the Failure of Intention

[ahhpeanutbutter]

Nature does not intend to be beautiful. The animals plants and landscapes that we enjoy were the result of random geological, meterological, and boilogical processes. A grove of old growth ceder is pleasing to eye, but you cannot ascribe any intention for it to be that way outside of a trees biological imparative to grow tall and large to reach as

Comments

[pollydacron]

beautifully put. perhaps when i am more awake i will write a more clever response, or perhaps not. we'll see.
i think spectre is my favourite unused lexical variable song, of the ones i've heard. there's just something really fucking good about it.

[pollydacron]

with the flowering plants argument though, they are eye catching for a functional reason, not just to exist as art. and the aspects that animals and humans find aesthetically pleasing in their potential mates generally are so because they represent something which is otherwise desirable (physical strength, health, ability to bear children etc.) and the argument could be made that they are not attractive for the sake of being attractive, but that they are attractive because it is good for the continuation of the species. i personally tend to judge a pontential "mate" more by whether they are intelligent and interesting more than if they are just pretty to look at. but perhaps i am in the minority.

[soggyroach]

The fact that "beauty" is completely subjective should be enough to relegate it to a category of "things originating within the mind." Nature is beautiful because we percieve it that way, and because we are and have always been a part of it.

[pollydacron]

i think i had something like this in my brain and couldn't devise how to articulate it.

[ahhpeanutbutter]

Beauty isn't completely subjective. There seems to be a near universal attraction of people to semetrical and ordered forms, which probably arose out various selective pressures that Mike (xaositect) mentioned. My point was not about the realitivity of beauty, but the pointlessness of it in a teleogical sense. Meaning that beauty in the natural world has no higher purpose other than an outgrowth of unconconcious processes.

[dennysfan982644]

Humans are like God with the causal arrow reversed.

[violet_soda]

The old saying "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" might apply here. And accuounting for slight variences in taste and/or prefrences it seems like there is a cross-cultural preception of what is aesteticaly pleasing. For instance a Swiss girl who has never seen Mt. Rainer looks over the alps and marvels at their vast beauty, the same as I did on my first trip to Mt. St. Helens. Or a Chinese boy looks up at the stars on the same night as a boy in Russia and both think they are the most amazing sight they have ever beheld. Before there were cities and man imposed his will over the landscape, we had only nature to marvel at, thus establishing a somewhat universal point of refrence