Abstract
Why do we experience certain natural phenomena as ‘beautiful’? Although such experiences rely on our senses, the experience of ‘beauty’ is not limited to our perception of phenomena in the external world. We are also able to experience ‘beauty’ abstractly, i.e. with only minimal sensory input. The essay therefore also reflects on beauty encountered not just in nature, but also in mathematics and natural science. Finally, reflection is provided on the beauty that is experienced during spiritual experiences – where there is no perception, no thought and yet conscious awareness per se. So the essay unfolds with a series of reflections on the origin of our experience of beauty as being the senses, the mind, and a source that transcends the senses and the mind.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Chalmers (1997, p. 9, 10, 18) raises fundamental questions as to how we can understand the emergence and existence of consciousness and whether a physical system, no matter how complex it may be, can give rise to experience. “Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. … The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. … This subjective aspect is experience. … For any physical process we specify there will be an unanswered question: Why should this process give rise to experience? … The emergence of experience goes beyond what can be derived from physical theory.”
- 2.
Extending these considerations of beauty in nature to the matter of the so-called laws of nature, I note as well that it is reasonable to assume that the same scientific laws would exist as now, at least potentially, since we have come to accept that scientific laws have universal legitimacy, independent of how they are arrived at. I write “potentially” to indicate that they might not be discovered/developed in a world where vision was limited to the X-ray range, and that the formulation of such laws would be transformed to fit a world perceived by people with such X-ray vision. In addition, they might discover other laws that we have not yet been able to uncover, since they would have access to different data/facts than we do. It is also most likely that just as with our aesthetics, the history of science, and of the world, would be immensely different than the one we have developed/created.
- 3.
Dutton extends this evolutionary development of cross-cultural appreciation to domains other than aesthetics: “Human beings experience an indefinitely long list of direct non-artistic pleasures, experiences enjoyed for their own sake. Any such pleasures may, like those notoriously associated with sex, or sweet and fatty foods, have ancient evolved causes that we are unaware of in immediate experience.” (Ibid; 52).
- 4.
Not only can beauty be reflected on from an evolutionary perspective, the same is true for its antithesis: ugliness. For example, the avoidance of sources of nourishment characterized by what we experience as ugly, repugnant odors that are a result of decay can be understood as having led to increased probabilities of survival and reproduction and to being encoded into the human genome.
- 5.
Called after William of Ockham/Occam, circa 1285–1347.
- 6.
“Results showed that the experience of mathematical beauty correlates parametrically with activity in the same part of the emotional brain, namely field A1 of the medial orbito-frontal cortex (mOFC), as the experience of beauty derived from other sources.” (Ibid; 1).
- 7.
The renowned mathematical physicist Roger Penrose provides the fascinating perspective that, even though they lack spatiotemporal properties, mathematical objects have ontological existence and that they are in essence ‘beautiful’: “… my sympathies lie strongly with the Platonistic view that mathematical truth is absolute, external and eternal, and not based on man-made criteria; and that mathematical objects have a timeless existence of their own, not dependent on human society or on particular physical objects.” (Penrose 1989; 151).
- 8.
McAllister (1990) presents an in-depth analysis of Dirac’s writing regarding aesthetic evaluation in physics and refers to Dirac’s being motivated “… by an understanding of the limitations of empirical criteria of theory – assessment, and of the scientist’s frequent practical need to make recourse to a supplementary set of evaluative criteria in order to decide choices among competing theories.” It should not surprise us that Dirac’s ‘unorthodox’ views on the significance of aesthetic evaluation have been challenged; see e.g. (Kane 1997).
- 9.
A far more poetic, though enigmatic and impersonal expression of such a “meeting” can be found In section V of the last of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, “The Little Gidding” (Elliot 1943):
“We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.”
- 10.
Forman (1999; 172) refers to mysticism as conscious events not described or describable in terms of perception or thought: “… in short, mysticism seems to offer a procedure for unveiling certain depths of human existence … not a linguistic truth, but rather a way to slough off the onion layers of illusion and self-delusion and allow the nonlinguistic inner presence to reflexively reveal itself to itself: consciousness showing itself to consciousness.”
- 11.
There are however exceptions. For example, from the vantage point of quantum physics; a physicist investigating “quantum reality” does not observe an objective reality that is independent of us as observers, but a world of potentials. Reference can also be made to the limitations in our cognitive capabilities to have access to an “objective world” and to the influence of our personal values and experience when making observations (Pruzan 2016; 43–55).
References
Chalmers, D. 1997. Facing up to the problem of consciousness. In Explaining consciousness – The ‘Hard Problem’, ed. Shear, J. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press (Originally published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2, 200–219, 1995).
Dirac, P.A.M. 1939. The relation between mathematics and physics. Lecture held on Feb 6, 1939. Proceedings of the Royal Society. Edinburgh: Vol. 59, 1938–39, Part II, 122–129.Available at http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/events/strings02/dirac/speach.html.
