The Two Rivers of Mind: #3 Beauty’s Irrationality

Adapted from a chapter of a philosophy non-fiction book i’m currently writing and welcome thoughts

‘On Being an Angel’, Francesca Woodman, 1977

Beauty is an absurd and radiant little thing, resisting our touch every time we feel that we are on the cusp of grasping the virginal lustre of its unspoiled essence. Because as rational creatures, we can’t help dissecting beauty with our gazes, reducing it to parts, peeling it back from its once-vibrant form. Yet, we forget that it is in beauty’s quiet resistance to logic that it lives. Romanticism, with all its uncontained passion, was born of this truth — an embrace of beauty’s wilderness, and its fearless refusal to be understood.

So I wonder what would it mean to know beauty in its fullness, and see it without seeking symmetry or structure. We look for beauty in golden spirals, in the flawless geometry of symmetry, as if beauty could be held in the purity of mathematics. But these measurements fall short. There is an element in beauty that evades them, a je ne sais quoi quality that cannot be graphed or calculated. Consider the world of high fashion, where beauty is defined not by perfection but by the curve of a feature, a slight asymmetry, a look that defies categorisation; for beauty is not an additive equation but an unbreakable gestalt. And in its fluidity and transience, beauty bends light and time; a shifting shadow that exists in the singular moment of a gaze, a smell, a sound, or a touch.

And then there is beauty in the parts of ourselves we hide beneath cloth and convention. The feet, for instance, often become a product of collective imagination, a delicate pair of things that are just out of reach. In history, particularly in patriarchal societies, a woman’s feet have often been fetishised, seen as a symbol of grace or submission. In ancient China, feet were bound to achieve a fragile perfection, a symbol of feminine delicacy — beauty crafted through constraint, fragility transformed into attraction. Yet the appeal of the foot goes beyond cultural symbols. Feet are, at their essence, power; they root us to the ground, support us, grant us independence. But they also remind us of the primal, of a time when beauty was raw and untamed. Like other intimate parts of the body, the feet carry a scent that hints at an unguarded vulnerability; an unvarnished authenticity that creates true intimacy unbound by the polite sanitisations of daily life.

In the charm of a woman’s foot, we see the power and the slavery of femininity itself; where Beauty suppresses rather than enlivens. Women have been taught to view themselves as artworks, seeing themselves through the eyes of others. Men, conversely, as their possessors and artists. Such unequal power dynamic shaped the definition of beauty to singular feminine terms — gentleness, empathy, patience, tenderness. Beauty becomes the embodiment of the archetypes of the mother, the grandmother, and the nurturer.

Yet, true beauty is not a delicate flower swaying in the summer wind. It stirs and unsettles, flows and adapts, like the ever-shifting, fluid self — unwilling to be defined by femininity nor masculinity, or caught by the rapacious gaze of man. The way you accidentally glimpsed her wet, damp hair, in a late summer haze, as she surfed above the oceanic waves, with rigour and courage. And you return to your book, not letting that glimpse turn into a gaze. Because you know, that you have nodded to Beauty, as an inconsequential passer-by, while Beauty walked to their destination; where a glimpse is admiration and a gaze is gluttony.

#Philosophy #Psychology #Essay #Existentialism #Nonfiction