Beauty in its most natural, unfiltered, and unrefined form.
The beauty of being raw, real, vulnerable, and aligned with harmony and balance.
“Aesthetics is not about art, it’s about how we perceive the world.” – Peter Zumthor
“Beauty is the splendor of truth.”
— attributed to Plato
Kant defined aesthetic beauty as something we find pleasurable without wanting to possess it or use it—what he called “disinterested pleasure”.
Immanuel Kant’s idea of disinterested pleasure—finding something beautiful without wanting to possess, use, or benefit from it—revolutionized aesthetics. Beauty, for Kant, was a unique kind of pleasure: free from desire, moral judgment, or personal gain.
Then disinterested pleasure may be the beauty that feels too fragile to hold or claim.
We admire it at a distance—not out of indifference but reverence.
A wildflower is beautiful until it’s picked.
A moment is beautiful until it’s forced to last.
A person is beautiful, and we love them more in their freedom than in our grasp.
Raw beauty, for me, is the perfect aesthetic beauty, since it is real, evocative, unpolished, and spontaneously natural.
It is the perfect aesthetic beauty with its skin off—messy, honest, and sometimes more powerful than the ideal.
Now, I look around our digital world, and I only see digitally born, fake beauty.
In this ecosystem, beauty isn’t something we are—it’s something we pretend to be, something we edit, something we release into the feed that loops endlessly but lands emotionally.
It’s something we appreciate only when the algorithm “appreciates” it.
Kant’s disinterested pleasure in aesthetic beauty?
Cute! No reverence at all—only abuse.
FCK NO — I PAINT IT BLACK
“No colors anymore
I want them to turn black.”
Then maybe we can try — multiple times — hard enough and paint it white.
Then maybe we can apply raw “colours” and finally turn to our true selves.
Algorithm rejected, but hopefully standing where “Beauty is the splendor of truth.”
-GF
