The Promise of Beauty and Why It Matters

By Shakti Maira

'A concern for beauty would certainly make us better shapers of the world.' - Roger ScrutonThe idea of beauty is highly conflicted terrain. Does it only have to do with how things look? Is it merely prettiness? Is it entirely subjective? Does it serve a function?Historically, beauty has been held in high esteem: 'beauty is truth, truth beauty,' the poet Keats wrote. Why then do the high priests of the arts and the arguably progressive socio-political thinkers of the day shun it? Shakti Maira explains how the problem lies with the confused understanding of beauty and with beauty becoming superficially located: quite literally, on the skin. What would happen, he asks, if beauty were to become central to every aspect of our lives: environment, education, economics and governance? Maira engages eighteen eminent thinkers in a series of conversations around the difficult, enthralling notion of beauty.Scientists explore whether there is an evolutionary purpose to it. Philosophers examine its relationship to truth and goodness. Artists speak of beauty and its rejection. Brain-mind experts consider whether the experience of it strengthens certain neural pathways connected with the qualities of balance, harmony, rhythm and proportion. Activists probe how beauty works in the context of social systems. What emerges is a deeper understanding of beauty and how it is a key to our world: a radical new way of evaluating problems and finding solutions, from the personal to the political, the individual to the universal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: Dec 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9789352641680

Shakti Maira

Shakti Maira is a critically acclaimed artist-philosopher whose work has been widely exhibited and is in the collections of the National Gallery of Modern Art in India and in private collections around the world. He speaks and writes on art, aesthetics and culture in India and abroad, and has contributed essays to three anthologies: Transmissions and Transformations edited by Kapila Vatsyayan, The Cult of the Goddess edited by Arputha Rani Sengupta, and Artistic Visions and the Promise of Beauty, which he co-edited with Kathleen Higgins and Sonia Sikka. In 2005, he helped organize the 'Learning through the Arts in Asia' symposium in New Delhi and was invited by UNESCO to formulate the 'Asian Vision of Arts in Education: Learning through the Arts'. In 2012, he co-organized an international conference, 'The End of Art and the Promise of Beauty', held in New Delhi. His first book, Towards Ananda: Rethinking Indian Art and Aesthetics (2006) focused on contemporary art and its place in the emerging global art scene. The Promise of Beauty and Why It Matters is his second book. .

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Around the world, the preoccupation with economic growth seems to have created a rather topsy-turvy type of progress. There has been an enormous increase in the production, trade and consumption of material goods, but simultaneously, a disturbing degradation of our physical and social environments. These have become more polluted, less balanced and healthy; and disproportions, inequalities and tensions in them have grown. We find a loss of harmony and beauty at many levels. And, as an artist, I have watched beauty being dismissed and conceptually banished from the arts with dismay.

Why, I wonder, are more people not bothered by this proliferation of ugliness around us? Why are we not demanding greater beauty from the people who manage our societies, the politicians and administrators, from our artists and builders, from our neighbours, and indeed, ourselves?

When I began to talk to people about this, I found that though most people are troubled by the loss of beauty in their lives, they don’t quite know how to articulate it or actually even think about what beauty is and why it matters. There are several reasons for this.

The word ‘beauty’ has lost its clarity. In everyday language, it has become a mere synonym for attractiveness and prettiness. It is often used as a general and amorphous adjective, interchangeably with good, pleasing, terrific, wonderful, great and excellent. We might say we had a ‘beautiful meal’ and mean that it was delicious, or we had a ‘beautiful day’ and mean that everything went rather well, or we might say that was a ‘beautiful goal’ or a ‘beauty of a catch’ in talking about a football or cricket match when we meant it was a skilful goal or a difficult-to-make catch. The word has even been used to describe bombs and wars – ‘it was a beautiful war’ or ‘it’s a beauty of a bomb’!

The idea of beauty has also become very superficial. ‘Is beauty skin-deep?’ is a question that has been asked and, for all practical purposes, the answer we seem to have collectively given is ‘yes’. It is exactly where we seem to locate beauty: on the surface of things, on the visible form, and even, quite literally, on the skin. A publisher I met a few years ago on a trip to the UK didn’t seem at all perturbed about titling a new book he was publishing on cosmetics and skin care, Holistic Beauty.

Two other points need to be made about this widespread confusion about beauty. One is the subjectivity associated with beauty and captured by the popular adage: ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder'. The other is the valid need to resist the idea of fixed and inviolate definitions of beauty that qualify some things and some people as beautiful and others not, with all the attendant problems of who decides what or who is beautiful and the culture, race, and gender issues that are wound up with the idea that beauty is fixed and definable. It isn’t. These issues of the slippery subjectivity of beauty and the tyranny of absolutism in beauty are, in a sense, related misunderstandings. Is beauty subjective? Yes, it is. But that does not diminish its importance. That is the fallacy of a world view that gives undue importance to the non-subjective, the measurable and the absolute. A world view that has been out of touch with the dynamic, changing, interlinked and relational reality of the world and one that is, I think, beginning to recede.

