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In reply to the discussion: The wild card in Venezuela: armed Chavistas [View all]JackRiddler
(24,979 posts)Even if they're in the middle of an unrelated monster thread.
Thank you. This is what makes Internet and sometimes DU special.
It's OP worthy and I may repost it elsewhere, with your permission. Why don't we have more genuinely philosophical and thought-provoking threads? You should do that.
I think the general thought is true and I like your phrasing, that the appreciation for aesthetic beauty acts as a form of super-cognition, or intuition. What we feel as beautiful points us to what's actually good, although given all our forms of camouflage, meaning both in nature and even more so among the humans, it would be dangerous as an ironclad rule. Because of this natural tendency for aesthetic beauty to point us to the good, which I think you have correctly identified, beauty is also useful for deception, as seems to have always been understood by actors, artists, church-builders and the more charismatically gifted politicians, as well as assorted sophists and exploiters in all professions and trades. (And let's not even get into sex.)
"Truth is beauty and beauty is truth, that is all ye know, and all ye need to know."