Quest For Beauty Research Articles

Book review of A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

《A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design 》is a popular science book authored by Frank Wilczek, a Nobel Laureate in Physics, . The book, through a clear and compelling narration and ten core concepts, elucidates the fundamental principles of physics, covering the topics on time and space, matter and force, quantum mechanics, and the evolution of the universe. In his book, Wilczek not only shared profound scientific insights but also explored the relationship between science and philosophy, emphasizing the importance of scientific exploration and the value of the scientific spirit. This book serves not only as an informative popular science reading, but also as an academically stimulating work that inspires thoughtful reflection. It guides the readers to examine the real world from a novel perspective, fostering deep contemplation on science, the universe, and humanity itself. By reading this book, readers can acquire a wealth of knowledge, appreciate the charm and power of science, and experience the joy of scientific exploration while gaining valuable wisdom and enlightment.

Fibration symmetry-breaking supports functional transitions in a brain network engaged in language.

In his book 'A Beautiful Question' 1, physicist Frank Wilczek argues that symmetry is 'nature's deep design,' governing the behavior of the universe, from the smallest particles to the largest structures 1-4. While symmetry is a cornerstone of physics, it has not yet been found widespread applicability to describe biological systems 5, particularly the human brain. In this context, we study the human brain network engaged in language and explore the relationship between the structural connectivity (connectome or structural network) and the emergent synchronization of the mesoscopic regions of interest (functional network). We explain this relationship through a different kind of symmetry than physical symmetry, derived from the categorical notion of Grothendieck fibrations 6. This introduces a new understanding of the human brain by proposing a local symmetry theory of the connectome, which accounts for how the structure of the brain's network determines its coherent activity. Among the allowed patterns of structural connectivity, synchronization elicits different symmetry subsets according to the functional engagement of the brain. We show that the resting state is a particular realization of the cerebral synchronization pattern characterized by a fibration symmetry that is broken 7 in the transition from rest to language. Our findings suggest that the brain's network symmetry at the local level determines its coherent function, and we can understand this relationship from theoretical principles.

The Question of Beauty and the Aesthetic Value of the Image of the Mother of God in Pastoral Care and Catechesis

Ancient philosophers attached great importance to the ideals of unity, truth, goodness, and beauty as the path to the greatest good. Beauty expressed through works of art can open the eyes of the mind and heart and direct the human spirit to transcendence. The beauty of art awakens inner emotionality, evokes elation in silence, and leads to “coming out of oneself”. The concept of beauty is inextricably linked to Catholic theology and preaching. Beautiful sacred images were a source of theological messages, intercession, and entry into the transcendental world. Medieval Gothic cathedrals had images on the walls as a basic tool of catechesis. Even in today’s teaching of young people, images play a crucial role. The world of symbols enables Christians to connect everyday life experiences with theological messages. The image of the Virgin Mary is the best example of recognizing personal life situations, with the story of a mother who loved her child, accepted the suffering and death of her own son, and together with St. Joseph formed a holy family, which is the image of an imperfect family in which each person recognizes himself. All these aspects of the life of the Virgin Mary could form the basic concepts of the Christian understanding of beauty. In modern thought, the concept of beauty is understood quite narrowly (we are talking about narrowing the meaning of the concept of beauty). In the first part of this paper, we focus on the philosophical concept of beauty with a brief historical overview, then we point out the difference between transcendental beauty and aesthetic beauty. Beauty appeals to the human being and opens the heart to the transcendent, to God, who is the source and fullness of beauty, beauty itself. The originality of the article is in its presentation of the understanding of the Christian concept of beauty through the figure and image of Mary, the Mother of God. The experience of the beauty of Mary and Mary’s life story enables the believer to have a different perspective on the perception of his own life and thereby opens him to the transcendent, to a personal relationship with God, who is eternal Beauty.

What’s new for the clinician – summaries of recently published papers (March 2023)

In a world of increasing emphasis on aesthetics and beauty, the tooth form, colour and appearance has taken on significant importance in the overall makeover that many patients seek as part of their quest for beauty and youthfulness. Common concerns among many patients relate to the appearance and colour of their teeth. This dissatisfaction has led to an increased desire for treatments that improve dental aesthetics, including tooth bleaching, which is a conservative and viable option for attaining a patient’s desired smile when tooth integrity is acceptable.1

Sex and design in our evolutionary cousins: The perception of beauty in nature

Taking an evolutionary approach to the question of beauty, we discuss the expression and perception of sexual beauty across the animal kingdom. Animals experience beauty in their brains, and animal brains are tuned to features of the environment most relevant to their survival. Over evolutionary time, sexually reproducing animals have exploited that tuning to maximize their attractiveness to the opposite sex, often leading to extreme courtship traits and behaviors. These are the traits of sexual beauty. Combining modern principles of neuroscience and neuroaesthetics with established principles of evolutionary biology, we aim to understand the biological basis and evolution of beauty in all animals, including ourselves.

