Victoria Munn and Erin Griffey’s research is centralised around ideas of beauty in the Renaissance age and how the ideals, methods of beauty inform or parallel with our own understandings of beauty in 21st century in the western world.
This idea of how the past could help our own understanding of concepts, such as beauty really resonated with me. Especially in the way how it unveils the value, importance and implication of historical research on a practical level. There are so many practices, no matter cultural, religious, political, or even of the beauty world that we know of, we do not realise the reasons we do them and how they were done in the past.
“吾故曰能知其然不知其所以然者也。”
“So I say he only knows what it is, but not knows why it is. ”
This old Chinese saying shows our epistemic limitation based on only the empirical evidence within our society. It also resonates me strongly also because I have seen other history research projects presenting similar implications such as research on the French revolution shows us how the revolution had changed our use of pronouns in French and research on Buddhism history shows how the spread of Buddhism effectively set the foundation to the use of written Chinese in East Asia. Research projects, especially the research into the past can help us to not only understand the past better, but also reflect on our own lives and societies.
