Beauty is deep

I probably care too much about physical appearance.

Still I think beauty is profound. One reason is that humans seem instinctively to derive from physical reality, including physical beauty, deeper meaning.

Deeper concepts are based on physical concepts

We see this in so much of our language. Many, maybe most, of our common literal and physical concepts have figurative meaning.

Temperature—a person can be psychologically warm, cold, cool. Distance and direction—forward thinking, backward thinking. People can be open to new ideas or closed to them. Or narrow-minded. Color signifies emotion, like if you’re feeling blue. If you’re a square you’re conventional, if you’re edgy you may be unconventional, if you’re well-rounded you could be somewhere in between. Difficult challenges are steep, easy tasks go smoothly—we could go on and on. So many physical descriptors possess metaphorical meaning.

We may be wired to infer deeper meaning from literal phenomena.

This process seems mostly subconscious. So it’s not like we’re constantly thinking, “My refrigerator is composed of elongated straight Dramatic lines and so symbolizes power and the inherent drive of all humans to assert themselves, and now I’m sitting on my couch which with its blunt Natural and rounded Romantic shapes symbolizes both carefreeness and passion, and I’m now talking to my husband whose Natural Classic Ingenue face symbolizes kindness, balance, and friendliness—” no one is doing this on a conscious level. But subconsciously? Maybe. Especially given that our language, as described above, constantly conflates the figurative and the literal.

Style essence theory: literal made figurative

Because humans seem wired to use literal qualities to depict figurative qualities, style essence analysis—which detects figurative meaning in the literal shapes of faces—can help us understand how this process applies to human faces. By learning about style essence theory, we may become more aware of our biases toward or against certain essences or people. We may also become more aware of the unique literal and conceputal beauty of all the essences.

So the idea that physical appearance, or caring about physical appearance, is shallow doesn’t seem reconcilable with the fact that so much of our language, the basis for how we think, relies on our understanding of the physical world in order to describe more complex, meaningful concepts. It’s not that we abandon the physical world and move on to deeper concepts; instead we rely on our continued knowledge of the properties of materiality in order to understand deeper concepts. I don’t think you can fully separate the physical from the abstract, the surface from the depth. We need the former to understand the latter. We need the former for the latter to exist.

Emotions are deep

Even without this analytical perspective, beauty is still profound. Profound for how it affects us emotionally, even when we have no deeper understanding of why or how the surface is so affecting. Beauty elicits an immediate and visceral reaction, bypassing the need for conscious analysis.

Some people have neuropsychological disorders where they’re unable to experience much emotion. These disorders are devastating. This is because emotions are critical for motivation, decision-making, social connection, and engagement with life. Emotions signal what we value and what we need for survival and wellbeing.

So the intense emotional response that beauty evokes is significant on its own, even when we don’t know what the surface symbolizes. A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. Though roses also symbolize passionate Romantic beauty (maybe with a sharp Dramatic stem). So a rose is both a rose and a symbol. But sometimes it can just be a rose, and still be profound.