Blog #16 (Outline)

Thesis: Beauty has an infinite number of interpretations and perceptions. Yet, with all these different views, beauty has the same potency. This potency can result in change of all forms.

• Standards of beauty vary from culture to culture and continent to continent.
• “When it comes to physical beauty this framework expresses itself in the assumption that Western standards of beauty are peculiar artificialities, with no grounding in human nature.”
• Standards of beauty tend to be intensely superficial.
• Beauty is both objective and subjective.
• Schiller’s understanding of beauty is that what is considered beautiful may only be determined as such by the one perceiving it.
• “The only popular thought about beauty today, the one that has the widest currency in the world, is the idea that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.” (Armstrong 1).
• Schiller details two powerful psychological drives; the sense drive desires “immediate gratification” while the form drive desires a sense of constancy.
• Beauty is not something that can be exclusively relegated to someone of a higher class or status.
• Beauty knows no class, status, racial, or boundaries of any sort.
• Large-scale social change will unfortunately not be achieved until society as a whole as learned to appreciate beauty and each other.
• There is a sense of beauty in all of us that if appreciated, can change society as a whole for the better.
• My personal interpretation of the object of beauty is anything that elicits a particularly strong emotion but is also balanced by nature.
• American mainstream society has a superficial interpretation of the object of beauty.
• My definition of beauty is much deeper than the definition held by mainstream American society as I have learned to recognize beauty by nature, not by superficial standards.
• As previously stated, the object of beauty is completely open to various forms interpretation.