In an advanced conversational Spanish class, we students were asked to draft a response to the following quote. For simplicity purposes, this post is the English translation.
"We do not know what it is, perhaps we will never know; but that beauty is something that exists..." - José Echegaray (1903)
Echegaray says that we do not know what beauty is; I disagree with this. We do know what beauty is, at least for ourselves. They may be right if we try to guess what others view as beauty; in those cases, we do not know what it is. In addition, beauty is a construct we as humans created. We put a name on the spectrum of emotions and thoughts various encounters create within us, therefore we do know what beauty is because we created it.
I know that beauty exists because it is a construct created by humans, so at the very least, it exists to us. I can find it in nature, artistic expression, fond memories, myself, and creation in general. There are some ugly things too, but overall life in itself is beautiful. It is difficult to define beauty because it is a construct encompassing a range of emotions and thoughts. The encounters that inspire these emotions and thoughts are different for every person, and thus make a standard definition of beauty impossible to keep accurate. Yes, different definitions of beauty can exist. Every person is unique. This means that every individual has a unique perception which leads us back to beauty having a slightly different meaning to every person. It’s fair, then, to have no set definition of beauty.
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