What is the locus of our existence? I am not trying to delve into metaphysical enquiries as it may sound but trying to address something this worldly. I know that or at least I put my faith into the concept of dual existence. Not entirely the way Descartes has conceptualized it in his mind-body dualism but on similar lines. Here the I that is thinking is the Personal Ego, mind or “soul". It is the essence of my existence but the one which is writing it all down physically is the body which has appearances, a physical definition in which change is more conspicuous.
Imagine yourself as a third person viewer of your own self. Dissociate for a moment yourself from your physical body and think of yourself as sitting on a chair across your body and watch yourself go about the day. What are you going to see? The body. Its appearance. Of course the body has no essence now. It cannot personally think or judge for itself. But the you that is independent of it now can look at it as a person not you. Like you look at yourself in the mirror. Now you might find yourself pretty or not depending on the standard of beauty you adhere to or are acclimatized to. It is the body wrapped in skin and the Ego is categorizing. One common way in the adult world to judge the parameters of beauty is to see the amount of attention you garner without the personal ego coming into picture that is solely on the spectrum of attractiveness. Your personal Ego or Mind or Soul is the essence or the philosophy with which you react or interact with the world but your physical existence is the locus of all such interactions.
To give you clearer idea let us consider a basic art piece of Dadaism, “The Fountain” by Marcel Duchamp. In reality it is just an inverted urinal placed in a gallery. You look at it devoid of its essence or what it stands for. You see just an urinal and depending on whether you find such off white urinals attractive or if your culture finds such urinals attractive just by the looks, you tend to either have a sense or attraction or dislike. You still have no clue about the philosophy behind the art work or the movement at large and your entire premise of emotional judgement is based on the external look. When you know the philosophy behind it you may have a stronger affinity or dislike based on the appeal of the philosophy. But the piece of ceramic in the gallery, if had a personal Ego, would be tormented to be judged only based on the look without being able to contribute philosophically. Our bodies are just so.
There are some standards of beauty. Few are universal too. Rationalism would claim that they pre exist in our minds and empiricism would say that our experiences give us an understanding. How to judge beauty is a difficult question but for me it is something that should inspire motion in the one perceiving. Either physical or emotional. That’s why beauty is subjective as what moves me may not move you at all.
Let us now go back to the self that is sitting across the body. Now you are observing and based on the inherent spectral understanding of beauty you are meticulously calculating the short comings. The features aren’t sharp enough, either too skinny or too heavy or whatever. You either like yourself or don’t and if you would now move back into the body, you are either happy about it or not and that influences a plethora of actions and emotions that will manifest through the physical body eventually. The body as such has done nothing but our own perception of its physical existence has created an essence that we tend to Perpetuate until there are conspicuous changes. So the pertinent question here is who am I in essence? This is the dilemma that Oscar Wilde's Dorian Grey faced having his essence splattered on a canvas hidden in the attic. He was a very handsome man in the outside while his soul rotted in the painting.
This philosophy is nothing new. The Indian school of thought of Nyaya-Vaisheshika has tried to make a similar distinction, rather an enquiry into what is really inherent. For example, let us look at an orange. What do we see. We see the color, the roundness, the texture of the peel etc. To put it simply, the orange we perceive is the combination of these attributes. For Nyaya-Vaisheshika there are layers to this viewing. First is the physical perception of the outward qualities. All the ones I just mentioned. Then the second layer of viewing is the viewing of the attribute independently. Like the orange color as a color independent of the orange and the third viewing is the viewing of the “ideal orange color" that is the perfect color and based on the knowledge of that color we judge whether this orange color is pretty enough or not. In short the universal ideals of beauty. But now we have gone to the level of looking at the essence of the color and the roundness. It is like trying to look at Aristotle's Idea of Justice as an entity and not looking at the examples of justice that tell you what justice is. You look at the essence. Seldom we go so far and this essence and their inherence in ourselves is the bundle we call the personal Ego which eventually inherits in the physical body. So looking from outside, the path is: physical orange to the present color and shape to the ideal of orange color and shape which are universal. Looking from inside it is starting from the ideal attributes to the inherent attributes to the physical manifestation. The problem is the physical manifestation is all we see unless we look deeper.
