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Philosophical Writings
2. ON BEAUTY 2.1. Meaning and Concept :
The term 'Beauty' as a quality of the 'beautiful is though familiar to everybody, its understanding has proved exceedingly difficult. It is generally agreed and accepted as a value, and its first essential quality is to please. It is our experience that whenever we contemplate any such object that is beautiful, the feeling of pleasure is stirred up in our souls. This is a very prominent subjective aspect. We should also note that “the objective aspect of beautiful objects has largely remained a puzzle or mystery. Some aestheticians are inclined to deny its very existence, while others assert that beauty is inherent in, or dependent on, the object of easthetic experience themselves; a few even maintain, following Plato, that beauty has transcendent existence in which it coincides with the True and the Good. The puzzle is so profound that Kant came to regard it as an antinomy, or a contradiction that has to be nevertheless accepted."
Prof A Zee., one of the intellectual dessendents of Albert Einstein, exploring the search for Beauty in Modern Physics, says, "But, in fact, aesthetics has become a driving force in contemporary physics. Physicists have discovered something of wonder : Nature, at the fundamental level, is beautifully designed. .............. Let us worry about beauty first, and truth will take care of itself. Such is the rallying cry of fundamental physicists”.? An Indian aesthetician, Rupa Goswami, compares, beauty with “the unrealised shadowy something of the pearl visible in a body. We preceive it but cannot name it”.
In order to understand beauty let us note how it has been described/explained by some reputed philosophers and scholars. Both, the ancient Greeks and Indian Vedas spoke of Truth, Beauty and Goodness, as also Bliss and Consciousness as the attributes of Perfect Being. According to Platonic philosophy, the soul of man, before this world, had dwelt in the the pure world of being, where there is no becoming, a world of perfect Beauty, Harmony and Light. Therefore here in this world of senses, ephemeral shadows
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