Where there is beauty...

I have often said that my purpose in life is to seek out beauty. 

What could be a more important and fulfilling pursuit? It is beauty, after all, upon which, I would argue, all our notions of “goodness” are built. Or, somewhat less verbosely: goodness and beauty may share the same underlying shimmers of consciousness.

Beauty is the foundation not only of aesthetic realism, but of moral truth. It is fundamental to love, compassion, empathy and our desire for purity. And we seek it in everything. The beauty of an island sunrise can be as moving and infectious as the beauty of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. What separates Maradona’s “goal of the century” from The Birth of Venus? Or Kevin Carter’s The Vulture and the Little Girl, from your first kiss? Justice from empathy? A line of code from an act of kindness? Beauty is a paradox. It is as elusive as it is commonplace, and as inconsequential as it is fundamental. And I am beginning to understand why.

Beauty isn’t the image of a girl with a pearl earing, the brush strokes, the light in a Turner, or Ophelia's bed of lfowers. Beauty isn’t even the quality of a thing. Nor is it an emanation from what is. With the dying of blossoms, the wrinkling of skin, the fading of paintings, the dulling of touch, we are forced to look deeper until we realise that beauty happens when our inveterate, possessive, appraising self retreats enough for reality to reveal itself.

When we get close to beauty, we realise that in order to truly appreciate it, we need to detach. We need to remove ourselves from our programming, or programmers. Take off the culturally appropriate goggles. We need to live alongside or within beauty, without wishing for it to be different, more one thing than another, more “good”. We need to recognise that we are just one head of an eight-billion-headed beast, each with a different eye for, and ideal of, beauty.

I was reminded of this by Maria Popova in The Marginalian, who took me back to Iris Murdoch, an author who had a profound effect on me in my younger years (For those of you interested in Murdoch who haven’t seen it, I highly recommend the biopic Iris, which itself is a remarkable beauty delivered by a stupendous Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent).

Murdoch taught me (I say this as if it is a lesson learned) of the relationship between beauty and morality; that moral life requires learning to see other people as they really are, rather than through the distortions of our own ego, desires and fantasies. This is great advice beyond the realms of morality. For Murdoch, genuine moral progress comes through attention, humility and love, the patient effort to perceive reality and the other person justly (another word worth diving into). This is no small feat and something I am not sure I have genuinely seen in anyone. This, incidentally, is also how she sees beauty.

But what Popova reminded me of was not Murdoch’s sharp wit on morality, but what Murdoch termed unselfing – that very act to which I was referring earlier – the quiet, intentional act of casting aside our ego, worries, and selfishness to perceive the world, and other people, exactly as they are, without distortion. An act that Murdoch argues in her 1970 masterpiece The Sovereignty of Good, for which nature and art uniquely train us. She writes

“Beauty is the convenient and traditional name of something which art and nature share, and which gives a fairly clear sense to the idea of quality of experience and change of consciousness. I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. And of course this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care.” To complement this beautiful passage, I suggest you read the poem The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry (link).

This, of course, in no way takes away from the beauty of the experience of the brooding self. If we were to attend to it as closely as Murdoch attends to the kestrel, perhaps an equal beauty might be revealed. Because unselfing doesn’t require the object to be beautiful. It requires us to stop demanding that the object be different from what it is. Unlike Murdoch, I am open to recognising the beauty in hurt vanity. Our wounded vanity doesn’t have to become beautiful. You can simply see the wounded vanity without recoiling from it or trying to make it into something else.

For Murdoch, it seems that beauty isn’t necessarily the opposite of ugliness, but may be the opposite of self-absorption. But I feel true unselfing, as I understand it, allows beauty to be realised in anything, even self-absorption. The kestrel need not be flying separate from you. Murdoch gets us to the threshold of something that the yogic traditions have explored much more systematically: the movement through the limbs of yoga, past ego dissolution and towards oneness.