Song of the Andoumboulou: 300

Song of the Andoumboulou: 300

About the Cover

About the Cover Gina Athena Ulysse (bio) About the Cover: "Ola Thunder"1 by Gina Athena Ulysse 2019 Kwi and digital photograph © 2019 by Gina Athena Ulysse. Permission to reprint may be obtained only from the artist. Artist Statement What if our point of departure in encounters with difference stemmed not from domination, but an impulse of radical vulnerability? What would we turn to if we did not cling to power? Would we recognize and comprehend that difference as an opening? Expansive. Limitless. Extremities. Revelation. A space to meditatively confront and embrace our socially limited imagination? Would we become more aware of our sensibilities … feel a multitude of sentiments, feel that, as Toni Cade Bambara asserts, "the revolution begins with the self … in the self". Deference. Humility. Surrender. Grace. Can these sentiments be reflected? What reflects them? "Ola Thunder" was a central piece in An Equitable Human Assertion, a site-specific installation-performance rasanblaj (a gathering) of ideas, things, people and spirits exhibited in Australia at the Biennale of Sydney in 2020. Variations of the primary materials in this work are found all over the world. The Kwi, made from the kalbas or calabash tree (Crescentia Cujete), are the simple, sacred and profane holder of rasanblaj. These gourds are known for their multifunctionality and significations, routinely used as containers for eating and storage, carvings, musical instruments, and as sacred objects. In this rasanblaj, the Kwi are and have become living things—primordial beings possessing aesthetics in their myriad forms, patina, textures, and vibrations. Reflected in the Kwi and other materials of this piece (cowries, kindling, threads, ochre, etc.) is the ancestral imperative in Afro-diasporic traditions and found referents in the long history of Indigenous Australian artistic expression. This work is an assertion of shared attachment to the land, and comparability in experiences of self-determination in the persistent shadow of colonialism, displacement, and fracture. My aim is a movement toward wholeness and a quest for beauty in nature, despite our human tendency to denigrate the earth and each other. With their inherent force, the Kwi create space inviting possibilities for new encounters, however ephemeral. [End Page iii] Gina Athena Ulysse Gina Athena Ulysse is a Haitian-American feminist artist-scholar and Professor of Feminist Studies at UCSC Her research is concerned with the expression and representation of the dailyness of Black diasporic conditions, her rasanblaj approach to her art and writing practice entails ongoing crossings and dialogues in the arts, humanities, and the social sciences. Her writing has also been published in Feminist Studies, Journal of Haitian Studies, InterimPoetics, Kerb: Journal of Landscape Architecture, Gastronomica, Third Text, Transition as well as in art catalogs and other venues. She was the invited editor of "Caribbean Rasanblaj" (2017), a double issue of e-misférica, journal of the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics at NYU. In 2020, she was an invited artist to the Biennale of Sydney, Australia. Over the years, she has been invited to perform at The British Museum, Gorki Theatre, LaMaMa, Marcus Garvey Liberty Hall, and MoMA Salon. Notes 1. This piece was inspired by the fierce little human created by two of my former students. ________ Click for larger view View full resolution Copyright © 2022 Feminist Formations

My Mother's Facelift

My Mother's Facelift

Toward a Theory of Cultural Revolution

Before his complex involvement in the events of the Cultural Revolution, Yao Wenyuan emerged as a central figure in wide-ranging theoretical debates around questions of beauty under the aegis of the Aesthetics Debate of the 1950s and ’60s. This debate provided the conditions for a series of engagements on the part of Chinese and Soviet aesthetic theorists with the conceptual vocabulary of the “early Marx,” preceding the more famous embrace of humanist Marxist discourse in the 1980s. This article proposes to take Yao seriously as a theorist of an anti-humanist proletarian aesthetics, whose thought seeks to pose the relations between labor and aesthetics in terms strictly opposed to the philosophical figure of the human that emerged in the thought of more prominent figures such as Li Zehou. It does so by tracing Yao’s conception of aesthetics as a site of class struggle at the level of sensorial experience, in terms that suspended any attempt to articulate a universalist aesthetic according to humanist tropes of creative labor. The depth of Yao’s aesthetics not only demonstrates the theoretical underpinnings of the Cultural Revolution, but so too does it underscore the persistence of the problems of humanism and anti-humanism in engagements with Marxist thought.

