Aesthetics

Beauty

Scale of beauty?

The first intuitive notion of beauty is that it is different from ugliness, or from mere dullness. One could conceive that some things can be more beautiful that the other things, so that there could be some scale of beauty to apply to any phenomenon in the world and thus evaluate its aesthetic content.

In Unism, such scales are supposed to be historical and culture-dependent. The fundamental principle of the hierarchical approach states that no scale can be absolute and stay forever. Scales are developing as a result of the development of the humanity in general, and the criteria of one epoch may be not applicable to another. Thus, few modern men would like the enormous heaps of a Neanderthal "Venus", and ancient music is of mainly ethnological interest for a modern listener. Inversely, Beethoven would have been too "elitarian" a couple of centuries before.

The same holds for the syncretic assessments of "good" and "bad". The formal criteria one can provide can only work within a definite society, and any other culture assumes its own ways of evaluation. Also, the estimates of the "good/bad" type would have different meaning on different levels of reflexion. Thus, in the syncretic sense of the everyday life, these words generally belong to the emotional domain. However, on the level of art, the same words mainly refer to formal perfection, being related to the "productivity" of a scientific concept on the level of science, and describing certain social attitude on the level of philosophy.

Beauty and science

Scientists often spoke of beauty as a criterion of scientific truth, and many of them consciously tried to make their results as elegant as possible. It is well known that formal perfection makes a theory much more powerful, since it eliminates a wide class of possible errors due to the logical inconsistency and ambiguity. However, beauty was never the main goal in science, and a scientist would often be quite satisfied with an ugly theory, provided it gave the objectively verifiable results. This is especially so for modern science, with its explicitly applied orientation, when the funding party is interested in immediate results by any means, since abstract conceptualizations are poorly sold. This is one more manifestation of the same process that makes the arts so decadent in the capitalist society. Well, an artist (or a scientist) just has to take it as it is and try to do something really valuable despite of it.

However, one should understand that the beauty of science is different from the beauty of art, since conceptual forms are not exactly like aesthetic forms. Still, human reflection develops in such a way that the higher-level forms get gradually folded into elementary conceptions. In particular, scientific notions become common to the everyday reasoning, and one might expect that any perfection in science could be reproduced in the arts, using the appropriate means. Thus, for instance, one can paint Lagrange dynamics, special and general relativity, scattering matrix, etc. However, this can only be achieved within a specific ways of painting, and the influence of science on the work of art may be not evident, being mediated and disguised by thousands of other factors.

Beauty and ideas

Beauty is not the only aspect of a work of art that can deeply impress the people. Some paintings make people shiver --- but they still remain the works of art despite all their hyperbolic ugliness. There are paintings that are definitely beautiful --- but beauty does not seem to be their dominant, the center and principal idea. One could suspect that the core aesthetics of such a painting should be expressed with some other aesthetic categories. Sometimes, quite different things can be meant under the word "beauty", and a scientist or philosopher cannot be content with only feeling beauty, they have to learn what it is and where it comes from.

The works of a great artist (or a scientist!) possess an important quality that could be called "meaningfulness". They are not mere random wandering among the words (or images, narration etc.) that can be observed in the majority of modern "art" (and "science" --- alas!). The samples of true art have well perceptible integrity in them, and a kind of "drive": they make the mind roll. Even beauty fails to become artistic if it bears no meaning (though, possibly, it would cease to be beauty then). And nobody can make art if they have nothing to say. One could also call it an "idea" --- that is, something that forms the subjective core of the product, revealing its purposiveness and universality. In Russian, the word безыдейный (idealess) conveys a strong negative attitude, and it was often used in the former USSR to characterize the bulk of the bourgeois art. This Russian word was almost a synonym for yet another word, бездуховный, which could be translated as "lacking spirituality". After the counter-revolution of 1990s, the meaning of many words has been reversed in official usage, and it is what formerly was the lack of spirituality that is meant under spirituality in the bourgeois Russia. Still, the presence of idea in a cultural product failed to be renamed, and, after the destruction of the USSR, Russian mass media tried to fight it in a different way, advertising artistic freedom devoid of any purposiveness and content (except, possibly, religious piety). However, lack of spirituality and idealess "art" became boring to the public very soon, and the official ideologists try to find at least some idea to give meaning to their deeds, as well as to the bourgeois propaganda in the arts.

The presence of idea is what bridges the apparent gap between art and science. Both art and science are forms of ideology, and they can develop the same ideas, incorporating them in their specific ways. Thus, art would express the idea in an emotional manner, with the means of expression bearing the subjective attitude; on the contrary, science is apt to detach the formal aspects of any idea from its content, making it apparently impersonal. The ideas purported by art lie on the surface --- and hence may be overlooked, be lost among accessory details. The ideas of science lack the clarity of expression and may be buried in formal manipulations. However, it is the presence of idea that makes art captive and science convincing, and idealess art is as dull, as idealess science is futile.

One could also ask about the ideological basis of philosophy. Its place in the hierarchy of spirituality is to provide the links between Art and Science (and virtually between all sorts of activity). The ideas of philosophy should be as clear as art, and as deep as science, they should synthesize personalized outlook and impersonal formality, belonging to every individual, that is, being interpersonal. Few philosophies satisfied that high standards!

One of the first statements of Unism is that no idea can be fully expressible in words, or symbolic abstractions. Therefore, the means of art are as fit for conveying ideas as the means of science, and there is no reason for the dominance of either of them. An artist cannot put an idea in plain words --- and tries to express it another way. A scientist cannot put it in plain words too! --- and tries to invent a formal model to express the idea in an indirect manner. The complementarity between art and science becomes yet more like the complementarity of coordinate and momentum (or time and energy) in quantum mechanics --- and the unity of these complementary characteristics is in action (the Planck constant).

Beauty and Nature

Many people can enjoy beauty in nature: a glorious sunset, a colorful flower, a well-shaped animal... They may even wonder about the necessity of realistic art: "This is so beautiful on itself that one cannot do better --- why merely copy?" However, this view is superficial, and neither nature can give birth to beauty, nor the arts should be mere copies of nature.

The latter is easier to understand: when an artist pictures some natural phenomenon in his/her art, this phenomenon is bound to transform in a quite different thing, and nobody will identify a rose with its picture, however detailed. Transforming nature in the arts is what allows artists to express their (and hence social) attitude to natural things, thus assimilating them in the culture. Hyper-realism in the arts is as fruitless as absolute randomness --- luckily, humans rarely can be too realistic, or too random in their art.

Similarly, when a person simply looks at a natural phenomenon, this natural phenomenon looses its being on itself and becomes an object, a thing existing in its relation to the subject. Every human perception is a product, and it contains both objective and subjective components. Consequently, the way we perceive nature is different from nature itself, reflecting our personality as well as the world around us. "Natural" beauty is one of such "artifacts", self-reflection under the guise of pure contemplation. The more human we are, the more our spirituality is developed, the better we can feel the beauty of the world, and it is us who make it beautiful.