Philosophy

[Bombadillo]

John Locke is my favorite character. Anyway though, he really is. I assumed the creators of Lost picked that name deliberately, but now I don't really think he's similar to the real Locke. I digress.

I reread most of this thread just now and realized that there were lots of posts I meant to reply to! IDK why I didn't.

First of all, sorry for leaving you hanging, Rian.

Originally Posted by RÃ*an

and Bomb, could you please elaborate on your beauty statement?

What I said was: "Beauty is appreciation." That was to summarize an idea that I remember trying to verbalize, but no matter how I phrased it, it was too ambigious, so I tried an anecdote instead. Since it was part of a discussion on art and beauty, that anecdote emphasized that they are not the same, but that beauty cannot exist without art.

Someone proposed that beauty is inherent in everything, just waiting to be noticed by someone with just the right mindset to notice it. I disagree. I think that art is inherent in everything. To sumarize my views on art: Art is the potential to be interpreted as allegorical.

For example, I remember being very little, squatting in my backyard, holding a soft, bright green leaf that had somehow fallen from a tree despite its impressive health. I was admiring its flawlessness, and very glad to be able to examine it so closely without having it disintegrate in my hands like a dead leaf would. I never really noticed all those veins before, nor had I noticed that if you put the leaf between your eye and the sun, you could sort of see through it and see all the little veins that form patterns inside and don't even affect the surface. Then I started to think, "This leaf is just like life. These veins are just like all the turns we can take in our life, major, minor, good, or bad. These little boxes inside are just like all the different areas of life that we carry with us in memory. So different, and yet all parts of one leaf, that in people, make us unique."

BTW I swear I'm not making this one up. There would be no reason for that. I know it doesn't make sense that I remember this so vividly or that I would be thinking like this as a six-year old kid, but the important thing is that it seems poetic doesn't it? Because that leaf represented something to me that was more than just a literal leaf. It was art. It would have been art whether I noticed it or not, but, lucky for the both of us, I did notice it, and I found it beautiful. That's what I mean. Things are beautiful when someone recognizes the art in them.

The most similar famous philosophical statement that I'm familiar with would be that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." (Anybody know who said that?) I guess I agree with that, but I wanted to be more specific.