Asymmetry of Beauty

This week I started reading Easy Beauty by Chloe Cooper Jones, on recommendation from a client. As a philosophy professor and a woman who lives with a rare congenital condition that impacts her posture and gait, Cooper Jones explores how ancient ideas of beauty from the Greeks and Romans, insistent on symmetry, measure, and order, inform how we think of beauty as something that can be “caught and pinned by the regulating forces of design, measurement, order. Beauty could be whittled down to principles.”

She argues against this understanding of beauty in the human body though. She writes, “Symmetry is predictable; I am soothed but not surprised. To say that beauty was merely the result of definite measurement deflated the mystery of the aesthetic experience: that bodily recognition, an ancient sense tuned to beauty, a physical seizing of beauty and of beauty’s dissonance; a welcome fever, a palpitant thrill, pleasure ill at ease, a turned stomach, a chill, prickling hairs, goose bumps, high attention. And I have felt that high attention in the presence of art, people, ideas, sounds, storms, sentences, sunsets, streams and rivers and oceans, colors, efforts, failures, loss, pain, and how much of this can be measured? It is both there and not, neither subjective nor objective. I like the vastness. I want to keep the idea of beauty like a stone in my hand, turning it over and over.

“But maybe I am dismissing the ancient ideals because they don’t fit the story I tell myself about myself. My body did not fit into any narrative of order, proportion, plan. What was my lineage and where was it celebrated?”

I agree with Cooper Jones’ arguments against symmetrical beauty, but I add to it another perspective. While some human bodies may appear symmetrical on the surface, in all of us there is underlying natural asymmetry. The neurological, respiratory, circulatory, muscular, and vision systems are not the same on the left as they are on the right. We have a 2-3 pound liver on the right side of the body and the pericardium, a fluid-filled sac that surrounds and protects the heart, on the left. We have three lobes of lung on the right compared to only two on the left. As a result of this natural imbalance in the torso, the diaphragm, the pump that powers our breathing, is different from side to side. The right side diaphragm is better positioned to serve as a respiratory muscle. It has a larger diameter, a thicker and larger central tendon, a higher central dome and is more able to maintain its dome as it is supported by the liver, and the crura that attaches the diaphragm to the lumbar spine attaches 1-2 lumbar levels lower than on the left side. This dominant respiratory activity over the right half of the diaphragm centers our core of stabilization and neurological control over the right side as well.

This asymmetry in our internal organs asymmetrically impacts every breath we take and our patterned movement. But it is in this asymmetry that we realize the brilliance of the human body. We are balanced through the integration of these system imbalances, heart balanced against liver, right arm balanced against left leg.

In this way, none of our bodies fit into a narrative of order and proportion, as the ancient Greeks and Romans saw it and as Instagram’s algorithm still prioritizes. In this understanding of the human body, our beauty is located in our asymmetry, the ways we deviate from order and precision. The more we change the narrative around how we perceive beauty, the more included we all become in its discovery.