Murdoch suggests getting there a different way. She sees the dissolution of the self when in presence of great art: “The experience of art is more easily degraded than the experience of nature. A great deal of art, perhaps most art, actually is self-consoling fantasy, and even great art cannot guarantee the quality of its consumer’s consciousness. However, great art exists and is sometimes properly experienced and even a shallow experience of what is great can have its effect. Art, and by ‘art’ from now on I mean good art, not fantasy art, affords us a pure delight in the independent existence of what is excellent. Both in its genesis and its enjoyment it is a thing totally opposed to selfish obsession. It invigorates our best faculties and, to use Platonic language, inspires love in the highest part of the soul. It is able to do this partly by virtue of something which it shares with nature: a perfection of form which invites unpossessive contemplation and resists absorption into the selfish dream life of the consciousness.”

While I agree with Murdoch on the ability of art to facilitate transcendence, I find this all too judgmental for me: the notion of “greatness” somehow trivialises the idea of unselfing. 

Murdoch believes that our ego is “fat and relentless”, always looking for ways to protect and comfort itself. She believes that looking closely at something outside of ourselves, like a bird, a piece of art, or another person, shatters our self-absorption and connects us to reality. Yes, art is everything she describes, but can there really be great art then? If I need to determine that an object is sufficiently beautiful, pure or excellent before I can properly encounter it, haven’t I already placed myself between the object and reality? What if deciding what is excellent is itself a form of self-involvement?

There are obvious parallels here with the Vedic and, more explicitly, Vedantic traditions. But what interests me more (and what Murdoch made me realise) is that, as far as I am aware, the Vedas do not present a systematic “philosophy of beauty” in the aesthetic sense. There is no Vedic equivalent of a treatise asking, “What is beauty?” Yet beauty is woven deeply through Vedic poetry, especially through light, radiance, order, harmony, fertility, nature and the experience of the sacred, and it plays an important role in the texts, which seem to offer us insights into what beauty is and where we might find it. The Vedas are intentionally obscure at times, asking a lot from their readers. 

For example, the Ṛgvedic poets repeatedly describe Uṣas, the goddess of Dawn, as beautiful, radiant, young, richly clothed, smiling and revealing herself to the world. In RV 1.124, for example, Dawn appears “well attired” and “unmasks her beauty”. But the important thing is that her beauty isn't merely physical appearance. Dawn is beautiful because she reveals. She brings light where there was darkness. She makes things visible. She awakens beings. She opens pathways. She restores the world to consciousness. RV 6.64 describes Uṣas as shining, radiant and revealing her beauty, while her light makes the paths passable.

Reading these hymns, I began to wonder whether beauty might be understood as revelation.

But, as is the case with the Vedas, it gets more complicated. Uṣas doesn’t simply appear beautifully. She follows ṛta, the cosmic order. RV 5.80 describes Dawn as displaying herself in splendour while following “the path of ṛta”. That suggests that Vedic beauty is intimately connected with right order, harmony and truth. Something is beautiful not simply because it stimulates the senses, but because it participates in the underlying order of existence. Truth and order manifest as harmony, and harmony is experienced as beauty.

There are many more, equally complicated notions of beauty in the Vedas, but I was wondering how this might clash with Advaita philosophy, which tells us that there is no duality. But surely we need duality to experience beauty? And, if Brahman is non-dual, and therefore beyond all particular forms, then what exactly happens to beauty? Well, this is really where it gets fascinating and, in beautiful symmetry, echoes Murdoch’s unselfing. Nothing, the Advaita argue, possesses absolute beauty independently. Forms arise, change and disappear. Yet the awareness in which both the object and the experience of beauty appear does not arise or disappear with them. In Advaita, even the distinction between the experiencer and the experienced ultimately belongs to the realm of appearance. The Advaitic position see beauty not ultimately a property possessed by an object; it is a mode in which reality reveals itself to consciousness, while being consciousness itself. 

And this gets me asking: “Perhaps beauty is the experience of the non-separation of consciousness and form?” For a moment, when something is extraordinarily beautiful, the usual subject/object relationship can become strangely quiet. You aren’t thinking: “I am here, and that beautiful thing is over there”. You simply experience: beauty. Aren’t the most beautiful moments in life those in which separation seems to fall away? When two breaths become one?

As beautiful as this philosophy is, it’s also important, I feel, not to analyse. Not to think and question and seek so passionately. To sometimes, just allow an askew smile to be an askew smile, or that incredible connected feeling of completeness when you see a painting, to simply be a feeling. To remain separate, to feel. To stop standing outside experience and watching myself experience it. 

Perhaps beauty lives precisely in the tension between separation and non-separation.