Music and Justice

Although aesthetics began with an interest in a teleological order, the classical question was largely disparaged and rejected in mainstream academic circles by the twentieth century. The two dogmas of musical modernism were the presumption of formalism and the assertion of aestheticism. Historically, philosophers defending the objectivity of aesthetic value focused on the question of Beauty per se. But what if beauty is descriptive of something else? Our conviction of justice runs deeper than convictions of beauty. This essay explores the significance of human anticipation concerning justice and how moral conviction relates to music as an encounter with teleological convictions. Music is fundamentally an individualized philosophical experience engaging the question of order, based upon a universal teleological presupposition. We do not find the arts to be meaningful because we believe them to be beautiful; we ascribe beauty to that which we find to be deeply meaningful--a way-it-should-be.

Between Ephemerality and Eternality

The question of beauty continues to engage humans, especially intellectuals, who inquire into its quintessence and the sources from which it derives. Does beauty consist in attaining geometric harmony of structure and shape, or in achieving numerical proportion in audio and visual? Or, does beauty transcend all that, to crystalize into an absolute essence that conforms to high values as justice, truth, and goodness? How long does beauty last? Does it terminate at the terrestrial realm or transcend to the celestial? What kind of beauty is essential for the attainment of transcendence and eschatological happiness? Beauty is two-sided, one is transient, the other eternal. This essay examines the concept of beauty in Arabic poetical compositions of Muslim mystics, and explores how they construe beauty and identify its locus vis-à-vis transcendence between ephemerality and eternality as seen in the poems by Ibn al-Farîd and al-Tilimsânî. The former perceives God’s name and attributes as embodiment of absolute beauty, and everything in the universe, as manifestations of the beauty, while the latter argues that every beauty in the universe derives from God’s absolute beauty.

Making Things Right: New Zealand industrial design pioneer Peter Haythornthwaite, the quest for beauty and putting the user first

In 2018, interviewing Peter Haythornthwaite for a small contribution to the book, ‘Design Generation’1 (by Michael Smythe; published in support of an Objectspace exhibition of the industrial designer’s work), the designer ventured on to the subject of beauty and its importance to his design process. It seems fitting to start here with that idea, because while beauty’s role in design is little discussed today, Haythornthwaite saw how objects of beauty make everyday use a delight.

An Information Theory Approach to Aesthetic Assessment of Visual Patterns.

The question of beauty has inspired philosophers and scientists for centuries. Today, the study of aesthetics is an active research topic in fields as diverse as computer science, neuroscience, and psychology. Measuring the aesthetic appeal of images is beneficial for many applications. In this paper, we will study the aesthetic assessment of simple visual patterns. The proposed approach suggests that aesthetically appealing patterns are more likely to deliver a higher amount of information over multiple levels in comparison with less aesthetically appealing patterns when the same amount of energy is used. The proposed approach is evaluated using two datasets; the results show that the proposed approach is more accurate in classifying aesthetically appealing patterns compared to some related approaches that use different complexity measures.

Rediscovering the Aesthetic Argument

The aesthetic argument for the existence of God is sometimes seen as a weaker younger cousin to the more powerful moral argument, but it may in fact be the more formidable of the two. The phenomenological aesthetic argument, presented here, brackets the question of beauty’s objectivity. It argues that various aspects of the raw data of the human aesthetic sense—specifically, our perceptions of human, natural, artistic, and abstract beauty—are highly unlikely to have developed on naturalism but are unsurprising given theism. These facets of aesthetic experience therefore ground a substantial argument against the merely Darwinian paradigm.

