Philosophical Writings

Author(s): Hemant Shah
Publisher: Academy of Philosophy

Page 88

The Role of Beauty as a value in Everyday Life
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Beauty by nature is eternal. The forms are transitory. They can be caught in thought but Beauty iteself is unthinkable. It is to be felt and experienced. In the words of Plotinus: “In itself perfectly pure...” In the words of Upanishads, “In itself perfectly complete (Purna) which means pure. Plotinus says, “... beauties proceed from the Beautiful itself.” Upanishads say that all is beautiful because all have come from the Pure and Pure is Beautiful.
About the location of Beauty, it had been said that “Beauty lies in the eys of the beholders” as the same object may not be beautiful to others. What is required is to have the mind and heart clear and free, free of self involvement. Because of these conditions being not fulfilled, though there is beauty everywhere one finds it somewhere or nowhere.
Beauty has a typical nature - an unique characteristic. It eludes him who seeks to hold and possess. Beauty as a true value bears no selection, no comparison. According to Indians it is an absolute value. And yet Beauty once enjoyed, once experienced, there is a strong desire to repeat the enjoyment. J. Krishnamurti says “Beauty is not in the museum, in the painting, in statues or listening to concerts; beauty is not in a poem or in the lovely sky of an evening; or in the light on the water, or in the face of a beautiful person, or in a building. There is beauty only when the mind and the heart are completely in harmony and that beauty cannot be gotten by a shallow mind that is caught in the disorder of this world.”
Where disorder and disharmony exist Beauty does not.
We conclude the Nature of Beauty by mentioning it to be a state of freedom.
Ture Beauty is never dependent. Ancient Indians have considered True Beauty as "an awakening to the universal nature of things. It is the quietening of the “I” principle. It is the brightness of a consciousness which is unobserved. It is the mind which is free of transformations. Beauty is a state of freedom- freedom from the recognition, the identification of the self and the choice of