What is Beauty ?

A beautiful poem, piece of writing, painting, music or a movie takes one into an esoteric experience. Something which is almost always cannot be described verbally rather into the world of cognition. I always wanted to think that beautiful is universal, at the least to mankind. Over the years I found out that it is not the case, it is only universal when everybody has similar sensibility and value system, as in today’s globalized world. Imagine a few hundred years ago , in a not so globalized world , the practice of having a ‘small’ feet for Chinese women or extreme long necks on Burmese women or etching scales on ones’ body in Papa New Guinea was considered to be beautiful but to the rest of the world it is not. To the world , it is not even disgusting; there is complete nonchalance, no extreme emotions. Why is that? Did it not reflect a unique combination of proportion, scale, balance, symmetry and rhythm? Maybe or maybe not? However one thing was certainly different, the concept of belief in a particular world view, thus the associated morality, sense of purpose of life and so on.  This is the basis generating the perception of beauty. ‘Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder’ as they say

There is no universal beauty. It is culture, world view specific. If that is the case all the taxonomy in Aristotles ‘Poetics’  do not apply. Aristotle as such did not develop a theory of esthetics in the sense BharatMuni’s NatyaSashtra did, through the idea asserting “that entertainment is a desired effect of performance arts but not the primary goal, and that the primary goal is to transport the individual in the audience into another parallel reality, full of wonder, where he experiences the essence of his own consciousness, and reflects on spiritual and moral questions “. While I would not agree with the “reflects on spiritual and moral questions” as I believe that these are cognitive factors which in the first place drive the creation of the parallel reality and experience itself.

I believe that anything beautiful is a slice of life itself , slicing dimension maybe time, space or our consciousness. It is the reality that brings for the Baharatmuni’s Bhavas ( emotions) and subsequently the rasa( sentiments). Emotion is the instrument of action, an action which instills sentiment in the motions of sliced reality. This notion of process of slicing the reality is a very deep intellectual process as Anand Coomaraswamy ( 1877-1947) put it “ it is not by sensibilities but by his intellect that a man can be called an artist”.

So when Tagore writes his poem or Ganesh Pyne and Da Vinci does his painting or Satyajit Ray creates his cinema they are all slicing chunks of reality but with a twist. The twist is their own intellectual understanding of the reality and what do they want to communicate through it. Hoping to transform the recipients of the art through an experience to what they felt or thought.  Art is just the expression , beauty is the objective , the experience. It is not necessarily noble, pleasurable but should always be able to bring extreme emotions (bhavas) and rasas . You can either love it or hate it but will not be able to ignore it. If an work created as art can be ignored, then it is not a work of art but just another banal expression .

It is for this reason, certain works of propaganda are works of art, created to promote a particular political cause or point of view. There is always a truth in beauty, not the truth of the factual reality of the time but deep introspection of the existence of primeval human emotion and also the fact that without emotion, be it positive or negative, there is no life.

With globalization the world view is changing or more appropriately the world view is converging. In this way , slowly all over mankind a universal sense of morality, an acceptance of only way of life is becoming the norm, thus the sense of what is beautiful. In this ecosystem the idea of beautiful women or a painting or music becomes global. Since everyone will agree, a theory can be created, rules can be set and finally everything can be produced from a formal framework.  Do we, as a human being want to live in this world by drowning diversity and celebrating monolithic human attitudes is another question?

Personally I would like to live in the world where, if ever I could I would like to go in the far corners of the world and see completely different things emerging out of human ingenuity. Whether they are beautiful to me it doesn’t matter, what matters most is that they are genuinely different arising out of completely different value system. That would take me to in Bharatmunis words “to another parallel reality, full of wonder” and help me to experience the God within me .