Beauty Is Given Birth Through Ugliness
Beauty is given birth through ugliness and good is given birth through evil. Therefore ‘is’ and ‘is not’ originate from each other. Difficult and easy become one another, long and short form one another, high and low position one another, sound and silence define one another, future and past accompany one another. Therefore the wise person lives without effort in his daily life. He practices a wordless doctrine. Good and bad come to him and he refuses neither. - Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching
One of the biggest mistakes we make is not appreciating how the opposites create unity in this world.
What do we decide is beautiful?
The unity of opposites is what makes up the world. This does not mean that one thing is good and the other is bad. When we start to separate beauty as good and ugly as bad, we start to separate them from the world. After that separation, we start an attempt to eliminate the ugly. After we eliminate the ugly, what is left?
That is when we start to view the things that are less beautiful as ugly and we’ve artificially created this hedonic chase for perfection in beauty.
Learning To Appreciate The Ugly
How do we learn to appreciate things that are ugly in this world? Does that mean we should leave it alone and never attempt to make things more beautiful?
Let’s take an example of a classic rustbelt city that has come under economic turmoil. The city has boarded up houses and is in ruins. While we should make an attempt to save things and make the city better, we should also use the ugliness of the city as a reminder of the mistakes that we have made in the past.
How did something that was once beautiful decay into ugliness? Then we discover the root cause of the problem.
There are some things in this world that are ugly that cannot be changed. Lets use an example of a person with severe physical disfiguration. The world may view them as ugly but imagine what kind of life they have gone through to get themselves to where they are today.
There’s an aspect of it that you must appreciate of that person enduring a life like that. Many people may be repulsed by a person or feel sorry for them but instead we should learn to appreciate them. When appreciation comes aboard then respect comes. Maybe the ugliness wasn’t so bad after all?
Understanding The Subjective Aspect of Beauty and Ugly
If you look back to historical fashion, you may think that their clothes looked ugly. Why would anyone wear that? Well, they would have the same questions for what you’re wearing today.
As society changes, so does the aspect of what we deem beautiful and ugly. These changes usually occur slowly over time without much knowledge. Today, things are changing faster than they ever have and we have many intergenerational conflicts between what is beautiful and ugly. Changes that have always occurred between generations are now accelerated faster than before.
There Is No Perfection
Everything in the world is on a spectrum of what we deem beautiful and ugly and is always changing. The universe is what it is at any given moment and we are a small part of it. What we deem as beautiful is an evolutionary hard wire for us to figure out what we like and do not like in this world. It has helped us survive for millennia.
Everyone has their flaws. We see people who we consider beautiful to have an ugly personality all the time. Even the people who seem to have the best of both, have flaws in themselves that give birth to a little ugliness.
Without a little ugliness in the world, it would become boring. We wouldn’t have the adventure of nuance that we experience every day.
Even the Tao Te Ching has some ugliness to it. It’s vague, it’s open to interpretation and it’s thousands of years old. Yet, many of it’s lessons are still applicable to this day. The beauty of it is because of the ugliness that it contains.
