Article. Is beauty fundamental?

       Is beauty fundamental?    

We live in the society of the spectacle, and in it we usually value what appears more than what it really is. Thus, we identify and reduce beauty to a specific body aesthetic, based on a pattern, a model to which we should aspire and consume. The imposition of this model generates an obsession for those who want to fit in, and a source of profits for those who provide it. There is a market play, of consumption, underlying this beauty proposal. The interests are not in the order of concern for the person's well-being and happiness. The fitness, diet, cosmetics, plastic surgery industry invests heavily in the human desire to become desirable through the visual.

There are many promises they make, for the eternalization of youth, notably for the female body. In this (un) measure of the market, we are not the ones who decide whether we are beautiful, how we will be beautiful, but the people, those who watch us or devour us with their eyes, or the market, always with an eye on profit.

To become "desirable" to attract the eye of the other desiring person, you invest a lot, consume a lot of time and money. It consumes, on a large scale, the products of this programmed, thought-out aesthetic industry, which can produce interesting effects, but often without soul and even inconsequential. Many anorexic and bulimic people are daughters of the tyrannical processes of “becoming beautiful”.

Sometimes they are beauty projects that reach health, make you sick. Undoubtedly, there is a feminine enjoyment in seducing the body, as there is a masculine enjoyment in looking, seeing, consuming the aesthetics that a body reveals. There is a kind of convergence in this “perverse enjoyment” of women showing and men seeing. However, true attraction occurs when the aesthetic appearance reveals the inner person that one is; when external beauty is a confirmation of internal identity, of the subjective experience of feeling beautiful.

Like other dimensions of the human, beauty is not something merely external, glued to the real of the body, inscription, form or detail. Beauty brings together aspects from outside and inside the subject. It is set, and it is imperceptible detail. It is visual, and it is an aura that overlaps the body. It is something that proceeds from a point, and travels through relational interactions. The aesthetics that enchants, has a soul, is not a shell, is not a periphery, piece or pattern. It brings together soul and body, in the experience of feeling good about yourself and in front of the other. Blaise de Pascal makes us reflect: “Whoever loves someone because of his beauty will love him? No, because smallpox, which will kill beauty without killing the person, will make him stop loving ... Therefore, you never love anyone, but only qualities ”.

If we build an inner beauty, the other can love us for that indestructible portion that overflows our being. In this dimension, we could also begin to experience the fortune of being men and women, both consented objects of each other's desire and pleasure, in a reciprocity of enchantments and permissions, where simplicity, aesthetics and ethics make the joy of relationships.