Neurologist Anjan Chatterjee in his TED talk on beauty noted how Francis Galton sought to build a composite face of criminality. Using his new technique of combining faces, Galton expected to find the grotesque face of criminality but instead brought to life a face of beauty. What happened? Galton didn’t realize that beauty is an archetype, a composite, the essence of something we hold in our mind.  Hence the face of a supermodel is merely the simplest unblemished and unvarnished prime example of the range of human specimens rolled into one person. Helen is all Greeks rolled into one. 

Just about my favorite story of all time is Pygmalion who sculpted his inner vision of beauty in Galatea who came to life. 

Galton didn’t consider Plato seriously enough.  Plato noted that we hold in our individual heads perfect visions or Eidos.  The specimens we meet in life variably live up to those expectations.  Thus an American beauty is the mere quintessence of the idea of Americanness in our head. This is not to diminish the fact that Americans come from divergent backgrounds and so carry wildly different ideas of what constitutes Americanness. 

I shouldn’t have been so shocked on my first trip to Israel to find so many Israelis wondrously beautiful.  On the other hand I found in China a tendency to find facial characteristics of “Westerners” beautiful to the point that some Chinese wanted plastic surgeries to alter their eyes and grow long straight hair which we attributed to the unfortunate penetration by American and European media. 

The American beauty reflects the American ideal in some way, being an expression of some idea of the averaged American face, without blemish asymmetry or imperfection. Love, at first sight, happens instantaneously for a reason, the fulfillment of an inner concept of perfection literally snaps into place as for the first time fulfillment of perfection resonates in our inner latent concept. On the other hand blemishes, asymmetries, and growths immediately render connotations evil as this an aberrancy askew with inner eidos. 

In beauty we have truth. As Plato would say as a perfect chair is somehow the best expression of chairness. We all have chairs but all of us harbor somewhere within our minds an ideal of what it is for something to be a chair. Maybe we have never ever met up with a perfect chair, but that will still not stop us from being attracted to a perfect ideal of a chair. Chatterjee has shown by experimentation how we gravitate to this an ideal of beauty even when encouraged to be concentrating on something else.  Being so drawn to the beautiful, we are prepared to make way for it in preference to anything eccentric imperfect or less beautiful. We believe beautiful people, are more apt to hire them, follow them in Instagram, believe them in courts of law and generally hold open doors and make way for them. Beauty is the reason for the Academy Awards. 

Ideas of perfection are not confined to the sense of sight. We have the idea of perfection in music whether that is a perfect succession of tones or major chords or triads that we find beautiful which are the Pythagorean musics of the spheres. Geometry has the perfect Platonic solids, figures composed of identical faces, as in the cube composed of squares, the perfect icosahedron made of 20 identical triangle faces which turn out to be the natural shape of many viruses.  

All the Platonic solids: are symmetric structures whose apices contact an enveloping sphere with faces composed of equilateral polygons. We have the  Cube of square faces, Tetrahedron of triangles, (pyramid), octahedron of triangles,  the dodecahedron of pentagons, icosahedron of 20  triangles. There are is one Platonic solid of squares, One of pentagons, and 3 of triangles.  The three-dimensional star of David composed of two tetrahedrons inverted into each other is a variant of the octahedron composed of two tetrahedrons and it seems to me this is is also a Platonic solid. This is particularly neat because it seems composed of 8 smaller tetrahedrons. Many people attach this figure taken from the ecstatic visions of Ezekiel 1:4-26) the Merkabah or chariot, Mer=light, Ka=soul, bah= body. (For this latter interpretation I am indebted to crystalinks.com website). I have long thought Ezekiel must have been under the influence of some hallucinogen. 

One plucked string finding resonance in another, is an harmonic Platonic or is it Pythagorean perfect expression of beauty. The most harmonic individual notes are near simple fractions of frequencies of one another as in C:G which are 3:2 in frequencies and perfect octaves with are simple multiples of frequencies. The Golden Ratio where a+b/a = a/b tends toward the number Phi which approximately = 1.62…. is a universal in plants flowers Fibonacci sequences and in architecture describing such perfections as the Parthenon and other structures plus Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. The concept of beauty resides in hard-wired intracerebral (internal connections)  and where we see an outer connection that even approximates this inner vision some of us at least maybe not all, no matter what we’re doing you can count on will snap to attention. Beauty is built-in, neurological.