Beauty Revisited :: Japan Culture Greece Essays

"When a man has gone deep enough in the lore of love and turned his attention to things of beauty in their due order,... there shall dawn upon his eyes a vision of surpassing beauty, for whose sake he endured all his former toils; a beauty which, in the first place, is eternal, without beginning and without end, unbegotten and without decay; and secondly, is not beautiful at one time or one place or from one point of view and then ugly, as if its beauty depended upon the beholders. Nor again will that beauty to his eyes take on the likeness of a face or hands or any fleshy part, nor of speech or learning, nor will it have its being in any other creature but will have its simple and essential being ever one within itself. ..." -plato "So when any one climbs the ladder of true love in this world till he catch a glimpse of that other beauty, he has almost attained that goal. And this is the true discipline of loving or being loved: that a man begin with the beauties of this world and use them as stepping stones for an unceasing journey to that other beauty, going from one to two and from two to all, and from beautiful creatures to beautiful lives, and from beautiful lives to beautiful truths, and from beautiful truths attaining finally to nothing less than the true knowledge of Beauty itself, and so at last what Beauty is." -Plato What is art? Who cares of beauty? What really goes on when I make art. Why do I love art? Do I feel the essence of this journey which Plato speaks of? Beauty, yes, that is the focus of my life,... beauty. It sounds fantastic, but it may be true. by looking at Platonic and Japanese ideals of aesthetic beauty, I will show that art is all about a feeling, a communion with that "simple and essential being, ever one within itself." It is an ongoing dialogue with the mystery of sentient, hard to discern emotions. I'm wary to say that my artistic endeavors are aimed towards beauty, maybe skill, luck, or ingenuity. This essay is more about the glue which bind one artistic experience to another, an irrational and ever-present push towards the unmade. Plato's basic philosophy centers around the "Allegory of the Cave," which, distilled, points out that for man to think that he may know the whole truth, end all and be all in itself, is for him to declare the largess of his own ego.