Does Beauty Obey the Law of Diminishing Returns?
The law of diminishing returns says that the value of a thing depreciates the more you have of it. For the average person, bites of chocolate cake, trips to Mars, and graduate degrees, obey the law of diminishing returns.
What doesn’t obey the law of diminishing returns?
Arguably things of infinite worth—love, life, meaning, presence, joy, awe, insight, truth, beauty, etc.
Though some might say these too obey the law of diminishing returns. For example, one could argue that going from totally unloved to a little bit loved is more of an existential delta than going from being loved to loved even more. The initial discovery of a sense of purpose is more valuable than any subsequent add-on. In classical theology, God’s distinction is in being creator ex nihilo, implying that creation/innovation, too, obeys the law of diminishing returns: something from something is less shocking (1 to 2) than something form nothing (0 to 1). One could argue that being born is more of a delta than adding another year onto the end of one’s life, saying making it from 99 to 100.
Depending on how you look at it, addiction does not obey the law of diminishing returns—for an alcoholic, the tenth drink is more valuable than the first nine.
But even addicts have a tipping point where the price of an additional dose is too much. Overdose is the point at which too much of a good thing becomes bad. Note that I could have replaced the word addiction with connoisseurship or expertise, which are forms of knowledge addiction. Academic over-specialization is the intellectual version of being an alcoholic.
At a certain point, the world no longer needs another paper on Shakespeare. Or does it? Maybe this paper will be the one that radically changes the way we understand our existence. Stanley Cavell’s The Avoidance of Love, on Othello, is a profound work of thought in its own right.
In light of these reflections, let’s ask about the experience of beauty—is there such a thing as “too much beauty”? Or if not, is it possible that once a certain baseline of beauty is hit in design, making a thing that much more beautiful doesn’t yield that much more value? What about wisdom? Goodness?
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