What is beauty?
Beauty is a force of nature that disciplines beings with the capacity to express it toward its own actualization. In other words, it is the feeling we experience when we witness perfection.
It is present in the arts, but it is also found in engineering, science, finance, and violence.
Beauty is objective. The pleasure or displeasure of witnessing beauty is irrelevant. These qualifiers do not negate the condition that there is a right and a wrong way for the piece to more itself in form. Or, for a graph to be organized, a stock portfolio to be hedged, or a left hook to be torqued.
The experience of beauty, like the experience of odor, is indicative of reality’s noumenonic amness; these experiences act as canaries in a coal mine to those things in and of themselves. Therefore, expressing beauty, and its wisdom of reality, is not merely worth our while, it is an empyrean act.
The meta-purpose of art is not to gain personal pleasure or communal good from engaging in meta-aesthetics but to allow beauty to be actualized and expand its scope and its insights. In other words, the meta-purpose of art is to be a vessel for the entelechy of beauty.
How can beauty be more than eyes and beholders? Because things emerge and things persist regardless of voyeurs. For example, “Sandbars in a river and the stream itself collaborate in persisting as themselves” (Marilynne Robinson Grace & Beauty).
However, even in the exquisitely designed machinery of torture, beauty is at work. The aesthetic archetype should not always gravitate toward actualization.
Ironically enough, beauty is blind. Its disposition is purely to perfect its insistence. Ethics are how we decide whether or not to be disciplined by beauty or let beauty’s daemons die in our minds without manifestation.