———. 1963. The evolution of the physicist’s picture of nature. Scientific American 208: 45–53. Available at https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-evolution-of-the-physicists-picture-of-nature/.
Dutton, D. 2009. The art instinct: Beauty, pleasure & human evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Einstein, A. 2007. The world as I see it. San Diego: Book Tree (Originally published 1949. Available at https://archive.org/stream/AlbertEinsteinTheWorldAsISeeIt/The_World_as_I_See_it-AlbertEinsteinUpByTj_djvu.txt.
Elliot, T.S. 1943. Four quartets. New York: Harcourt. Available at http://www.davidgorman.com/4Quartets/4-gidding.htm
Forman, R.K.C. 1999. Mysticism, mind, consciousness. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Hawking, S., and L. Mlodinow. 2010. The grand design: New answers to the ultimate questions of life. New York: Bantam Books.
Hoffman, D.D. 2008. Conscious realism and the mind-body problem. Mind & Matter 6 (1): 87–121.
Huxley, A. 1985. The perennial philosophy. London: Triad, Grafton Books. (Originally published 1945).
Kane, M. 1997. Beauty & science. Philosophy Now Issue 17.
Kant, I. 1788. The critique of practical reason (T.K. Abbott, Trans.). Available at http://philosophy.eserver.org/kant/critique-of-practical-reaso.txt
Kelly, E.F., et al. 2007. Irreducible mind: Toward a psychology for the 21st century. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Keltner, D. 2009. Born to be good – The science of a meaningful life. New York: W.W. Norton.
Kornfield, J. 2000. After the ecstasy, the laundry: How the heart grows wise on the spiritual path. New York: Bantam Books.
McAllister, J.W. 1990. Dirac and the aesthetic evaluation of theories. Methodology & Science 23: 87–102.
Penrose, R. 1989. The emperor’s new mind: Concerning computers, minds and the laws of physics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pruzan, P. 2003. From optimization to transformation – My path to the wellspring of rationality, morality and spirituality. Faces of Business Ethics (special issue of Society and Economy), Budapest University of Economic Science, 25: 123–138.
———. 2009. Rational, ethical, spiritual perspectives on leadership: Selected writings of Peter Pruzan. Oxford: Peter Lang.
———. 2010. “Matematik, virkelighed og moral” (“Mathematics, reality and morals”). In Maskinen skabt i menneskes billede (“The machine created in the image of man”), ed. B. Jørgensen et al., 31–42. Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag.
———. 2015. The source of ethical competency: Eastern perspectives provided by a westerner. In Business and the greater good: Rethinking business ethics in an age of crisis, ed. K.J. Ims and L.J.T. Pedersen, 117–148. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
———. 2016. Research methodology – The aims, practices and ethics of science. Cham: Springer.
———. 2018. Science and spirituality. In Routledge international handbook of spirituality & society, eds. Laszlo Zsolnai and Bernadette Flanagan. New York: Routledge.
Russell, B. 1919. The study of mathematics. In Mysticism and logic: And other essays. London: George Allen & Unwin. Cited from the ebook: Project Gutenberg’s Mysticism and logic: And other essays, produced by J. Howse, A. Mastronardi and the online distributed proofreading team. Available at http://www.pgdp.net/.
Trasi, N. 1999. The science of enlightenment. New Delhi: D.K. Printworld University College London (Feb. 12, 2014) Science Daily. Available at www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140212183557.htm.
Ullman, N.D.R., and N.D.J. Reichenberg-Ullman. 2001. Mystics, masters, saints and sages. Berkley: Conari Press.
University College London (Feb. 12, 2014) Science Daily. Available at www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140212183557.htm.
Van Biema, D. 2006. TIME magazine. November 5, 2006. Available at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1555132,00.html.
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet known by his nom de plume Voltaire) quoted 1924 in The Philosophical Dictionary, Selected and Translated by H.I. Woolf, New York; Knopf. Scanned 1995 by the Hanover College Department of History.
Ward, P.D., and D. Brownlee. 2004. Rare earth: Why complex life is uncommon in the universe. New York: Copernicus Books.
Weinberg, S. 2012. Beautiful theories. In Albert Einstein memorial lectures, ed. J. Bekenstein and R. Mechoulam, 81–108. Israel: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and Singapore: World Scientific Publishing. Reprinted from 1994. Dreams of a final theory: The scientists search for the ultimate laws of nature, 132–165. New York: First Vintage Books Edition.
Wigner, E. 1960. The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences. Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics 13 (1): 1–14. Wiley, New York. Also available at www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html.
Zeki, S. et al. 2014, February 13. The experience of mathematical beauty and its neural correlates. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Available at https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00068
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pruzan, P. (2018). On the Experience of Beauty in Nature, in Mathematics and Science, and in Spirituality. In: Bouckaert, L., Ims, K., Rona, P. (eds) Art, Spirituality and Economics. Virtues and Economics, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75064-4_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75064-4_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-75063-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-75064-4
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)