Different ideas of Beauty

In the world of relativities, can there be the highest form of beauty? How does one set the standard for what real beauty is? Maybe, with our measuring mind, there can never be an ultimate standard of beauty. Beauty may mean different things to different people. Perhaps something more than the mind or the heart can recognize or express real beauty? Let us take a look at ideas of beauty from a few angles.

Historian and philosopher Havell makes a comparison between the perception of beauty between the Western and Eastern mind. The Western mind, more steered towards a materialistic viewpoint, views beauty as inherent in certain forms of matter and not in others. There is suggestion of a definition of beauty that denotes something as beautiful according to some principles and some not as beautiful based on some other sets of principles.
Kai Hammermeister offers further insights into the Western idea of beauty from other thinkers, from the recent to the ancient ones. He illustrates Western approach to beauty as one that was “treated together with the ideas of the good and the true as one of the aspects of being ….. There was never much doubt in any philosopher’s mind that beauty is something praiseworthy and valuable”. Beauty was an “expression of the harmony of the cosmos” according to Plato, and Plotinus proclaimed that “the visible beauty of worldly things mirrored the divine beauty”. Kai traces out that the same approach was predominant in the Middle Ages. Beauty in objects, according to the 13th century thinker, Thomas Aquinas, was “luminous symbolizations of God’s glory” (Garcia-Rivera, Graves, & Neumann, 2009).
The Eastern idea of beauty, on the other hand, is steeped in subjectivity. Beauty is not inherent in form or matter; it belongs only to the spirit and is only expressed in the outer form and can therefore, only be apprehended by spiritual vision. Sri Aurobindo’s point on the spirit in this respect in ‘Foundations of Indian Culture’ further illustrates this notion of the spirit being the seat and source of beauty (Aurobindo, 1988):
“For the Indian mind form does not exist except as a creation of the spirit and draws all its meaning and value from the spirit. This characteristic attitude of the Indian reflective and creative mind necessitates in our view of its creations an effort to get beyond at once to the inner spirit of reality it expresses and see from it and not from outside.”
In Indian philosophy, there is a definite movement away from the employment of only the sensory organs and the subsequent experience of pleasure that defines beauty. Beauty, when seen does not stop short at pleasure, a lower form of enjoyment; it can evoke Ananda or bliss, a higher form of spiritual enjoyment of the essence of beauty. Sri Aurobindo pronounces that “Where there is Ananda, Beauty finds itself expressing with ease.” (Aurobindo, 1999).
In fact, in ‘Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art’ he writes “beauty is Ananda in manifestation; beyond manifestation beauty loses itself in Ananda or, you may say, beauty and Ananda become indistinguishably one.” (Aurobindo, 1999; 14 March 1933).

According to Sri Aurobindo’s vision, Beauty is an expression of the Divine in the physical. Though the expression is in the physical, the “principle and law of Beauty” is spiritual, something having its root and emerging from within…it is this that expresses itself outwardly on the form. On a similar vein, it is also then true that it is through an object or a subject of beauty that one can touch the inner truth of things, that some intimation of the inner spirit is known and works of beauty, such as Art and Literature thrive only towards this high aim (Aurobindo, 1999; 23 August 1933). What could then be the highest form of beauty? “Beauty is the special divine Manifestation in the physical, as Truth is in the mind, Love in the heart, Power in the vital. Supramental beauty is the highest divine beauty manifesting in Matter.” (Aurobindo, 1999; 19 February 1934).