Beauty vs. Pleasure....Reason vs. Emotion

“The definition of a beautiful woman is one that loves me.”
- Sloan Wilson
As Mr. Wilson clearly demonstrates here, beauty is transient. In a world where anthropology tells us how often obesity was held as beautiful by previous cultures, where the male form was upheld over the female form, where extreme piercing and gauging of cartilage is a common practice, there is no simple way to say that beauty is linked to any one physiological or psychological response. Pleasure is a very dangerous criterion to base beauty on. Especially since some of the most beautiful things in this world can be characterized by the pain that they cause. Admission of fault or failure, the ecstasy of grief, the finality of death, are all beautiful things that cause little or no pleasure to the actor or the observer. Therefore, beauty must be something entirely different. Since it seems so transient, and we are continually exploring things as counterintuitive as the beauty in the grotesque, perhaps beauty is something more akin to the act of connecting to something conceptual, something behind the imitation that Plato held in such disdain.