“I want to look as if I am my child’s big sister”: Self-satisfaction and the yummy mummy in Taiwan

This paper explores the trend of stay-fit maternity in Taiwan and extends the feminist analysis of the yummy mummy under neoliberalism to a non-Western context. Drawing insight from Foucault’s critique of the theory of human capital and his emphasis on “psychic return,” it examines a process of continuous interaction between outer appearance and the inner world of these Taiwanese women during and after pregnancy. Thus, by using the perspective of the flux of psychic return in order to understand these women’s continuous aesthetic labour, I emphasize the importance of self-satisfaction as a determinant gain of the valorization of appearance in this process of maximizing self-appreciation and diminishing self-depreciation. I underline not only the importance of the functioning of an economy of affects which supports and overdetermines their beauty practices but also, in some circumstances, that the immaterial return in the quest for beauty takes priority over material earnings and the influences of social pressures. As well, my analysis finds complex and overlapping relations between self-satisfaction and neoliberal rationality such that self-appreciation constitutes the pleasure of embodying a recognized ideal of the maternal, the joy of overcoming undisciplined flesh, and the confidence-enhancement of being mistakenly seen as a young girl.

Making Space

In this interview, artist and scholar Deborah Willis describes the work of excavating and organizing the history of Black photography. Willis’s groundbreaking scholarship helped to formally establish an archive of Black visual practice before libraries and cultural institutions began to purposely catalogue such materials. Across projects, she has engaged questions of beauty, citizenship, Black culture, and family history from the nineteenth century to the present by closely examining the camera practices of legendary photographers and the cultural contexts surrounding iconic images. In this interview, Willis describes her research as a student relying on periodical records as well as on the support of Black artists such as Roy DeCarava, Carrie Mae Weems, Gordon Parks, and James VanDerZee. This conversation with the author intertwines Willis’s personal history and the history of creating a visual archive to offer a look back and a look forward at the practice of Black photography.

#MeToo and the Estrangement of Beauty-and-the-Beast Narratives

How might the #MeToo movement be understood as estranging? The essay explores several possibilities related to the Beauty and the Beast myth, involving estranging male privilege (the right to pursue women for sex) and female privilege (the traditional helplessness that makes a woman depend on a man for protection), before examining an art project launched by Russian artist Khasan Bakhayev estranging both modern fashion canons of and the bestiality of Stalin's purges in the 1930s. The essay explores the tensions between Bakhayev's quest for beauty (aesthetics as analgesia) and the empathic power of art to disrupt and disturb (estrangement).

Review: Quest for Beauty: The Architecture, Landscapes, and Collections of John Yeon

Quest for Beauty: The Architecture, Landscapes, and Collections of John Yeon Portland Art Museum, Oregon 13 May–3 September 2017 It was the compelling power of towering snowcapped mountains, deep forests, and sharp peaks plunging precipitously into the Pacific Ocean that served as the driving force of John Yeon's life. Born in 1910, he grew up in the shadow of an ambitious father who began as a logger, rose to become a leading figure in Portland, Oregon, and in 1913 supervised the construction of the state's first paved highway along the Columbia Gorge, the nation's first scenic route. Equally important was Yeon's mother, whose pioneering family began as homesteaders in Portland in the 1850s and through whom her son acquired an appreciation of the arts. Thus early on Yeon was drawn to the vast scale and powerful pull of the natural beauty of untouched wilderness—the rugged Oregon coastline, the deep Columbia Gorge with its powerful river, the flora and fauna of the forest—but also to the small scale and refinement of fine art. Having grown up in privileged circumstances and inherited wealth, Yeon turned to architecture in his late teens. He worked summers in the offices of A. E. Doyle, Portland's largest and most successful architectural firm, whose practice followed the classicizing tradition of McKim, Mead & White, and in the office of the Beaux-Arts–trained architect Herman Brookman. Granted access to their extensive libraries of architectural books, Yeon acquired a knowledge of and taste for European traditions at once Palladian and English picturesque. …

Solace: The Art of Asking the Beautiful Question (102)

Solace: The Art of Asking the Beautiful Question (102)

Defining Beauty: The Paterian Yeats

This essay contends that W.B. Yeats’s quest for beauty in art has far more in common with Walter Pater’s aesthetic views than is generally acknowledged. This article particularly focuses on Greek art, which provided both writers with paradigms with which to articulate their aesthetic theories. Yeats made ample use of Pater’s distinction between Ionian and Dorian art, and this opposition may in fact lie at the root of Yeats’s esoteric system set down in A Vision and based upon two contrary types of individuals, civilizations, and religions. The iconic power of art as a magical transformer of reality is asserted by both Pater and Yeats, and it is perhaps only in the question of the finality of art for Yeats, in the eschatological and magical dimension he attributed to it, that his path diverged from Pater.