The beautiful charms. The sublime moves.

      While body positive campaigns try to show different definitions of beauty, why doesn’t media encourage replication of the sublime? Why do we aim to charm with our looks rather than to move? According to Edmund Burke, “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.”

     If the ultimate goal of one’s physical attractiveness is to gain attention or draw people in, it seems almost counterintuitive to accomplish these only by means of the beautiful. It seems to me that people are afraid of the “horrific” aspect of the sublime, not wanting to be coined as ugly or hard to look at. If one is out to astonish with their looks, the most astonishing aspect of the sublime is the variety of reactions and emotions that it creates. People seem to be offended when their faces are coined as adjectives other than “pretty,” “beautiful,” “lovely,” etc. We should consider the greater impact we could have on our watchers with reactions like, “scary,” “intimidating,” “different,” “glorious,” “obscure,” “unique.”

    Are you seeking to delight or to fascinate?

“...the beautiful in music will not bear that loudness and strength of sounds, which may be used to raise other passions; nor notes which are shrill, or harsh, or deep; it agrees best with such as are clear, even, smooth, and weak. The second is; that great variety, and quick transitions from one measure or tone to another, are contrary to the genius of the beautiful in music.”

      “Beauty is sometimes disparaged on the ground that it causes a contagion of imitation, as when a legion of people begin to style themselves after a particular movie starlet, but this is just an imperfect version of a deeply beneficent momentum toward replication...Proust (having just seen a very beautiful woman serving milk on a train) wishes her to remain forever in his perceptual field and will alter his own location to bring that about: ‘to go with her to the stream, to the cow, to the train, to be always at her side.’ The willingness continually to revise one’s own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education ” (6-7).

      Modern-day society has developed a definition of beauty which has taken replication to a new level; it is not that we want to discover our own path of beauty, it is that we want to embody exactly the type of beauty we see. When a young teenage girl sees a thin and airbrushed model, it is often her natural impulse to try and mutate her own body to become a clone of this one particular definition of beauty.

     With the strong human desire to replicate exactly the type of beauty we see, body-positive messages like AerieReal and fitspiration (rather than thinspiration) are important; they show us that there is a varied definition of “beauty” and that we do not have to try and replicate just one form of it.

     In 1817, a writer named Marie-Henri Beyle (known in his works as Stendhal), visited the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, Italy; he had a famously surreal reaction to the artistry of the church. As he described it, “I was already in a kind of ecstasy by the idea of being in florence, and the proximity of the great men whose tombs I had just seen. Absorbed in contemplating sublime beauty, I saw close-up—I touched it, so to speak. I had reached that point of emotion where the heavenly sensations of the fine arts meet passionate feeling. As I emerged from Santa Croce, I had palpitations (what they call an attack on the nerves in Berlin); the life went out of me, and I walked in fear of falling.” This visceral reaction to a work of art was eventually named “Stendhal’s Syndrome.”

    This clip is from the movie Before Sunset, the second movie in a unique romance trilogy. The effects of the outlined relationship reminded me of the effects Stendhal described: “...As I emerged from Santa Croce, I had palpitations; the life went out of me…” The relationship in this clip seems to parallel this; as the two emerged from their deeply moving and gripping connection to each other, they both feel as if they have lost a piece of life. The disorderly and unpleasant emotions that come with this compelling connection is also spelled out in this clip. This further proved to me that the sublime can overtake a “love between the sexes,” contradicting Kant’s original claim.

       Compared to the depth of the sublime, beauty can sometimes seem surface-level and frivolous. Particularly, society sometimes patronizes those whose greatest assets are their physical beauty, claiming that they do not deserve so much praise for such a quality. Professor Elaine Scarry powerfully counters this notion in her book On Beauty and Being Just:

       “Sometimes this idea of undeservingness is urged on the grounds that their beauty is natural: such persons were born with it, lazily inheriting it through no labor or merit of their own (This argument is not very strong since so many things we unembarrassedly admire--great math skill, a capacity for musical composition, the physical agility of a dancer or speed of an athlete--entail luck at birth.)...With equal energy the idea of undeservingness is urged on the grounds that such beauty is artifactual: such persons spend hours running along the beach, plaiting their hair into tiny braids, adorning themselves with beads, bracelets, oil, arrays of color. (This argument is also not very strong since we normally admire feats of artificial labor, the formation of good government, a well-run newspaper, a twelve-year labor of self-education.)”

      I think the problem with society’s view of beauty emerges from admiring someone for just their beauty, ignoring other characteristic to one’s being. But, this is not because beauty itself is the problem. Admiring any person for a singular trait is detrimental and over-simplifying of their being. This is true for anything; if one’s only positive trait is their intelligence, they lack others such as kindness or humor. Society should recognize that beauty itself is not shallow, but it is the state of thinking someone just beautiful that rids the subject of their complexity and humanity.

Faith Hill performing her country/pop hit, “Breathe.”