सुन्दरता के खयालात - Thoughts on beauty

What is beauty?

Think of the woman standing near a tree and admiring it's beauty. Is that beauty? Indeed!

More importantly, why is it beauty? What is so beautiful about a tree? And where else can one identify beauty?

Let us ask, what is the tree? It's nothing but the execution of a prescribed set of chemical and mechanical reactions at a cellular level. Its operations are quite utilitarian, are they not? Utility is utility, and not the same as beauty. The growth, operation, form and shape, the existence in its entirety is a result of these prescribed utilitarian operations, which serve only the purpose of survival and propagation of itself. Is that beauty? Does beauty not strike as something independent of this sort of self-service? Can something that is purely the result of simple, self-serving utilitarian operations be beautiful?

Indeed the tree is beautiful, but not the tree in the sense of itself, rather its projection onto the rest of the universe. The tree is beautiful because of the many leaves, arranged just as the are, each independently, but coming together in a peculiar harmony; because of the branches so; because of the interaction of all of that with the breeze and the surrounding. What is beautiful is the complexity of the emergent form.

The harmony struck with the environment at the macroscopic level, and a similar harmony, at a microscopic level, amongst the composing elements of a cell, each operating independently, but coming together in that peculiar harmony, that is beauty.

And it is not this emergent harmony itself, even, that is beautiful. It is its emergence, just the fact that it can happen as a result of utility, that is the beauty. Beauty comes out of nothing, and that is why it is so; that is why it is beauty.

Beauty violates physical laws, laws of conservation and of causality, and only in that it is so, it is beauty.

One asks the question: Why am I? That is beauty. The question has no function, no utility, but comes out of a process of thought, evolved through utilitarian motivations alone, operating via the chemical and mechanical interactions of independent entities that follow only physical laws, the very laws that are violated by the question that emerges from their operations. The answer to that question may well not be beautiful, but that the question is asked, is indeed.

Think again, the woman standing nearby a tree, admiring its beauty. What the woman admires is the sight of the tree, which in itself is only entertaining, not beautiful. What is entertaining is not beautiful, but that we are entertained by sights, that in itself is beautiful. The sight of the tree itself is not beautiful, but that it induces appreciation for itself in the mind of the onlooker, purposelessly, is indeed.