Beauty manifests itself in the most diverse ways in people and in their environment. The recognition of beauty describes a path that begins on the outside and continues into the depths of the human being.
Beauty can stir overwhelm, amaze and leave you speechless. It can affect you, make you humble, quiet and devout, and it leaves very few of us cold.
Early awakening experiences
Beauty burst into my life quite suddenly. I was on my way to school, when I was around 10 years old, when it took hold of me in the form of two young girls. Both appeared so beautiful that I stood and gazed after them in amazement. A second, similar experience occurred when I was leafing through a magazine and looking at a woman advertising a face cream. The symmetry of her facial features almost took my breath away. From today’s perspective, I suspect that the face almost corresponded to the golden ratio, which I had not yet heard of at the time. However that may be, these were my ‘awakening experiences’ in relation to beauty.
Hardly any human being can ignore beauty. Why does it attract so much attention? It can show itself in almost everything in the world. Why does beauty affect so many people? Does it want to tell us something that we urgently need to know, something that is of the utmost importance for our world and for ourselves?
In the course of my further life, it was not just the beauty in facial features that caught my eye. Nature, a landscape, a bouquet of flowers, a beautifully woven fabric, music, poetry, architecture and many other things were added to the list.
The relationship to the sublime
I began to think about beauty and the power it has over me. Much has been written about the subject over the centuries. An entire science has emerged, aesthetics, the study of beauty – and a philosophy that searches for the origins of beauty. Proportion, order, harmony, consistency and more are part of beauty. But does that already explain its power over us, that can touch us so deeply? That which is beautiful has a relationship to the sublime. Sometimes we have to avert our eyes, so painfully does it affect us. Appearances in nature, in the big as well as in the small, can stir us, overwhelm us. We are not up to them. But do they not send out a message, an invitation to an inner rebirth, to become equal with them? Does beauty want to awaken something in us that belongs to us, but that we have forgotten and from which we fearfully shut ourselves off?
Plato put beauty on the same level as truth and goodness. He combined them into a tripartite unity that underlies our existence. Is there a hierarchy within this triad of truth, beauty and goodness? For Plato/Socrates, goodness was the most important, but at the same time he describes goodness – and this includes justice – as the most beautiful (in The Republic). Perhaps here the good should be understood as the ‘only good’, (the original creation of which it says in the Bible: ‘And God saw that it was good’) and not as what we, on our subjective level, call good, because: ‘No one is good, not even one’, as Jesus says. The GOOD is beautiful and true, it has no opposite. Originally, these three values produced each other reciprocally and confirmed each other instantaneously, because in the divine-spiritual, unity and simultaneity in the sense of the eternal-now prevail. With our ordinary, ‘unenlightened’ consciousness, this is not comprehensible. In our world, they inevitably appear separate from each other, and sometimes they even oppose each other. But the origin continues to influence us, driving us to further development.
Currently, aesthetics plays a major role for us when we think about beauty. In his book Ästhetisches Denken (Aesthetic Thinking), W. Welsch describes aesthetics as a process of perceiving present reality and exploring the meaning in it. Aesthetics literally means ‘the study of perception‘ or ‘the study of sensory observation’. This also includes what we call taste. We are familiar with phrases such as: I ‘find it palatable’ or ‘I don’t like the taste of it’. What does not taste good is spat out again, cannot be connected to what is already there.
I ask myself: is there also a ‘pure perception’, a tasting of the True and the Good, that can be assimilated by us? To do this, one would have to consciously free oneself from one’s own prejudiced knowledge and let the ‘common denominator’ of all beauty unfold within oneself. Beauty manifests itself in the most diverse ways in people and their works, and in nature. Tracing its roots leads us on a path that begins on the outside and continues into the depths of our being. We receive impulses for this every day. But do we pay attention to them?
