Thanks for the link. Might this be related to the concept of "quality" as brought up by Robert Pirsig in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (1974)? I

Thanks for the link. Might this be related to the concept of "quality" as brought up by Robert Pirsig in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (1974)? I don't think the "thing" is completely ungraspable. It is probably the same subject as that which philosophers have studied under the name of aesthetics for ages. Let's continue the rant from here: I tend to link everything back to the concept of evolution as a reason for existing, and aesthetics seems to me to be related to simplicity. If something is simple, it is most often better: i.e. a healthy body, instead of one full of pock marks, or a scientific explanation based on Occam's razor, instead of one based on the pattern of tea leaves. In the long run, simple things have proven to be extremely helpful to humans. Now, the problem with working on extremely complex things, such as societies, buildings, or software, is that these are not simple to begin with. So we have some humans finding extreme joy in trying to come up with ways to understand these in simple terms, even though the terms are still horribly complex to an uninitiated outsider. The building blocks do not always have, nor require, names. That makes them somewhat harder to grasp than your average object such as a table or a chair. But the entire process might be identified as quality, beauty, or cleanness. Or at least, that's what I think. Edit: To avoid common objections to the term "simple", consider that the reversal of something is only one hop away from the actual thing. That may still make a character with pock marks attractive, given that they have, say, an abundance of gold.