>[!info] About >Lecture 2 of [[John Vervaeke]]'s [[PA The Primacy of Beauty]] course from [[About]]. >More precisely, this is the second half of the lecture, as the first half was used to continue the previous lecture's discussion on [[The Decline of Beauty|the fall of beauty]]. ## Features of Beauty Elaine Scarry’s Five Features of Beauty: - Sacred - Unprecedented - Life-saving and giving - Provokes Wonder - Clearly Discernible ### Sacred Beauty has the ability to evoke something beyond itself, and situate us within a more encompassing framework — help us realize our connection to a bigger picture. Zwicky calls that "meaning" in Experience of Meaning. ### Unprecedented We act differently before beauty from how we act normally. This shares something with the sacred, because we set apart what is sacred. There is something **uniquely new** about beauty that makes us forsake that which is habitual or even natural. The way we reframe how we do framing is what John Wright calls sensibility transcendence. ### Life-giving and saving Beauty makes things alive. Augustine called beauty "a plank among the waves of the sea." Scarry says that beauty makes life worth living — it gives [[Meaning in Life|meaning in life]] and in that sense gives life.