It is part of the essence of beauty that it invites you to participate in it and make it part of the extended idea of yourself. That’s why we wear beautiful clothes, want to move to or visit lovely places and make them our home, why we make our homes beautiful and surround ourselves with loveliness. 

     I believe that the feminine is the original object of the love of beauty, and women are the original embodiment of that spark for the aesthetic sense. And so our ideas of beauty are tangled up with the idea of the feminine. Woman is the ultimate vessel of beauty, the most inherently beautiful thing. Nature, growing life, and the sea are two other primordial sources of beauty, ancient beyond imagining. And we associate living nature, the earth, in culture after culture, with the feminine. The sea also is very often viewed as feminine. And women have a body shape the arouses comparisons with sea creatures.

    Three of the great environments we have inhabited as a species are the living world/nature, the world of water/the sea, and one another. And we have all literally inhabited our mothers as a primordial environment. We have all emerged from them as species emerge from nature and life from water. All are literal or figurative wombs, places of gestation. At some point we become conscious and we turn to regard those environments, and we conceptualize the feminine. Because that is the first thing our personal and mythological awareness touches. 

   The feminine is grasped quite effectively by other species, but on an entirely unconscious and instinctive level. They don’t need to understand it to be compelled by it, for it to structure their world and desires and affiliations. The capacity to conceptualize the feminine would require being able to conceptualize the self, and since animals can’t quite do that, they worship in ignorance by pure compulsion what we worship knowingly and can either embrace or reject. 

    Once the feminine has been grasped as a distinct conceptual entity attaining to certain primordial forces and specific entities, you can begin to represent it. It is beautiful, it is desirable. One might even say that it is desire, as it is the avatar of that which is desirable. And there are motivational associations built into us so deeply that they become tangled up and used by our more complex systems and conceptions. There is a certain amount of borrowing and overlap. Why invent new essential desires and associations when we already posses and can recontextualize them? Ripe fruit, good food, is desirable. Our visual senses are keyed to identity the colors and shapes of these desirable objects. And when we look at women we see the blush of the young cheek, the roundness and softness of breast, hip, and buttock. It’s not a coincidence, not merely a poetic serendipity. It is convergence. Not only of one with the other, but of both with one another. Fruit is feminine, and the feminine is fruitful. 

   The question is, what makes seeing beauty necessary? Because it isn’t obvious, except for the fact that we do. There are many senses we don’t have, an almost infinite array of things of which we are not aware, do not perceive, and do not possess as evaluative categories. “Why not?” is an easy question, because by default it contains everything. Plenty of animals get by without seeing most of what we see and without caring about much of what we care about.

    So why is seeing beauty necessary? Because it isn’t obviously just an extension of utility. Art is, in its nature, not necessary. It is creative. It doesn’t have to be. And often the purpose of beautiful things isn’t closely tied to some merely functional utility, though it can be a very reliable marker of it. But lots of very useful things aren’t very beautiful, and lots of beautiful things don’t seem especially useful, especially for the amount of attention we give them and the fact that we don’t necessarily do anything with them other than appreciate them.

    One could argue that appreciation is a kind of use. That beauty is a psychological good, or existentially useful object, and we use it by participating in it. By appreciating it, by making it part of our experience and making it part of our mental landscape and our extended idea of ourselves and our world. That is a kind of use, but it’s a very odd one. It doesn’t explain itself much, and it doesn’t explain what demands it to exist as a perceptive capacity. What makes seeing beauty necessary, and what makes valuing that beauty necessary? It apparently is. But why? 

    I believe that, in a mythological, originational sense, women make seeing beauty necesssary. Women use beauty as a signal for biological health, for reproductive fitness, for desirability. I don’t mean as a matter of craft and design, although it has become a conscious feature of humanity so we make its production a conscious goal, but women use beauty as an unconscious signal, entirely without intention. And men and women both process it as a signal, entirely without intention. We also do it intentionally, but the system would work even if (and before) we were aware of it. It is pre-cognitive.

    Men also possess beauty, insofar as lack of it is an honest indicator of a lack of health, and insofar as we are all ultimately part of a shared species and so share to varying degrees in all the qualities it possesses. But it isn’t a primary signal in male signaling, nor is it a primary evaluative criteria for women. A lot of the qualities males specifically possess as males are detrimental to their beauty. Males also fixate to a greater degree on beauty as a signal, whereas women include it among a host of complex and interacting considerations. Men will take other qualities and factors into consideration, but will typically conceptualize them as extensions of beauty, a sort of meta-beauty. But women don’t generally do that to men. They don’t by habit define men’s attractiveness across multiple domains as an extended concept of beauty. 

    So as a necessity for the life and function of the species, you must be able to perceive beauty. Women cannot be escaped. And the features of the feminine are foundational and primordial. And beauty is part of their essence, or part of our response to their essence. We call that response love of beauty. That response is innate, a fundamental instinct to seek that which is inherently good and fruitful and desirable. It emerges with consciousness out of the underlying systems that structure life and make it possible. Women make us see beauty. They open our eyes to it, as a species. And that is a lovely thing, and worthy of its veneration. Fearful and terrible as it may be. For few things are as terrible and fearful as love.