The idea and the reality of beauty involve meaning. Beauty gives meaning. It infuses things in specific and existence in general with meaning. The meaning it engenders and infuses is not so much rational meaning, as existential meaning. Beauty participates in and even, in a sense, answers the very reason for being. When we perceive beauty, we understand, whether intuitively or consciously, that we are made for beauty. We are made for a world with beauty. The experience of true beauty in the world as we know it may perhaps be infrequent or even rare. Yet it is for such that we are made. It is for such that we live.
That beauty gives meaning to existence in general and to things in specific leads to another aspect of beauty. Namely, beauty gives value to life and to specific things in life, with value being the worthiness we recognize in something. Value is indeed the close correlate or derivative of meaning. That is, when we apprehend that life or things have meaning, the realization leads us to the implicit or explicit valuation of those things and even of existence itself. We value things that have meaning, and to the extent we see life in general as having meaning, we value life in general.
Hence, beauty, inasmuch as it infuses things with meaning, suffuses things and existence with value. We value beautiful things and beautiful aspects of existence. We find them worthy. We find them worthwhile. Because we value beautiful things, we want to apprehend them, make them, conserve them, foster them, enhance them, and praise them.
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