Human Behaviour
Do People Look Only at Appearances?
Do you choose food because it tastes good or for its appearance? In this post I discuss on the value of appearance and where it comes from.
If I look around, I see that everything is based on appearance: everything must be beautiful, flawless, perfect.
Even the foods that are presented to me must be served with a certain choreography, without paying too much attention to the real taste.
Not to mention the virtual world, where through a thousand filters and retouches, normal people look like young, beautiful, radiant and perky actors and actresses in the photographs, .
But is reality really like that? Is it really important to take care of the appearance?
Aesthetics is a real art. To take care of the aesthetic aspect of something, you have to take care of it. And taking care of the appearance takes time. Like the rest, everything takes time to be done well.
Even in the way of speaking, one can only think of appearing, perhaps better than others, trying to underline one’s achievements: I have traveled a lot, my son has become a scientist, my daughter is a great musician, I have been on vacation in the Maldives and so on.
But behind this appearance, this exasperated care of aesthetics, what is really hidden? Where is the substance in all of this?
The discourse is very complex and has its roots none the less than the Enlightenment, when starting from the great philosophers of the time, the concept of substance was denied. The substance? Yes, just the substance! And what is the substance?
Substance is what makes things what they are.
For example, the substance of a tree is to be a tree. The essence of a table is to be a table, and so on. Substance is the ultimate meaning of a thing, the very motive of a thing.
With the Enlightenment the concept of substance was denied, that is, the philosophers of the time said that things have no substance. In other words, a tree is not a tree because within itself it has its being a tree, but a tree is such because I say it is a tree. This means that it is man who decides the substance of a thing and it is not the thing that has its meaning.
So if one thing takes away its substance, what is left? What appears. Here then is the cure for appearance, so dear to our society today.
If I take away from a good plate of pizza its being pizza, nice and tasty, what is left? Its appearing on the plate or in the photograph. So, when I look for a pizza recipe on the Web, I don’t go to see the substance (i.e. the ingredients and the procedure), but the appearance (i.e. how the photo representing the pizza recipe appears).
Returning to the question posed at the beginning of this article, is it really important to take care of appearance?
What is certain is that, as they say, the eye also wants its part, so I would say that at least a little the aesthetics must be taken care of. You can’t go to the office smelly or with messy hair. But it is not even worth spending hours and hours curating an aesthetic with the sole aim of appearing.
Anyway, I think that substance is more important than appearance, because it goes further.
Appearance or Substance? My answer is Substance. And what about you? What do you think about it?
