Being surrounded by beauty in my habitat is indispensable to me. The sunlit room I wake up in, the antique art books that fill my shelves, the pearly white amaryllis that blooms near the window, the view of the neo-Roman church I see when sipping my morning macchiato, the wing piano on which I practice arpeggios and the arpeggios I practice on my wing piano, up until the golden pen I sign letters with – all these expressions of beauty contribute to my happiness. Beauty is important to me, and therefore abundant in my world. Even the sleek design of my toilet brush receives compliments from visitors. Life is just too short for unappealing toilet brushes, and if you must engage in activities as primitive as discharging your excrements, you might as well have an aesthetical experience.
My love for beautiful things stems not from materialism, but rather from a profound appreciation of the aesthetical. I do not buy beautiful things for the sake of possessing them but for contemplating and appreciating them, which gives me serenity and joy. The opposite is true, as well: spending time in an environment that lacks beauty makes me feel miserable. And as befits an aesthete worthy of her name, I detest ugliness, in all its forms.
And so does Immanuel Kant, the first philosopher to have written a systematic work about aesthetics, the philosophy of beauty and art, man’s ultimate expression of beauty. He and other great thinkers like Baumgarten, Locke, and the contemporary Sir Roger Scruton, have reflected upon what beauty means, why we are the only creatures on the planet consciously craving and creating it, and how it can be meaningful in the human existence. They all seemed to agree on the fact that the perception of beauty triggers emotions that are a prerequisite to our mental wellbeing.
So, in trying to define beauty, one could say it is something we perceive to be harmonious and well juxtaposed, whether it is colours and lines in photography, shapes in abstract paintings, notes in music, phrases in poems, or bricks in architecture. But most of all, beauty is something we feel – the Greek word αἰσθητικός (aesthetikos) means sentient, feeling. Try listening to Mendelssohn’s Spring Song played by Daniel Barenboim and not feel overwhelmingly joyous. Or listening to David Fray play Franz Schubert’s third moment musicale for piano, which triggers a variety of emotions in me: careful joy impregnated with a sense of patience and a slight melancholy. It is so beautiful that I hold my breath not to miss one single note, composed by the man who called himself the saddest man on earth. Schubert is proof that not only joy, but also sadness can be the creator of a beauty so great, words become insufficient to describe it. Nothing concrete happens to make us feel that joy or sadness, and yet those abstract, ephemerous notes make us feel real emotions in all their intensity. The beauty of art lies in its capacity to frame human emotions, and in identifying with them, we get a deep insight in the human condition and recognise ourselves.
Beauty is indeed a metaphysical trait of a physical object, a feeling. But not everyone feels the same when looking at or listening to the same thing. Our eyes and ears indeed all judge differently – I might think Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia is a horrendous building, while others perceive it as the epitome of architectural beauty. We westerners tend to find slender people attractive, while inhabitants of other continents admire curvier figures. And quite incomprehensibly, not everyone appreciates the genius of Mozart, some find more excitement in jumping up and down to the frightening screeches of heavy metal singers. Beauty is clearly a relative concept, dependent on the preferences of the individual who is molded by his époque, environment, and culture. Beauty, we have been taught, is to be found in the eye of the beholder.
Cultural relativists go even further in this line of thinking, and say that everything humans create is equally beautiful, that the naïve, chaotic scribbles of a child are as beautiful as the masterpieces of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, or that Ludwig van Beethoven’s sublime oeuvre is on the same level as the tastelessness and vulgarity of twerking strippers on MTV, rapping with two-syllable words about sex and money, blasphemously identifying as artists. In as much as this modernist definition of beauty might be popular and politically correct, it certainly is not satisfactory. If anything can be judged beautiful by anyone, nothing is ugly, and the word beauty becomes void and meaningless.
The vision that all beauty is taste-dependent, is also disputed by the observation that some features are judged as beautiful by everyone, regardless of their surroundings. Several academic studies indicate that all the infants involved in the research had a strong visual attraction to certain facial characteristics, like big eyes, a small nose, full female cheeks, a square male jawline, and facial symmetry. Infants have not yet been programmed by societal influence, suggesting that the role biology plays in our response to beauty might be bigger than we think. If certain facial features are universally appraised as attractive, perhaps there is a beauty that transcends subjective perception, and that is undeniably, intuitively beautiful to everyone it confronts. Like a symmetrical face, but also a peach golden afternoon sky, a majestic waterfall, or a tree, this wonderfully complex, fruit-bearing, oxygen-producing structure with an abundance of leaves in a billion shades of green, growing from earth to heaven in Fibonacci sequences. This is the Absolute Beauty discussed by the aesthetes: the beauty that contains absolute, mathematical truth.
We did not invent mathematical laws, but discovered them in nature, the cradle of beauty and truth, and therefore our greatest source of inspiration, creatively and scientifically. The fairness and wisdom are there, waiting to be unraveled by humanity. Ugliness and ignorance, on the other hand, are an anomaly, a deviation from the natural standard, a work in progress. In distinguishing the beauty from the ugliness, we recognise the truths among the falsehoods, and in understanding that the truth is superior to the falsehoods, we can extend our judgments of the rational to the moral sphere, and determine what is right and what is wrong. To be good, we must first know what is good. This, then, must be the most complete definition of beauty:
Beauty contains Truth that leads to Goodness.
Aristotle understood this link and underlined the importance of teaching children to play an instrument, as that would also educate them ethically, and virtuosity would lead to greater virtue.The interconnection of those three elements makes me believe that Earth and humans are supposed to be beautiful, wise, and good, and that they are the ultimate ideals man should strive to attain in his eternal, bittersweet pursuit of happiness.