“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
– John Keats
There seems to be two different but related aspects to beauty, namely, pleasure and truth.
The hedonic view of beauty is that beauty ‘feels good’, in other words, it is a pleasure to perceive. And, what I would call the eudaemonic view of beauty, is that beauty ‘feels right’. You could say that the pleasure comes from perceiving the truth, or rightness, of something. They are two sides of the same coin. A beautiful scene feels good because it feels right.
Philosophers of art and aesthetics often ponder if we enjoy something because it is beautiful, or do we say something is beautiful because we enjoy it? Again, these are two sides of the same thing.
The late Dennis Dutton, a philosopher of art, believed there was an evolutionary purpose to the perception of beauty. Dutton said, “The experience of beauty is one of the ways that evolution has of arousing and sustaining interest or fascination, even obsession, in order to encourage us in making the most adaptive decisions for survival and reproduction.” (from Denis Dutton’s TED Talk here.)
The French writer, Stendhal, wrote “beauty is the promise of happiness.” In other words, beauty attracts us towards happiness.
Nevertheless, to perceive beauty is satisfying in itself. The experience of beauty is an intuitive feeling rather than a rational thought. John Keats used the term “negative capability” for the ability that artists have to intuit the truth by pursuing beauty and the sublime rather than using what Keats called “consecutive reasoning”.
I believe “negative capability” is another name for right-hemisphere perception which is receptive, as opposed to the grasping and rational left-hemisphere perception. The right-hemisphere perceives beauty because it does not break things into parts, it sees the complete picture and how the pieces are composed in a beautiful whole. You can’t make up the truth but you can be receptive to it and experience it when it comes.
There is something more beautiful and more truthful in a poem, a song or a painting than there is in a scientific law or mathematical equation. Great art can “capture” beauty because art is more intuitive and emotive and not logical or “consecutive”. Beauty has meaning, and meaning has beauty.
Beauty is our protest
The activist folk-singer, Phil Ochs, said “In such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty.” A lot of what humans do is ugly. Phil Ochs said this over 50 years ago and things have only got uglier since then.
To do what is right, is to make beauty our protest. That begs the question, what is right for people and our shared planet? Right is to both care and not harm. To care for nature and people is beautiful. Whereas, to harm people or nature is ugly. Sustainability involves embracing the responsibility of care all people naturally have. We need to care for each other and our natural environment. That is what sustainability is.
Sustainability is inherently beautiful because it is right.
“In such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty.”
– Phil Ochs