what is beauty

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What is beauty  The very concept is rejected by many contemporary artists and estheticians. This essay is an attempt at an advocacy of beauty; it will show how beauty is at the very core of science, clarify the creative and innovative aspects of beauty, and demonstrate its cultural universality, biological foundations, and human necessity. Finally it will show that beauty is the source of our deepest knowledge of the world, and the foundation of effective and ethical action. Part of our predicament is that the arts have been cut off from the sciences, cut off, I mean, from any coherent and well-founded and surprising conception of the cosmos that we live in and of our own bodies and nervous systems. Thus a scientific answer to the question of beauty has been until recently unavailable to artists and estheticians. At the same time science itself has been until recently--though there are encouraging signs of change--fragmented, disunified, and mortally afraid of value questions. In practice all true scientists prefer beautiful scientific theories to ugly ones. But this aspect of science is a long way from the routine of institutionalized science and has seldom penetrated through to the arts. That "spiritual sense of gravity" is close to what I mean by beauty; but to give this phrase some meaning we must pursue our first question without qualms that analysis will destroy it. Analysis could only destroy it if it had no concrete existence--which is what its critics claim, that beauty is an illusion in the eye of the beholder, an eye preconditioned by social convention and economic interest. What this essay will do is argue that beauty is an objective reality. If not beauty, what do contemporary artists propose to themselves as the meaning of their work? There are three usual answers to this question. The first is that it is enough to be new, disturbing, analytically interesting. If there is no further depth in a work of art, does not this boil down, honestly, to being what Pirsig calls stylish?--fashionable? Is not such art merely a sort of demonstration of critical ideas? The second approach is to be personal. In this view the work of art has a quality derived from the mysterious and intangible nature of the individual. But does not this answer simply shift the problem from what makes a good work of art to what makes a good human being? The third answer is that art should be socially, economically, politically correct. There are many variations of this: Marxist art; the simulation of regional or vernacular art; the art of gender politics; functionalist art. But again the question is begged: if we don't know what is a good work of art, how can we know what is
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a good society or economy or polity? And isn't functionalism merely a permit for art to be guided by unguided technology? So we must return to the idea of beauty as the goal and meaning of art. But what is beauty in the most general sense? What nontrivial description could hold true for a beautiful Inuit mask, a beautiful man or woman, the laws of thermodynamics, an arcadian landscape, a picture of an arcadian landscape, a Bach canon, the Mandelbrot set (with its microcosmic corona of Julia sets), a flowering chestnut tree, the theory of evolution by natural selection, an ...

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