Plague Journal, What if?
What if a butterfly thinks it is ugly?
I participated in a Socrates’ Cafe discussion last night that entertained this question. The discussion was wide ranging, stimulating, satisfying. There were seven of us in attendance using Go-To-Meeting for the video mediated discussion.
The question asks the reader to imagine oneself a butterfly. That alone is enough to ignite the imagination. Only in the concluding moments of our discussion, at the very end, did someone offer that an actual butterfly was unlikely, almost certain to be incapable of thinking anything of this nature. Perhaps that is the most obvious fact, that without language, butterflies and all of the insect world, and the mammalian world are unable to entertain beauty, and the obverse, ugliness. The butterfly is fortunate that it cannot wrestle with the binary difference, the distinction which we make between the beautiful, and what is ill formed, ugly.
The question yet intrigues me. Language: beauty, and the monstrous, unpleasing, etc are human categories, figures of speech, tools of communication. To be human is to be a competent user of language. Upon hearing a comment that an object is beautiful, I know what you mean.
It is worth noting that the term ugly and beauty do not have precise meanings. The meaning is context dependent. Context is not a simple matter either. Granted the immediate physical context, there is also a cultural context which has been inherited from generations gone on before. This is learned at about two or three years with the acquisition of language. Also, I am reminded of a literary context. What have I learned of beauty from reading Camus, or Dostoevsky, or Annie Dillard, or Wendell Berry? And what about theater and the cinema? The learning, the addition goes on, layer upon layer.
The question was asked is there anything in Nature which is not beautiful? We all answered by our silence. We couldn’t think of anything. This too is learned.
Enough talk about beauty. Language at it’s best functions as a pointer, like a finger pointing at the moon. Here are some photographs taken yesterday in the backyard garden. The final photo of the earth-witness-Buddha captures something profound. In the final analysis, the earth must bear witness to all of our meanings, to our judgments, our linguistic formulations.
4 thoughts on “Plague Journal, What if?”
I was the one who suggested that, at one time, I might have seen a dying, gnarled tree as ugly, but cannot anymore. I wonder how I might adjust my vision to make ugliness a truly misunderstood word in all contexts? Having said that, I immediately think of human inhumanity as ugly, and am not sure I ever want to see that as anything else.
There is evidence that beauty and its opposite are human judgment calls, and do not inhere in objects around us. Also it is interesting that there is not necessarily a moral component to the ability to affirm beauty. I agree that inhumanity is ugly, yet inhumanity can take subtle forms which we find hard to identify. Learning never ends.
“The purpose of life is to be happy”.
HH the XIV Dalai Lama.
It’s a good thing the Buddha left a set of instructions.
Blessings
FWIW, I have found the ‘nature’ of the butterfly beautiful. Consider; We see a cocoon, hanging by a single slender thread of silk, then being most vulnerable and from that cocooned state – probably not falling in the ‘beauty’ pronouncement by many – we witness one of natures countless gifts to the observant, as beauty struggles, emerges and takes wing to share it’s beauty with any who would behold.
Blessings