There are signs of a renewed interest in beauty and some efforts are being made to revive the place of beauty in our lives beyond the limited confinement of beauty salons and cosmetic products. This book is part of this movement for change. It makes the case that by making our world and our lives more beautiful, we will solve many of the systemic problems we face today: the growing environmental crisis, an economic system that leads to increased disparities of income, wasteful consumption, and the depletion of resources our children will need in the future.

To explore what beauty is and why it matters, I thought it would be best to do it through a series of dialogues with accomplished scientists, philosophers, art practitioners, social thinkers and activists from many cultures. The common thread that brings these eighteen eminent people together is that all of them have expressed a concern for beauty in their work or writings. In talking to them, we get a chance to examine and understand beauty from diverse, multidisciplinary, and cross-cultural perspectives.

I discuss with them whether beauty is a property of things or an entirely subjective experience, what the types and levels of beauty are, the triangulation of beauty with truth and goodness in Western philosophy and Asian cultures, the role of harmony, balance, proportion and rhythm in beauty, and the place of beauty in art. We talk about the agency of beauty in nature and in human systems, how beauty can be cultivated and also what inner beauty is.

I believe we are in the early stages of a paradigm shift that is based on a more relational understanding of life. We are discovering and remembering that the planet and all its forms of life are webbed, interconnected and interrelated. This is now called the ‘systems view’ and it is helping us see the limitations of reductionist approaches in the sciences, technologies, and social systems that ignore interrelationality, interconnectedness and the qualitative. We all have the challenge of imagining and creating new ways of living that are ecologically aware, cooperative, artistic, balanced and harmonious, and I wanted to explore whether beauty and aesthetics are crucial to the new ways we are looking for.

Beauty was not always seen with the jaundiced and superficial gaze of recent times. It was once a part of the high trinities of Greek and Indic philosophies: ‘Truth, Beauty, Goodness’, and ‘Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram’. In early Western civilization, there were high concepts of beauty and the Greek philosophers considered beauty a path for the soul’s union with the Ultimate. A major shift occurred during the European Renaissance, when beauty went from, what the Harvard sociologist P.A. Sorokin termed, the ‘ideational’ phase to being something primarily sensory, which he called the ‘sensate’ phase. Beauty fell from the lofty trinity that John Keats alludes to in his famous ode: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’, to a more material and sensory phenomenon.

There have been other significant reasons for this waning of beauty: its awkwardness with science and its placement in postmodern philosophy. Being subjective and difficult to quantify and measure, the reality of beauty does not fit well with traditional scientific methods and, hence, science disregards it. Postmodernism, which has become the dominant cultural philosophy of our times, finds beauty awkward, as judgements of beauty are prone to the abuses of power. Ideas of beauty have become misfits in contemporary socio-political agendas, like feminism and multiculturalism. Art historians, critics and curators of modern and postmodern art have dismissed beauty from contemporary art practices. In postmodern critique, which has aggressively questioned the foundations of epistemology, beauty has been devalued along with truth and goodness. At the same time, individualism and postmodernism have made it difficult and unpopular to think about beauty beyond the personal and subjective.

The more I thought about the proliferation of ugliness and the recession of beauty in modern life, the clearer it became that it had to do with poor relationality. When relationality is healthy and harmonious – it could be in the form of a flower or a relaxed and happy face, the placement of buildings or just the cleanliness of a street – beauty is present. When it is not, things appear and feel ugly, and are in fact so when rationally analysed. Most of our problems, environmental, socio-economic and health, arise out of disharmonies, disproportionalities, imbalances and a lack of synchronization. In one way or another, ugliness is caused by poor relationality.

I remember the old aphorisms in Eastern and Western thought which claim that beauty is based on balance, harmony, proportion and rhythm and I wonder if this could be a way of looking at today’s problems and to conceive their solutions. After all, everyone has a sense – a nose and an eye – for beauty. Would our lives improve if we used our instincts for beauty as a guide for living, rejecting what seems ugly and embracing what is beautiful? Especially, if we keep in mind that beauty is about much more than how things look on the surface.

Surely, beauty, or its absence, is an undeniable part of our sense of wellness, well-being, and rightness. When I hear people grumble about life, I notice they turn to their innate sense of beauty and ugliness and say this or that is ugly or is no longer beautiful. When people say life is not so beautiful any longer, it is not just because of how their street, neighbourhood or city looks, which is certainly a part of it, but due to a larger sense of it being ‘out of whack’. Just like the human pulse can tell doctors in the Ayurvedic and Chinese medical systems much about the health of a person, I think our sense of beauty can tell us about the state of wellness of things around us. One could even say, as the truth, goodness, beauty triangulation suggests, that beauty is imbued with goodness and truth. That it forms in rightness and wholesomeness, and that our sense or instinct for beauty has this triangulation ingrained in it. This is why things that are not good usually feel ugly, though not always, and the same holds for untruths and dishonesty.

