What is beauty, anyway?

Greetings,

Beautiful people with free minds and free consciences.

Continuing to look through the mirror of art…

What appears to us today in the mirror of art is; beauty…

Dear reader, you are naturally asking within yourself, or murmuring, or shouting at the top of your lungs: Is there anything beautiful left? What kind of beauty is this, professor…

What kind of beauty could it be, dear reader? Of course, it is your own beauty.

Are you now worrying that Professor Abidin is making fun of us?

I say let us talk about the beautiful, the science of the beautiful—that is, all of our stories, and thus your beauty—so that we may all become more beautiful together.

Are you asking where this story of beauty came from? Where else would it come from, dear reader, but from the pragmatic nature of us humans? Have you ever seen a human being observe, ponder, or practice something that would be of no use to them?

I can swear that I have never seen it…

Then let us go back to the very beginning of the story and see what happened, what really happened…

Have you ever thought about it?

Before our ancestors saw their own faces in still waters, they saw the faces and physical presence of their peers. Seeing oneself in another, how strange, isn't it? I wonder if they thought about their own ontology through what they saw in someone else…

I know these are strange questions, but it feels like they must be asked, for the sake of a little beauty for our minds…

Before you say it, I will cut it short and get to the point, sir.

Are you asking what happened after they saw it? Beauty became the conceptualization of visually encoding everything they saw in each other in terms of ensuring the most powerful continuation of biological evolutionary development. Evolutionary biology commands it so. My mind agrees with this theory, but of course, only up to a point. If you ask up to what point my mind agrees, let me tell you right away so I do not leave you in suspense: until human communities reached the stage of creating culture.

That is to say, evolutionary biology before culture, and cultural anthropology after.

Let us continue with the evolutionary biological theory where we left off, sir. Men and women looked at each other. Why did they look at each other? Why indeed, sir. Of course, they looked to see if they were healthy, to try to understand if there would be any problems regarding reproduction and fertility.

Everything they saw on the face and body in terms of the continuation of the species and lineage turned into symbolic indicators that needed to be deciphered within themselves. In terms of the female gender or the male gender, perhaps due to an implicit existential agreement that has continued de facto throughout human history without being written down, for the continuation of genetically strong lineages, men and women made the harmonious wholeness they saw in each other—in the context of symmetry and proportionality—a prerequisite for mating.

In other words, the symmetry and proportion we seek in the face specifically, and in the body as a whole, became not a subject of beauty, but criteria for ensuring the continuation of healthy generations. But when cultures emerged, symmetry and proportionality within wholeness acted as the midwife for the technical emergence of the concept of beauty.

So, what was symmetry and proportion from an evolutionary biological perspective?

Symmetry: Perfect symmetry in the face and body indicates that the organism is genetically strong during the growth process and resistant to parasites/diseases.

Waist-to-Hip Ratio: The ideal waist-to-hip ratio in women is directly linked to high fertility and hormonal health.

Average Facial Features: Having facial features close to the population average rather than extreme ends (the averaging effect) points to the most "safe" and healthy gene pool evolutionarily.

What we exalt as beauty today was a discovery process that our male and female ancestors carried out within the evolutionary flow to ensure the existence of genetically robust generations.

Are you saying, "One way or another, Professor Abidin, while you were going to tell us about beauty in the mirror of art, did you explain evolutionary biology?"

Dear reader, we explained it, but did we do a bad job? We did well. We did very well.

Remember that everything in the Universe is connected, and within this connectivity, humanity and its historical flow are intertwined.

Therefore, we will also talk about beauty from a cultural and artistic perspective in this chain of connectivity, do not worry, sir.

Moreover, unraveling connections is also enjoyable and engages you with the cognitive potential that comes through your evolutionary heritage; how happy are those who say, "I can think."

Beautiful people, dear readers, now think about it until the next article: what is beauty?

If we have confused you a little, please forgive us.

Until our next meeting, goodbye for now; now and always, breathe with art, stay with art.