Beauty is a wonderful word — except when you try to define it.
When anyone can call anything “beautiful,” the word quickly loses meaning, and it becomes unfit for clear communication.
Communicating as clearly as possible matters. It’s the top priority in the famous 1948 Shannon & Weaver model of communication. When the sender’s intended meaning doesn’t get across to the receiver, that confusion is called “noise.” To avoid that “noise” and consequent misunderstanding, it’s best to avoid ambiguous words.
“Beauty” is painfully ambiguous. Some people use it to describe a religious experience, and others put it into the name of a nail salon. If we can’t agree on what a word means, it creates noise — which easily translates to misunderstanding.
In universities, vague concepts are a serious problem. Scientific theories only hold when the research community agrees on what the words in those theories mean. In the humanities and social sciences, concepts must often be rigorously defined; otherwise, a theory can’t be tested or validated. For example, in positive psychology, theories about happiness gained traction only after scholars agreed on how to measure that “state of mind” called happiness — by using a specific question. A similar consensus about the definition of beauty doesn’t exist.
That said, beauty does show up across multiple academic fields, including:
• Philosophy / Aesthetics — beauty as an aesthetic value linked to truth and goodness.
• Art History & Visual arts — where beauty was once central but is now treated with more caution.
• Architecture & Design — beauty in relation to form, function, and utility.
• Literature — where beauty appears in discussions of literary aesthetics.
• Psychology & Cognitive Science — studying beauty as a perceptual and emotional phenomenon.
• Sociology — examining beauty as social power and capital that shapes inequality.
• Anthropology — exploring beauty as a culturally specific system of meaning.
The takeaway: although seven different academic disciplines find beauty worth studying, the concept is apparently still too complicated to approach it in a really integrated way.
One reason may be summed up by the sociologist William Bruce Cameron, who wrote, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” The word “beauty” points to something so personal that it can only be experientially – and not theoretically – known.
From the perspective of Zen Buddhism, direct experience is immediate and non-conceptual; language always mediates, slices, and freezes the living flow into static categories. Words therefore often misrepresent or omit the felt quality of experience instead of conveying it faithfully. Language over lays and codifies reality. The question is, where does the word beauty fit in this equation?
Let’s bring in a metaphor. Suppose we look at languages as mega cruise liners sailing on a vast ocean. The reality of human experience is the ocean whose waters carry all the ships. The words of a language are like the passengers and crew on board.
These language ships are so big that life on board is almost like life in a normal city. ‘Passenger words’ relate to sunbathing, shopping malls, fun parks, movie theatres and restaurants. Crew words refer to the navigation and propulsion of the ships. Because the ships are so large and stable, most of the time the idea of being on water fades into the background.
Yet every language ship is afloat and carried by the waters of the ocean of reality. And although not many words remember this anymore, some do. These words are different: they do not refer to what happens on board. They lean over the railing, look at the waves, and know that this endless mysterious substance called water carries them. These words connect to another kind of reality—not the life on board, but the deeper one that allows a ship to be a ship. They remind us that a language is just a collection of words. Some of those words leaning over the railing are poetry, music, spirituality. And beauty.
I’m intrigued that, despite institutions teaching us how to think, speak, and create beauty, the art of experiencing seems to be taken for granted.
Maybe it is an idea: some kind of World Beauty Day?
It could focus on:
A. the capacities and behaviour needed for a greater appreciation of different kinds of beauty and
B. raising awareness about the many positive as well as the problematic aspects of the intriguing word.
Let me know your ideas (via comments) if this rings a bell.
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