Do you measure beauty in Kelvin or degress Celsius?

I got into this really interesting discussion with my co-workers today, and thought I’d share it with you. It all started when this song came over the delivery van’s radio, and the message was “everyone is beautiful in every way.” Naturally, I disagreed…

…and said “that’s an absurd statement. I can understand how everyone can be beautiful in some way, but if everyone is beautiful in every way, then beauty becomes meaningless.”

This sparked an involved debate between me, Jeremy who was driving the van, and Whitney who was sitting in the back. Jeremy partially agreed with me, but Whitney disagreed.

Eventually, Whitney said “it comes down to what you mean by the word ‘every.’ You’re taking the word every to mean equal, but I’m taking the word every to mean each.”

At this point, something unfortunate happened and I didn’t quite catch what she was saying. However, as I was walking to class after my shift, I figured it out: I measure beauty by degrees Celsius, whereas she measures it in Kelvin.

In other words, I’m approaching beauty with the idea that it’s possible for someone to have negative beauty, or that ugliness is something more than simply the lack of beauty (here the analogy falls down a bit, but it’s still useful as a means of illustration). Beauty is therefore the exception and not the rule–or if it is the rule, then there are exceptions to it.

She approaches beauty from the perspective that ugliness is simply a lack of beauty, much as cold is simply the lack of heat. But just as it’s impossible to get down to absolute zero, so it’s impossible to have negative beauty. Therefore, everyone is beautiful, just in different quantities.

Putting it this way, it makes the song seem a little less dumb and my previous assumptions a little more thoughtless.  I suppose that it is theoretically possible for the phrase “everyone is beautiful in every way” to not render the word “beauty” completely meaningless, by measuring beauty like measuring Kelvin.  After all, everyone is beautiful to his or her own mother.  Also, it seems to mark a more optimistic and cheery outlook on life to be able to say that everything is beautiful.

However, this also makes the word completely impractical without some kind of personal minimum threshold.  Otherwise, when I say “you’re beautiful,” I could just as easily mean that you look like a puddle of dog urine as that you’re the most drop dead gorgeous girl at BYU.  This also means that Hitler had a beautiful mind, that Stalin had a beautiful conscience, and that everyone in your class did beautifully on the last test.

In short, if you want the word “beauty” to have any functional, practical meaning, you either have to measure it in degrees Celsius or you have to set some kind of minimum threshold–some “freezing point,” if you will–where the sum beauty ceases to be meaningful.

I’ll let you chew on that for a while, and move on to more useful things now.