Blog 14

I could not agree more with Schiller’s statement, “To regard beauty as a luxury adornment or a social signifier was to miss the true potential of the experience.” I see beauty as a means to open the world eyes to truly see. Not see on the surface, but see to understand and enjoy. Beauty is the walkway to the door of enlightenment. To see beauty as a physical object is to only scratch the very surface. When Schiller refers to the ‘true potential of the experience’ I believe he’s suggesting that beauty can start to explain the meaning of life. He is constantly pointing at the power behind beauty to allow you to enjoy life and to enable change with this beautiful view of the world. He also suggests the opposite, that if more people saw the world in this light that we would advance without blockages. He states, “ambitious social reform would always be frustrated until a much larger number of people had reached a higher level of inner development of the sort enabled by beauty.” Schiller is saying he believes if beauty allowed us all to see the world in such a way that possibilities are open, then we would be able to make uninterrupted progress without frustrations and see the world as this big and happy place. I think this also speaks to how I see the communities (society) view on beauty. The community I’ve been exposed to spends too much time focusing on the form drive that they forget to develop their sense drive and can’t seem to find enough joy in their world. Ideally, we could all spend more time trying to strike that balance between the two drives to promote a world of interdependency and growth.