PURRR: Why do we find almost every cat beautiful, but relatively few humans?

We find almost every cat to be beautiful. But when it comes to other human beings, beauty is more the exception than the rule. When we admire a cat, we admire its proportions, coloring, movements, and general appearance. But when we look at another human being, our judgment is complicated by sexual desire, or the absence of it. Cats may be entirely without aesthetic judgment and respond merely to mating signals.  Our feline friends have no conception of beauty, and certainly no ambition to be beautiful. Perhaps we should learn to look at people as we do at cats. They simply go on being beautiful, whether we notice or not.

NEEL BURTON: We find every cat, or almost, to be beautiful. But when it comes to other human beings, beauty is more the exception than the rule. We might walk past hundreds of faces without seeing one that makes us look again. Yet people try a lot harder than cats, expending considerable time, money, and ingenuity on beautifying themselves. We exercise, diet, dress, moisturize, dye, paint, inject, and sometimes even submit to the surgeon’s scalpel. Cats, meanwhile, do little more than lick themselves…

But even if we are the only truly aesthetic animal — as argued by the philosopher Immanuel Kant—that does not explain why we find the average cat to be a lot more beautiful than the average member of our own species. One possibility is that we are more sensitized to human faces. To the untrained eye, all sheep look alike, whereas their shepherd may be able to recognize each one. A large area of our cerebral cortex is devoted to visual processing, with specialized mechanisms for recognizing and reading other human faces…

Perhaps the more important difference lies not in what we see, but in what we look for. When we admire a cat, we admire its proportions, coloring, movements, and general appearance. But when we look at another human being, our judgment is complicated by sexual desire, or the absence of it. We are asking not merely whether a face or body is beautiful on its own terms, but whether we find it sexually attractive… Beauty and sexiness are not the same thing. We can find someone beautiful without being attracted to them, and vice versa—which is fortunate for ugly people…

Human beauty is not so rare as we suppose. We are simply too distracted by desire, comparison, and convention to appreciate it. Perhaps we should learn to look at people as we do at… cats. Cats are not just beautiful, but irresistibly cute. Part of why we find them so beautiful is simply that we love them. Our feline friends have no conception of beauty, and certainly no ambition to be beautiful — though they purr when we call them so. They neither admire their reflection nor regret their younger selves. They, like us, simply go on being beautiful, whether we notice or not. SOURCE

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