Absolute Beauty Exists

   Google 'ideas of absolute beauty' and the most depressing array of images pop up. Most of them are images of scantily clad women. Going much deeper into the search produces images of naked men starting with Michelangelo's David. The modern world or at least the modern digital world seems incapable of imagining ideas of absolute beauty. It's depressing because whole generations that derive their 'knowledge' solely from the internet are ignorant of the very idea that connects Reality, Truth, and Goodness.  It's called Absolute Beauty. Here's how.

   For the past 48 years, term after term, I've been the lucky recipient of student papers on the subject of human abortion. Comparing the popular perception of human abortion at the beginning of my academic career with what it is today can be traced through those student term papers over the years. In 1966, when I began to teach philosophy at Westfield State College (now a University), the beauty of a human fetus arose out of the wonderment of the fact that all new persons started out as a mere clump of cells inside a woman's body put there by the ejaculate of a male penis. The sense of awe at human conception was palpable through all strata of society. "It's a beautiful thing," people would exclaim upon mere hearing of it. Very thought of ripping out a fetus from the mother's womb and throwing it away with the casual disregard as one would a toenail clipping was seen as 'ugly' until after 1960. Only certain careful exceptions allowed this as a medical or moral practice. Rape and incest were the most common exceptions even for the morally strict Roman Catholic Church. Their logic rests on the observations of the natural order of things. It runs like this. No being composed of human DNA is a being that can be wantonly killed. All human fetuses are beings composed of human DNA. Therefore, no human fetus is a being that can be wantonly killed. The validity of this logic is impeccable. The soundness of this reasoning rests on the absolute beauty of human life protecting it except in the most extreme circumstances and then only for a greater good. The operative term in the syllogism is 'wantonly killed'.

   a baby at 4 days              

   The nano of human conception demands the logic that a human fetus is a human being. The same logic dictates that cows are not reproduced by putting acorns in the ground, any more than whales give live birth to spoons or lightbulbs. It's a palpable absurdity to claim the a human fetus is not a human being with all rights of protection granted to all other human beings. It's obtuse postmodernism to argue that we are morally permitted to 'wantonly kill' a human fetus merely because it lacks the viability to feed itself. My Grandmother can't feed herself. Can we wantonly kill Gramma? But this logic has been thrown out now preferring the ugliness of wanton human fetus killing for the beauty of human procreation. This logic is no longer tolerated because it's an inconvenient truth. Marginal minds demanded marginal reasoning for marginal morals. It's more than a bit bemusing to witness otherwise learned modern thinkers in the law, medicine and now even religion demanding the right to decide when exactly a human life begins when it ostensibly has already begun when it begins at all. At the nano of conception what else is it, a giraffe fetus, bird egg? By government imposition, a baby today is the existential equivalent of a mole on the skin. Disposable.These modern geniuses got what they wanted at the cost of Absolute Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. Quite aside from the estimated 1.3 billion human fetuses aborted since 1980 the greatest casualty of this modern illogic is the reality of Absolute Beauty itself. Once you kill that you can kill whatever you want. Therein lies the connection.

a baby at 20 weeks

   The reality of human fetuses connects with the truth that they are persons that connects with the good of preserving them from destruction that connects with the beauty in the unity between these absolute ideas. 'The Beautiful' does not lie in the sensual perception of the thing, nor even in the mental form of the thing. It lies in the contemplation that no greater thing is conceivable in a specific instance just that way. It's the 'wow' effect. Or, as the Millennials overplay, 'awesome'. When Matter fits perfectly into Form, as Aristotle reminds us, then we say it is beautiful. But 'The Beautiful' itself rests in the inconceivability of anything more beautiful. The ancients believed 'The Beautiful' was only approachable by the knowing 'the Canon' of perfect mathematical proportions as formulated by Polykleitos (5th and 4th century BCE). Other brute examples of how 'The Beautiful is definitely not in the 'eye-of-the'beholder' are, 'The Fibonacci Numbers' (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ... (add the last two to get the next), 'The golden section (0·61803 39887... = phi = φ) and 'The golden string' (1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 ... a sequence of 0s and 1s that is closely related to the Fibonacci numbers and the golden section.)
     Additionally, the conception, appreciation and mystery derived from the experience of 'The Beautiful' connects sense perception to transcendence beyond sense thus becoming the 'inexpressible'. Any artist knows this first hand. This is what happens when our aesthetic is stimulated either from within or from without. The Pythagorean Theorem expresses dimensional truth about any right triangle in plane geometry, but more significantly it expresses the beauty of 'right-triangularity' itself. Because the aesthetic unifies 'perceiver' with 'world' Absolute Beauty unites Reality, Truth, and Goodness in a manner completely unattainable by the materialist who only feels what the senses dictate. It does so, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty saw, by placing desire at the very heart of beauty. Desire is the human passion for possessing through knowing beauty as good and rejecting evil as ugly.
   Desire is our discrimination between beautiful and ugly, truth and falsehood, knowledge of reality and ignorance of a fact, good and evil. These distinctions attract the mind inexorably filling the soul with desire that we recognize as Absolute Beauty. If you doubt this have a look at these two images of the statue Venus de Milo (100-130 BCE) depicting Aphrodite the Greek and Roman goddess of love and beauty. Ask yourself, "Would the statue be more beautiful with the photoshopped arms still intact or does their absence enhance her beauty to the absolute?" Why?

REASON ARGUE REFUTE Critical Thinking About Anything 

by Mark McIntire 

Link: http://amzn.com/B00CC12QNE