What follows is my personal opinion. And so it is a relative quest for the existence of absolutes, not an absolute quest. I have used female beauty just as an example. Probably this concept can be extended to other similar cases.
One of the questions that has interested me a lot is whether there is any absolute in the matter of female beauty, in the sense that if a female looks like this and this, she is beautiful, else not.
I could think of two possibilities in this. One is that there is an absolute definition for beauty and that across countries, cultures and people there is a variation, but still something general can be seen and that this is absolute. The other possibility is that there is no such absolute and this is just one way of thinking we have got used to and it could have been that things were totally different and the very fact that things do change across time and geography is proof of this.
I personally do not think that the former is true. Not because it varies with time and space because even after such a variance some general factors can be extracted here. But because I see no rationality in a female having particular characteristics being called beautiful and some other not. Rationally it could have been either way.
But then what do I achieve from thinking so? That it just happened that I learned such and such is beautiful and such and such not. I can see through the futility of this and see the conditioning that my brain has been put through due to a variety of factors and thus learn not to consider any particular female as more beautiful than another.
But then does it come naturally to me? It might be true that it was just a learning (that I now see as false) that has lead me to thinking this female is beautiful but not that. So can I now learn that it is not so and that it is just a conditioning and come out of it? I tried and failed. I still see this female as beautiful and that as not. And it still affects me. So I accept that it is my nature. So now do I go against my nature to satisfy my desire to be rational. Or do I remain natural and forgo rationality? Rational thinking doesn’t come naturally to me, atleast in this context. Is it just because I need to learn to think rationally? If that is not possible, then probably, I think, I better remain natural rather than rational and say “No. This female is beautiful while that female is not”. Monday, July 22, 2002
