What are you wearing today?

[Mail-Moth]

CDGH+
Marvie
Lostandfound
Red wing

[Faust]

regal, master moth.

[docus]

[IMG][/IMG]

Wow, not a single comment for an original fencing??! Looking sharp Lost! Works well with the Rick trousers, great proportions.

[copacetic]

To all the nihilistic posters on the previous two pages who reject any objective measure of beauty: sell your entire wardrobe on classifieds, buy a new one at Wal-Mart, and GTFO.

[Sombre]

^Seriously? I think yours is the most dismissive comment of the entire debate. The position you dislike is not without merit, as any measure only has the qualities a specific group gives it, and those qualities change drastically across groups.

[ironman]

lost53, as the second owner of that fencing, i am glad that it has stayed in SZ hands :) it seems to fit you really well by the way!

Nicolas Andreas Taralis FW09 shawl collar suit
Givenchy SS09 overlap shirt
Givenchy FW09 bandage boots

[michael_kard]

To all the nihilistic posters on the previous two pages who reject any objective measure of beauty: sell your entire wardrobe on classifieds, buy a new one at Wal-Mart, and GTFO.

Just because there might be no objective measure of beauty that does not mean there is NO measure of beauty.

[zamb]

and cold blooded murderers who kill people without a cause.............there is no objective way of finding them guilty

[mrbeuys]

Ugliness is in a way superior to beauty because it lasts. (Serge Gainsbourg)

You are beautiful, no matter what they say. And words can't bring you down. (C. Aguilera)

[casem]

Can't we just agree that meaning is constructed from a social context (discursive formations, yo!) so of course nothing can be truly objective in that it can contain an inherent meaning that will be read similarly across cultures, time, space etc. Yet knowing this, understand that if we are to have any meaningful debate we must agree upon some shared meanings even for something as intangible as beauty. SZ is it's own community with a set of shared meanings and to waltz in and not recognize the context within which you are arguing is to bang your head against a wall. Resorting to "well everything is subjective" is a pretty unimaginative way of ending an argument you are losing.
(I'm so tired of Mr(s). Everything-is-subjective giving post-modernism a bad name, clearly I'm not on the side of Faust's modernist avenger )

Zamb, I'm not sure even murder is as clear cut as you make it. Our society sanctions murder by the state (death penalty) so even whether murder is good or bad seems to change depending on the time and place.

[Shucks]

^this is similar to the short ethics discussion/rant i had in the curiouos and unusual gift ideas thread, so i'll borrow some more arguments from boyd and throw them in here:

even if there are all sorts of different perspectives on goodness and beauty, i'd say there are a few quite interesting arguments why we should be moral realists (i.e. arguments why there may be universal truths for goodness, beauty...).

first of all, the theory of a universal beauty helps us in practice. it seems to work quite well. even if we as of yet do not have the tools to define it exactly, we can have an 'approximate' understanding of beauty (just as for the concept of 'porn', which i said earlier ).

our experiments in creating beauty on SZ seem to work well - we seem to get quite successful results when we treat beauty as an objective truth. i believe this is supported by the notion that just because we cannot measure something, it does not mean it does not exist (the theories of germs and electrons were developed and applied successfully before we could measure and prove them. both theories are now pretty much accepted by all as scientific reality...). applying the theory of an objective beauty seems on SZ to be more successful in practice than applying theory of the opposite (i.e. 'there is no universal beauty'), and it makes sense to say that this is so because the theory of an objective beauty approximates the truth more than the opposite theory does.

in fact, the more we keep applying the theory of an objective form of beauty in our experiments, the more accurate and successful these experiments become and hence also the closer we seem to get to being able to measure/understand beauty accurately or at least near-approximately.

and (although this last point doesn't prove that beauty is objective), accepting the theory of an objective beauty gives meaning to our experiments here. otherwise, why even bother posting in this thread?

[Heirloom]

the meaning of something visual is as objective as trying to communicate with a civilisation 100 000 years into the future telling them not to break into safety deposits of nuclear waste... maybe it's a bad parallell, but after i saw the documentary about this problem, i realised just how much our view of symbols and physical attributes changes depending on social context and tradition. of course it's impossible to completely abandon social context or tradition, but if we talk about TRUE objectivity, you'd have to look over a huge span of space AND time, including every civilisation in human history and beyond.

[lost53]

Ironman,
Looking impeccably elegant, but certainly not conservative, or contrived.
Perfect.

[zamb]

OK

I am proposing an objective definition of beauty

that which has the unusual quality of being pleasant, appealing and/ or desirable to the being who experiences the thing,
So there is beautiful act, there is a beautiful sound, there is a beautiful person..................and so on.
The commonality in all these things that make beauty objective is that they are pleasant, appealing and desirable.

One man might find something gross, while another find the same thing beautiful, but that doesn't change the definition (objective properties) of beauty. The difference between the two individual is that they have a different perspective, but what about the thing itself, outside of each mans perspective, does its qualities or properties change?

[Faust]

You are beautiful, no matter what they say. And words can't bring you down. (C. Aguilera)

'

Bwahahahahahaha. Made my day