without these outlets are often considered social pariahs, or old beyond obsolescence.

This social media technology is a relatively new phenomenon that has no precedence to anything remotely similar within the entirety of human existence. That’s quite something. This massive overhaul of civilization within such a brief amount of time must surely have altered the way human beings behave, and I hope to examine some of these consequences.

The three events that alerted me to the issues I’m going to discuss are the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, the increase in clientele of art galleries and museums that allow photography for the sake of the selfie, and the capturing of newsworthy events in the form of the selfie.

Judging by the fact that I used the word “selfie” twice already, it’s pretty safe to say that the insertion of the ‘self’ is the issue. I don’t believe that it is an issue of selfishness or narcissism that is at play, as the term “selfie” seems to imply, because selfishness is about hoarding and social media is supposed to be about sharing. If the Social Being was selfish, they would simply be absorbing the experience of the museums for themselves, and would not be donating to charity at all. I don’t believe narcissism is fully involved either because what is behind the person in the selfie often has as much value as the person taking the picture.

However, the Social Being is not sharing anything in the strictest sense of the word either. If one were to share the experience of an art piece in a gallery with others, even over social media, they would probably find a better representation than a cell phone picture could provide, and would need to write more than 140 characters to properly convey the emotional response or cultural impact of the piece. If one sought to raise money for ALS, they would talk about the seriousness of Lou Gehrig’s disease, its terrible symptoms and possible treatments, and the need of special equipment that the donated money could be put towards. Spreading the news would be important in-and-of-itself, and pictures would be accompanied by articles by professional journalists that have legally binding accountability and time to do the research that would provide the complete story.

The old criticism of society was that we were reckless consumers who needed material goods in order to create meaning in our lives. We bought useless products when their only value was their accumulation. I no longer believe this to be the case. We no longer define ourselves by the objects we own, nor do we need to worry about Fight Club telling us that these objects own us. Most people can’t afford to accumulate material goods these days anyway.

But rather than shed the consumer nature and embrace self-created meaning, we have internalized the process and become products ourselves. We no longer accumulate goods to fulfill our lives, we accumulate pseudo-experiences to increase our capital worth. We want others to consume us, and to do that we use social media to extol our charitable nature, our appreciation of the arts, and our role as citizen journalists. Why else have a thousand followers on Facebook and Twitter if we only ever actually deal with a few close friends and family members in our everyday lives? The reason that celebrities and businesses maintain their social media profiles is because their branding requires them to advocate themselves in whatever ways they deem marketable, and it is this same process that individuals follow to maintain their own nature as a product to be consumed.

If we are not trying to sell ourselves as products, if we are truly charitable, cultured, and socially conscious, then why add our selves into the process? Why does allowing “selfies” in museums increase their clientele? Why do social causes like Movember and the Ice Bucket Challenge raise more money than the deadlier heart and pulmonary diseases? Why do more than a third of Americans get their news from social media, and what does the handsome Soren Bowie have to say about that?

We are not our social media profile, just as McDonalds is not their advertising. The Social Being is a hamburger patty covered in Vaseline in order to make it look shiny, and the person behind it is inevitably going to be a slumped-over burger with the lettuce spilling everywhere and making a God-damned mess.

The Social Being is not only a deception to others, but it is dehumanizing and degrading us into being products rather than people. The Social Being goes beyond objectification, because objects can at least be appreciated for their own merit, whereas products only have value in their marketability.

The obvious solution is to remove ourselves from social media, to engage in person to person relationships and forego the whole demeaning process, and this is a solution I would openly advocate. But for those who choose to remain on social media, if you remove yourself from the process, this may counteract the cheapening of your Self. Try to think of social media like you’re having a conversation with a person or a small group. When having a conversation, you don’t cram yourself into the other person’s face, or constantly make mention of your own involvement in the story. You’re already the one telling the story; that necessitates your involvement or interest by definition.  When speaking in a personal conversation, you’re also aware of your audience. You speak to the person or the group, not so that those around might overhear.

The most valuable thing a person can do is be authentic to themselves and to those around them. Social media precludes that.

Tags , ,
Categories Social Criticism
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »