The soul of beauty

Romanticism: the first counterculture

The first decade of the current century (give or take) saw the publication of a series of books proclaiming the victory of science and reason over religion. The commercial success of such works as Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion,¹ Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great,² Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality,³ and Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape⁴ made it clear that the story these writers have to tell is one that a powerful part of Western culture wants told.

More recently, another series of extraordinarily successful books and articles have appeared concerning the advancement of scientific knowledge about the human brain: how it works and how it possesses (produces, accounts for) those mystifying capacities commonly known as consciousness, emotion, and creativity. Unlike those scientists and critics at war with religion, it is much less clear that these writers have an antagonist, but it is obvious that neuroscientists are trying to explain phenomena that until the last few decades were thought to be in the field of philosophy, the arts, and the humanities.

In The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers,⁵ the essayist and social critic Curtis White bemoans the lack of significant pushback from members of these fields. White has no beef with honest, fact-based, data-driven science. The “science” to which the title of his book refers is “science as ideology” — a scientism which “takes its too-comfortable place in the broader ideology of social regimentation, economic exploitation, environmental destruction, and industrial militarism that, for lack of a better word, we still call capitalism.” The question that most concerns him is, “to what degree Western culture, or some meaningful part of that culture, can free itself from the delusions on which the ideology of science is based, and find the resources to compose an alternative narrative about what it means to be human.”

What particularly caught my attention when reading White’s book was the passages quoted in which scientists and science popularizers express their amazement at the beauty of the cosmos, of M-theory, or — in Dawkins’ case — “the dizzy heights of complexity, beauty and apparent design dazzling us today” to which natural selection “has lifted life from primeval simplicity.” For authors of popular science books, feeling dazzled is a consistent response to the grandeurs of the universe. This makes White wonder:

If science writers were to be consistent, wouldn’t it make more sense for them say something more like: “That? That’s the Eagle Nebula. It’s nothing special. There are billions of nebulae. Some of them make stars, like we need more stars. We can barely see the ones we’ve got. Dazzling? I don’t know what you mean. It’s a nebula.” Wouldn’t that be more consistent with their assumption that everything is just a product?

— a product of physics, natural selection, brain chemistry or any other mechanical process. In other words:

There is an unacknowledged system of extra-scientific value at work that science refuses to take responsibility for, either because it is unaware of the presence of the system or because it doesn’t wish to disturb its own dogmatic slumber.

M16 The Eagle Nebula and Pillars of Creation, astrophotograph by Shawn Nielsen (via telescope.live)

White surmises that Dawkins and others of his ilk would be indignant if you suggested that his position — that a human is just a “product” of evolution — provides no explanation at all for why this product should be dazzled or amazed by anything. Nobody will be surprised that the New York Times published a scalding review of The Science Delusion. While the author of this review gives vent to the obligatory indignation, he misses the important point that White is trying to make. “Beauty in any context is hard to define,” concedes Simon Singh in his book Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe,⁶ “but we all know it when we see it.” That precisely is White’s point: how do we know it when we see it? Who can look at images from the Hubble telescope and not feel something? So what is the source of this feeling of awe? Who ordered that? And I have yet to mention the beauty that motivates theoretical physicists and mathematicians like Henri Poincaré,⁷ who wrote:

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living. Of course I do not here speak of that beauty which strikes the senses, the beauty of qualities and of appearances; not that I undervalue such beauty, far from it, but it has nothing to do with science; I mean that profounder beauty which comes from the harmonious order of the parts and which a pure intelligence can grasp.

(Let us take note, incidentally, of the obsolete notion that science is in the business of ordering parts.) There is another sense in which science can be beautiful. Towards the end of his book, White hazards this observation:

To return to the question with which I began this book, why does science call what it learns — through telescopes, fossils, or elegant equations — beautiful? ... I will hazard an observation: when scientists get excited about a discovery, their excitement is mostly about the dissonance of their new knowledge. We thought the Earth was at the center of the universe, well, see this, we orbit around the sun. We thought that man was created in God’s image, well, see this, the fossil. We thought that chemistry was a matter of substances, well, see this, the atom and its electrons. We thought gravity was exclusively a force, well, see this, the warp of spacetime. Science is beautiful when the confirmation of its theories disconfirms the dominant beliefs of the culture it is working within.

The first movement to push back against the emerging dominance of the scientific and rationalist worldview — including the materialism, instrumentalism, capitalism, and social regimentation that it brings with it — was romanticism.⁸ While romanticism comes in many different flavors, early German romanticism (ca. 1796–1804) has pride of place among them, not least because it offers the most philosophical expression of the romantic movement. One common concern that unifies all romantic contributions is their advocacy of the primacy of beauty; if the romantic ideal is to materialize, aesthetics should permeate and shape human life.

Although the romantic pursuit of aesthetics marks a break with the Enlightenment, the romantics’ focus on and praise for rational and autonomous criticism is continuous with the Enlightenment’s commitment to rational criticism. The German romantics in particular never attempted to replace reason with faith, mere feeling, or unchecked intuition. Instead, they wished to bring out the rationality of the passions and the passionate nature of reason.⁹ They extended Kant’s renowned maxim that “Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind,” suggesting that reason without feeling is empty and feeling without reason is blind. Instead of dismissing reason, they merely challenged such dogmatic uses of reason as system-building and the laying down of absolute foundations.

An important romantic concept was irony. Irony is a mode of self-restriction, an existential condition of humility. It is creative — constructive of perspectives on the world or on the Absolute — but at the same time it is destructive of the pretension implicit in any particular perspective — the pretension to be the one true perspective, the God’s-Eye view, the view from nowhere. The romantic treatment of the Absolute was therefore distinctively different from the idealistic one. While the idealists took the Absolute to be conceptually representable and inferentially related to other items of knowledge, the romantics regarded it as ungraspable by concepts and as non-foundational: it cannot serve as the foundation of a metaphysical system à la Fichte or Hegel.

But if not through concepts, how can one approach the Absolute? Although scholars of romanticism disagree about the exact nature of the romantic approach to the Absolute, they widely agree that it includes aesthetic pleasure, the exhilaration of artistic creation, longing for the infinite and unconditioned, and love. In contrast to many a modern thinker, the romantics regarded love rather than self-interest as a basic condition of human nature and as the proper basis for a genuine sociable but pluralistic community. They further held that social bonds should not be upheld by laws that are imposed on individual citizens from outside, but by natural love and affection. (This, of course, calls for the evolution of a genuinely supramental consciousness.¹⁰)

One of the romantics’ central aims was to (re)enchant nature in the face of the threat posed by modern science — the treat of alienating human beings from nature, which had come to be viewed as a domain of brute determination by mechanical causality. To the romantics, nature was organic rather than mechanical. It was a whole (rather: a one) reciprocally interdependent on its parts (the many), a domain of teleological rather than mechanical causality, a living force self-generating and self-organizing. The romantics aspired to counterbalance the merely mathematical use of reason characteristic of modern science in order to open (in the words of Novalis) an era “When no more numbers and figures feature / As the keys to unlock every creature” (Wenn nicht mehr Zahlen und Figuren / Sind Schlüssel aller Kreaturen).

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, a quintessential romantic work by Caspar David Friedrich (ca. 1818). The midpoint of the painting rests at the man’s chest. To the Romantics, the heart was the center of the universe.

Let us now return to this crucial question: how do we know beauty when we see it? We see it when we feel it, but what accounts for this feeling? How is it that we are capable of feeling, and therefore seeing, and therefore knowing beauty? In a related inquiry, Sri Aurobindo asks: “Why should Brahman, perfect, absolute, infinite, needing nothing, desiring nothing, at all throw out force of consciousness to create in itself these worlds of forms?” To this question he offers the following answer: if Brahman “indulges its power of movement and formation, it can be only for one reason, for delight. This primary, ultimate and eternal Existence, as seen by the Vedantins, ...is a conscious existence the very term of whose being, the very term of whose consciousness is bliss.” [LD 98]

In other words, that which has thrown itself out into forms is a triune Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, Sachchidananda, whose consciousness is in its nature a creative or rather a self-expressive Force capable of infinite variation in phenomenon and form of its self-conscious being and endlessly enjoying the delight of that variation. [LD 99]

The unconditioned delight at the heart of reality manifests itself first and foremost in the process of creation (as the joy of creation) and in its result (as “the spontaneous bliss that beauty gives”.¹¹)

Sri Aurobindo has devoted an entire chapter to the subject that was at the heart of the Romantic discourse, to wit: beauty and its relation to reason.¹² I shall conclude today’s mailing with some passages from this chapter.

A complete and universal appreciation of beauty and the making entirely beautiful our whole life and being must surely be a necessary character of the perfect individual and the perfect society.

Where the greatest and most powerful creation of beauty is accomplished and its appreciation and enjoyment rise to the highest pitch, the rational is always surpassed and left behind. The creation of beauty in poetry and art does not fall within the sovereignty or even within the sphere of the reason. The intellect is not the poet, the artist, the creator within us; creation comes by a suprarational influx of light and power which must work always, if it is to do its best, by vision and inspiration.

Genius, the true creator, is always suprarational in its nature and its instrumentation even when it seems to be doing the work of the reason; it is most itself, most exalted in its work, most sustained in the power, depth, height and beauty of its achievement when it is least touched by, least mixed with any control of the mere intellectuality and least often drops from its heights of vision and inspiration into reliance upon the always mechanical process of intellectual construction.

[Great art] seeks for a deeper and original truth which escapes the eye of the mere sense or the mere reason, the soul in them, the unseen reality which is not that of their form and process but of their spirit. This it seizes and expresses by form and idea, but a significant form, which is not merely a faithful and just or a harmonious reproduction of outward Nature, and a revelatory idea, not the idea which is merely correct, elegantly right or fully satisfying to the reason and taste. Always the truth it seeks is first and foremost the truth of beauty,— not, again, the formal beauty alone or the beauty of proportion and right process which is what the sense and the reason seek, but the soul of beauty which is hidden from the ordinary eye and the ordinary mind and revealed in its fullness only to the unsealed vision of the poet and artist in man who can seize the secret significances of the universal poet and artist, the divine creator who dwells as their soul and spirit in the forms he has created.

The spirit of the real, the great classical art and poetry is to bring out what is universal and subordinate individual expression to universal truth and beauty, just as the spirit of romantic art and poetry is to bring out what is striking and individual and this it often does so powerfully or with so vivid an emphasis as to throw into the background of its creation the universal, on which yet all true art romantic or classical builds and fills in its forms. In truth, all great art has carried in it both a classical and a romantic as well as a realistic element,— understanding realism in the sense of the prominent bringing out of the external truth of things, not the perverse inverted romanticism of the “real” which brings into exaggerated prominence the ugly, common or morbid and puts that forward as the whole truth of life. The type of art to which a great creative work belongs is determined by the prominence it gives to one element and the subdual of the others into subordination to its reigning spirit. But classical art also works by a large vision and inspiration, not by the process of the intellect.

[T]he conscious appreciation of beauty reaches its height of enlightenment and enjoyment not by analysis of the beauty enjoyed or even by a right and intelligent understanding of it, — these things are only a preliminary clarifying of our first unenlightened sense of the beautiful,— but by an exaltation of the soul in which it opens itself entirely to the light and power and joy of the creation. The soul of beauty in us identifies itself with the soul of beauty in the thing created and feels in appreciation the same divine intoxication and uplifting which the artist felt in creation.

The search for beauty is only in its beginning a satisfaction in the beauty of form, the beauty which appeals to the physical senses and the vital impressions, impulsions, desires. It is only in the middle a satisfaction in the beauty of the ideas seized, the emotions aroused, the perception of perfect process and harmonious combination. Behind them the soul of beauty in us desires the contact, the revelation, the uplifting delight of an absolute beauty in all things which it feels to be present, but which neither the senses and instincts by themselves can give, though they may be its channels,— for it is suprasensuous,— nor the reason and intelligence, though they too are a channel,— for it is suprarational, supra-intellectual,— but to which through all these veils the soul itself seeks to arrive. When it can get the touch of this universal, absolute beauty, this soul of beauty, this sense of its revelation in any slightest or greatest thing, the beauty of a flower, a form, the beauty and power of a character, an action, an event, a human life, an idea, a stroke of the brush or the chisel or a scintillation of the mind, the colours of a sunset or the grandeur of the tempest, it is then that the sense of beauty in us is really, powerfully, entirely satisfied. It is in truth seeking, as in religion, for the Divine, the All-Beautiful in man, in nature, in life, in thought, in art; for God is Beauty and Delight hidden in the variation of his masks and forms. When, fulfilled in our growing sense and knowledge of beauty and delight in beauty and our power for beauty, we are able to identify ourselves in soul with this Absolute and Divine in all the forms and activities of the world and shape an image of our inner and our outer life in the highest image we can perceive and embody of the All-Beautiful, then the aesthetic being in us who was born for this end, has fulfilled himself and risen to his divine consummation. To find highest beauty is to find God; to reveal, to embody, to create, as we say, highest beauty is to bring out of our souls the living image and power of God.

1. R. Dawkins, The God Delusion (Bantam Press, 2006).

2. C. Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve Books, 2009).

3. A. Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions (Norton, 2011).

4. S. Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (Free Press, 2010).

5. C. White, The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers (Melville House, 2013).

6. S. Singh, Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe (Harper Perennial, 2005).

7. H. Poincaré, The Value of Science, p. 8 (Dover Publications, 1958).

8. Much of following material on romanticism is gleaned (sometimes verbatim) from K. Gorodeisky, 19th Century Romantic Aesthetics, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2016 Edition).

9. Here is a striking testament to the passionate nature of reason: “But the years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing, their alternations of confidence and exhaustion, and the final emergence into the light — only those who have experienced it can understand that.” — A. Einstein, as quoted by C.W. Misner, K.S. Thorne, and J.A. Wheeler, Gravitation, p. 43 (Freeman, 1973).

10. See here, here, and here.

11. Sri Aurobindo, Savitri: a Legend and a Symbol, p. 277 (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1997).

12. Sri Aurobindo, The Suprarational Beauty, in: The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, War and Self-Determination, pp. 136–145 (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1997).