How do the blind interpret beauty?

Are you high tonight?

“Now, all the beauty that they once experienced through the sense of sight, all the pleasure that burned and pained at the sight of true beauty, is cut off. To stand now in the presence of a delicately or majestically beautiful object, to know that it is there in front of one, and yet to be unable to contemplate it, is a different pain, a pain without pleasure but with only terrible frustration.

And to stand by impotently while someone ineptly tries to describe something beautiful, tries to capture and communicate it in stupid words–here can be a source of sorrow indeed.” Thomas Carroll

However Carroll also says “if the capacity to appreciate beauty through the visual sense was there, it is almost certain that the capacity to appreciate beauty through the auditory sense is also there.”

Thanks for a great question. It took me to this book

Dunno. It’s best to ask a blind person.

I would assume its the same way a drunkard at a dimly lit bar does it. Not very well.

With imagination. Often, Blind people will correlate a scrap or little information they got from their limited senses with personal-interpretation.

Blind people could correlate that one is beautiful/handsome by the voice of the person they heard so I guess they could also use their imagination to define beauty. Beauty itself is limitless and could be based on personal satisfaction.

My mom had very limited vision and she relied on her memory or sense of touch.She also listened to music.:)

Girth.

Kinetically.

And girth, as my buddy @Blondesjon said. He’s never complained about mine.

Sounds aren’t one dimensional—they find beauty in sounds, textures, shapes and forms. They probably find more beauty in these things than sighted people do because those elements are enhanced for them.

Think about the texture of a river rock. I guarantee you most sighted people take a look, a quick feel, and toss it back. A blind person might explore it much longer and actually become more aware of the rock than a sighted person would have.

I went on an exchange program when I was 16 to London— 6 people in my group were blind. They designed the tours for them and allowed them to climb over some statues in Hampton Courts to feel the statues. Us sighted people took a look for less than 1 minute and were ready to go. They took 20, 30 minutes and looking back, probably had an heightened appreciation for those statues than any of us sighted kids did. The same thing happened when we were looking at English Roses. The sighted kids looked and were done. The blind kids were guided to the roses and they went over the rose bushes for 5–10 minutes and were given one petal each and they explored that too.

I guarantee you they know exactly how the inside of a rose petal feels on their thumbs and cheeks. How many sighted people do? It’s funny—people think blind or deaf people are missing out, but they don’t know sighted and hearing people are missing out on a lot of beauty, too.

@wundayatta . . . a roll of dimes isn’t all that hard to accommodate my friend.

Helen Keller said: “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen nor touched….but are felt in the heart.”