Beauty in art
At an exhibition in Zurich, I saw an ordinary stone on a pedestal, protected under a glass dome as if it were a special treasure. At first, I stood somewhat perplexed in front of it. A photo was attached to the stone. It showed young people – students in Paris – throwing cobblestones. You could feel their excitement. This way of representing in all its significance the 1968 movement with a single stone impressed me. I found the exhibit successful, coherent – and therefore beautiful. It broadened my spectrum of perception. A maximal expression of a zeitgeist was illustrated with minimal means, It was an attempt to represent essence.
Similar attempts can be found in mathematical formulae. Great scientists have searched for a mathematical master formula for our world. In doing so, we go beyond the visible into the realm of ideas and ideals. Is that where ‘primal beauty’ is to be found?
Whether in the beauty of a mathematical formula, an idea or an ideal, a gesture – be it graceful or an expression of spontaneous compassion – or a beautifully formed thought, there is beauty in everything. You just have to learn to see it. The German artist Josef Beuys, for example, expanded what is commonly understood by art with the concept of ‘social sculpture’. In it, the human being becomes a potential work of art. The beauty of the idea of ‘social sculpture’ for me lies in the fact that here is someone who believes people can develop. We can, despite many setbacks, always take our normal existence as an opportunity to change so that we can constructively participate in the infinite ocean of life and so become capable of serving original creation. The motivation for this can be described as beautiful, as pure. However, there must be an active desire for transformation. This wish, this longing helps to develop corresponding soul qualities and virtues, which then show themselves as the splendour of the soul. In the book Schönheit des Innern (The Beauty of the Inner Self) by Roland Zürrer, soul qualities and virtues that can be acquired are discussed in detail. They are always accompanied by a transformation of consciousness. It is a long and sometimes painful process, as the history of humanity shows. But it is also a joyful development. The decision to take it upon oneself can be described as beautiful. In this transmutation process, the soul and the material interact.
For beauty, for truth, for the elevation of the spirit
Recently I read in a biography of N. K. Roerich an excerpt from a letter he wrote to R. Tagore, which, although written in 1939, has lost none of its relevance: In the days of the dissolution of the world that, as we know, is felt just as deeply in your heart as it is in ours, I am moved to send you this message. I often recall the momentous words in your letter to me: ‘… and I almost lose my faith in civilisation. And yet we cannot cease our efforts. Truly, for the sake of beauty, truth, the elevation of the spirit, for everything that falls within the realm of culture, we must continue to strive. If, on the one hand, we see the poisoning of space by evil thoughts and fragments, on the other hand, every word of the poet sets a purifying act. ‘Beauty will save the world’ – this motto stands as the ultimate goal.
Beauty per se does not exist, it must be recognised
Everything is a parable, is perfection, provided you open yourself to it.
The French artist Marcel Duchamp and others took the view that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ – a thought that has been with us since antiquity. What does it mean? It means that beauty does not exist per se, but is recognised as such by the observer, indeed, uncovered and perceived, elevated. Beauty takes shape as a consequence of a process of realisation. This can happen suddenly, in a second, but also after long immersion and repeated contemplation, leading to the realisation of connections that lie behind things. It is as if a new gate of perception opens. Such realisation, which I experience as a grace, involuntarily triggers a feeling of beauty, a beauty that goes hand in hand with the discovered truth of what is known. And joy arises spontaneously. Joy because consciousness expands with insight and a more comprehensive understanding arises. There is a process of growth associated with it. With progressive knowledge, I become a witness to truth, as it were.
Could a secret of beauty possibly consist in the fact that it wants to open me to a higher, ultimately perfect consciousness, that it wants to show me a way that leads to the divine? Or could it be that God, with the help of man, wants to look at his creation? The image of the vineyard arises in me, the vineyard of God, in which we are to work. How should this be possible other than in the forces of the True, the Beautiful and the Good?
References:
Welsch, W., Ästhetisches Denken (Aesthetic Thinking), Reclam 1995
Zürrer, R., Schönheit des Inneren (Beauty of the Inner), Gowinda-Verlag
Augustat, W., Das Geheimnis des Nicholas Roerich (The Secret of Nicholas Roerich), Heyne Books, 1993 (p. 129)
