Ecclesiasties, verses 11-23
"Look upon the rainbow, and praise him that made it; very beautiful it is in the brightness thereof. It compasseth the heaven about with a glorious circle, and the hands of the most High have bended it."
HE Huntley, "The Faith of a Physicist", page 12
"My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky.....
---so does the physicist in the laws governing its manifestation."
Mohammed
"If I had only two loaves of bread, I would barter one to nourish my soul."
Richard Jeffries
"The hours when we are absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live....... These are the only hours that absorb the soul and fill it with beauty. This is real life, and all else is illusion, or mere endurance."
According to the "Shorter Oxford English Dictionary", beauty is
"that quality or combination of qualities which affords keen pleasure to the senses, especially that of sight, or which charms the intellectual or moral faculties."
Continuing from "The Divine Proportion"
`` Plato, in the "Symposium", has much to say about progress from aesthetic appreciation to the enjoyment of "absolute beauty". He recounts an inspired speech by Socrates in a dramatic dialogue at the "Dinner Party". Socrates modestly attributes his views to his 'instructress' --- a woman from Mantinea, called Diotima. The following excerpts are relevant to our subject:
`` "The man who would apply himself to this goal must begin, when he is young, by applying himself to the contemplation of physical beauty..... The next stage is for him to reckon beauty of soul more valuable than beauty of body..... From morals he must be directed to the sciences and contemplate their beauty also..... [The man] who has directed his thoughts towards examples of beauty in due and orderly succession will suddenly have revealed to him as he approaches the end of his initiation a beauty whose nature is marvelous indeed, the final goal, Socrates, of all his previous efforts. This beauty is first of all external; it neither comes into being nor passes away; next, it is not beautiful in part and ugly in part, nor beautiful at one time and ugly at another..... He will see it as absolute, existing alone with itself, unique, external, and all other beautiful things as partaking of it.....`` This above all others, my dear Socrates, (the woman from Mantinea continued) is the region where a man's life should be spent, in the contemplation of absolute beauty. Once you have seen that, you will not value it in terms of gold or rich clothing or the beauty of boys and young men..... What may we suppose to be the felicity of the man who sees absolute beauty in its essence, pure and unalloyed, who, instead of a beauty tainted by human flesh and colour and a mass of perishable rubbish, is able to apprehend divine beauty where it exists apart and alone? Do you think that it will be a poor life that a man leads who has his gaze fixed in that direction, who contemplates absolute beauty with the appropriate faculty and is in constant union with it?" ``
The Italian philosopher, Benedetto Croce
"Bright robes of gold the fields adorn,
The hills with joy are ringing,
The valleys stand so thick with corn,
That even they are singing."
J Bronowski, "Science and Human Values", page 27
"When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought: beauty, he said, is unity in variety! Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature, ---- or, more exactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge's phrase, for unity in variety."
Continuing from "The Divine Proportion"
`` This inborn love of beauty, our human heritage, must find expression if we are to be happy. If the hunger for beauty remains unsatisfied, the effects are seen in loss of mental and physical health, so deep is the need.......
``...... And now we have to meet the natural objection that many would raise: they have had no experience of creative activity. They have added nothing to the store of beauty, their own ideas have been neither new nor original. They have never known the luminous moment of inspiration which widened the bounds of knowledge. They can appreciate, but cannot create beauty.
`` The answer to this objection can be stated briefly. The act of creation and the act of appreciation of beauty are not, in essence, distinguishable. This is true whether the lovely object is a work of art, a musical composition or a mathematical theorem. In the actual moment of appreciation ("I see! Yes, indeed I see! How beautiful!"), the beholder experiences those precise emotions which passed through the mind of the creator in his moment of creation. With the help of the artist he himself shares the joy of creation. This important fact has been expressed with characteristic clarity by J Bronowski:
`` "The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations --- more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or the artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art..... [This view] alone gives a meaning to the act of appreciation; for the appreciator must see the movement, wake to the echo which was started in the creation of the work. In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness..... We re-enact the creative act, and we ourselves make the discovery again..... The great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself re-creates them. They are the marks of unity in variety, and in the instant when the mind seizes this for itself, the heart misses a beat." [page 29]
`` This passage, which illuminates the meaning of empathy, should be understood by all who seek the aesthetic experience. In particular, the reader of the following pages, whether his interest is focused on the golden cuboid, or the dodecahedron, or the logarithmic spiral or the genealogy of the drone bee, should realize that, in the act of appreciation, he is re-enacting the creative act and, attracted by beauty, is experiencing himself the joy of creative activity. He is in fact, in Kepler's phrase, "thinking God's thoughts after Him". ``
And if I may finish with a quote from the Latin:
"Ars longa, vita brevis" (pronounced: arz longa, veeta brevis) ---- Art (is) long, life (is) short.
Next Lesson: What makes the golden ratio golden?
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