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What is beauty? The very concept is rejected by many contemporary artists and estheticians.1
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.
Robert Pirsig put the matter thus:
"At present we're snowed under with an irrational expansion of blind data-gathering in the sciences, because there's no rational format for any understanding of scientific creativity. At present we're also snowed under with a lot of stylishness in the arts--thin art--because there's very little assimilation or extension into underlying form. We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all. And the result is not just bad, it's ghastly."2
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...