Why Beauty?
Beauty is so profound, so deep, so meaningful. Beauty makes life worth living.1 The great existential psychologist Rollo May (1985), as he explained in his book My Quest for Beauty, determined that beauty is more important than either truth or the good in Platonic philosophy: “When Plato considered the great trilogy of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, he placed Beauty at the top because Beauty is harmony, and whether Truth or Goodness are harmonious is the test of their integrity” (p. 27). In the last century the meanings of the concepts truth, beauty, and the good have been relativized and deconstructed in the post-modern world. Post-modernists assure us there is no truth, only perspectives; truth is really all about power; beauty is in the eye of the beholder, there can be no objectivity in beauty experiences; morality is all about power, whoever has the power determines what is right and wrong; there is no right and wrong, they are just cultural concepts; there are no moral universals and cannot be. Nonetheless, these concepts continue to engage human beings, one way or another (Gardner, 2011).
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1970), in his Nobel lecture for the prize in Literature, said: “One day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: ‘Beauty will save the world’. What sort of a statement is that? For a long time I considered it mere words. How could that be possible” (n.p.)? He went on to say that he couldn’t imagine how beauty could save anything based on the bloodthirsty history of our world, but he continued to reflect on what Dostoevsky meant. It dawned on him that the “ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth” (n.p.). He then described a metaphor of three great trees, and that if our world is cutting down the great tree of Truth, and the great tree of Goodness is being crushed—“then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar to that very same place, and in so doing will fulfil the work of all three? In that case Dostoevsky’s remark, ‘Beauty will save the world’, was not a careless phrase but a prophecy” (n.p., Section 2).2
Mathematicians and Physicists Chime In
James McAllister (1996), a philosopher as the University of Leiden (founded in 1575 by William of Orange, the oldest university in the Netherlands), in his Beauty and Revolution in Science, champions the critical importance of beauty to science. He develops arguments that beauty is often used for making choices between two competing theories (the more beautiful theory wins). He notes that simplicity and elegance are associated with beauty, and are highly valued by scientists in regard to theory development. He describes the connection between beauty and truth, showing that beauty is an attribute of truth. He points out that symmetry is a common sign of beauty, and that symmetrical equations are highly attractive to mathematicians and physicists. In general, his whole book is a testament to how crucial beauty is to the success and progress of science. He cites Einstein’s son Hans, also a physicist, as stating that Einstein’s “highest praise for a good theory or good piece of work was not that it was correct nor that it was exact but that it was beautiful” (p. 96). Semir Zeki, a founding father of neuroaesthetics, has provided functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI ) data to show that when mathematicians’ brains see an equation that they consider beautiful, the same part of the brain is activated as when we perceive a painting, or a piece of music, as beautiful (Zeki, Romaya, Benincasa, & Atiyah, 2014).
The Nobel Prize winning physicist Paul Dirac has been quoted as saying that “Einstein seemed to feel that beauty in the mathematical foundation was more important, in a very fundamental way, than getting agreement with observation” (McAllister, 1996, p. 96). Well, I wouldn’t want to pit beauty against observational data, but I would like to see them work hand-in-hand together. Physicist Frank Wilczek seems to think they can. He describes how beauty helped lead him to discover the equations that explain the strong force, which led to his Nobel Prize. His book, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design, is a 328 page meditation on the question, “Does the world embody beautiful ideas?” (2015, p. 1). He makes a strong case that “Yes, it does.”
A Biologist Adds a Note
Richard Prum (2017) has written a very provocative book, The Evolution of Beauty, in which he argues that animals and humans are guided by beauty in mate choice. Prum even makes the case that animals will select mates for their beauty, even if that beauty does not signify fitness or adaptive value. Sexual selection is partially based on attraction to that which creatures find beautiful. He calls it “beauty happens” (p. 54). “Throughout the living world whenever the opportunity has arisen, the subjective experiences and cognitive choices of animals have aesthetically shaped the evolution of biodiversity. The history of beauty in nature is a vast and never-ending story” (p. 120).
An Architect Takes Up the Beat
Renzo Piano (2018) delivers a delightful TED talk concerning architecture and our desire and need for beauty. “Universal beauty is one of the few things that can change the world,” he says (n.p.). “This beauty will save the world. One person at a time, but it will do it” (n.p.).
A Philosopher Sings His Song
Arthur Danto (2003), one of the greatest philosophers of aesthetics of the last half century, and professor at Columbia University, described in his The Abuse of Beauty that the idea of beauty entirely dominated the philosophical conception of aesthetics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But during the twentieth century, beauty was rejected by philosophers, artists, and art critics, due to its association with crass commercialism and the bourgeoisie. Beginning in the 1990s, beauty began to make a comeback among both artists and aestheticians. Danto was happy about the return of beauty because at that point he “came to view that in writing about beauty as a philosopher, I was addressing the deepest kind of issue there is. Beauty is but one of an immense range of aesthetic qualities … But beauty is the only one of the aesthetic qualities that is also a virtue, like truth and goodness. It is not simply among the values we live by, but one of the values that defines what a fully human life means” (pp. 14–15). And the last three sentences he wrote in Abuse of Beauty are “Beauty is an option for art and not a necessary condition. But it is not an option for life. It is a necessary condition for life as we would want to live it. That is why beauty, unlike the other aesthetic qualities, the sublime included, is a value” (p. 160).
Beauty Was There at the Beginning of Empirical Psychology
Wilhelm Wundt is often considered the founding father of empirical psychology. However, the great historian of psychology, Edwin G. Boring (1950), has written that both Gustav Fechner and Wilhelm Wundt wer...