This might help explain why many of us are experiencing a growing ugliness in our societies. It is because of the many imbalances and disharmonies, like the filth and pollution in the environment; the rise of new diseases such as cancers and immune system malfunctions; the alarming growth of mental disorders such as depression, bipolar conditions and attention disorders. To this list, we could add the problematic dynamics of our capital-intensive socio-economic-technological systems that are exaggerating disproportions between people in wealth, income and opportunities and that are making life on earth less sustainable. Despite rising GDPs (gross domestic products) and a dazzling array of new technologies we are not seeing a commensurate growth in human happiness and well-being.

The connections between the shared philosophic insights about beauty in the classical traditions of the East and West and developments in contemporary science led to an ‘aha’ moment when it occurred to me that everything in life, at all levels, occurs and exists in relationality and that beauty is fundamentally about relational excellence. It became apparent to me that each of these four important qualities – harmony, balance, proportion and rhythm – is relational and dynamic. Balance is a momentary state of equilibrium in a dynamic flow, not stasis; harmony is a state of relational excellence within perpetual change, not a fixed idyllic state; proportion is contextual, not absolute; and rhythm is, obviously, dynamic and flowing. It became clearer that there cannot be any ‘absolute’, ‘permanent’ and ‘timeless’ beauty, as beauty is always subjective, contextual and experiential.

This suggested an exciting possibility that if contemporary life is becoming less beautiful or ugly because of the many problems that have occurred because of disharmonies, the lack of proportion, imbalances, and breakdowns in the rhythms of life, the solutions for well-being and health – personal, social, and global – might lie in paying attention to beauty. It led me to ask about the unity between origin, function and structure in beauty and whether beauty, visible or hidden, is a fundamental organizing system in the ‘relational’ world. It also led me to ask whether ‘beauty’ and its relational values of harmony, balance, proportionality and rhythm may offer a sort of master key to solve a range of problems, some of which stem, in part, from a confusion and misunderstanding of the idea of beauty. I saw new possibilities for the creation of beauty through attention and emphasis on the quality of relationships, which could be applied in all disciplines – economics, business, engineering, medicine and architecture.

This, I think, is the fundamental importance of beauty – it is about the qualities in and of all relationships and it offers us a relational value system that has wide applicability.

My motivation for having these dialogues on beauty and compiling them into a book is to get a conversation going on the importance of beauty. It is an attempt to look at what beauty is and why it is important through several intellectual prisms. This is not an expert’s book but that of a foot soldier’s. As an artist, ideas related to beauty are part of my practice.

The value of this book comes from the many voices it contains, as these dialogues are the heart of this effort. I was privileged to discuss beauty with some fine minds, most of whom have authored a number of important books, and I am very grateful to scientists Fritjof Capra, Pushpa Mittra Bhargava and Rupert Sheldrake, statesman/philosopher Karan Singh, philosopher Roger Scruton, Gandhian philosopher Satish Kumar, artist Anjolie Ela Menon, poet Ruth Padel, poet and cultural activist Ashok Vajpeyi, dancer Geeta Chandran, film-maker Muzaffar Ali, architect and artist Gautam Bhatia, neuroscientists Semir Zeki and Clifford Saron, Tibetan meditation master Tai Situ Rinpoche, environmentalist and activist Vandana Shiva, politician Oliver Letwin and social anthropologist Kiebo Oiwa, for joining me in this exploration.

To each of them, the last question I asked was to share a personal experience of beauty that was profound or special in their lives and they were all gracious enough to open themselves up to give us a garland of experiences that are surprising and moving.

In an effort to weave these different perspectives and voices into a tapestry of ideas and views, I have placed them in five broad categories: scientists, philosophers, art practitioners, brain–mind scientists, and social activists. For each category I provide some contextual background and reflect on the key ideas and offer alternative perspectives. My hope is that this book will get the reader to rethink their idea of beauty and how we could all play a part in creating a more beautiful world.

PART 1

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DIALOGUES WITH THREE SCIENTISTS

Amorning light sparkles the surface of the ocean. Water laps gently on to the rocks where I sit. Waves break in rhythmic claps and turn into brilliant bands of white surf. Water sweeps on to the sand with bubbles that flash rainbow colours. It recedes rapidly, shimmering, rippling patterns in the sand, leaving behind a sparkling carpet of silica, shells and stones. Further ashore, yellow-green beams stream through swaying palm trees and the wild lattice of pink-yellow flowering lantana bushes that surround them. The sound of the waves merges with the flapping of palm leaves and the plaintive cries of seagulls. Around my feet, water plays ceaselessly, coming in, going out, and creating fractal curves and curls. My eyes close, joy fills me. A smile forms as a tiny shell comes to nestle between my toes.

There is little disagreement that the natural world is filled with beauty – the shapes and colours of flowers, birds, crystals, clouds and the mysterious inky night sky. One could probably fill pages listing the many beauties of nature, especially if we were to include the fragrance of jasmine and lavender and the taste of peaches and mangoes as part of the continuum of beauty, as I hope to establish it is, because it is excellence manifesting in alternative sensory domains from the same relational principles. How do we explain why there is such an abundance and diversity of beauty in nature? Is beauty somehow inbuilt into nature’s creative processes? Is it part of nature’s method for creating and connecting the many elements in the web of life, of which we are a part? Is there is an evolutionary purpose for beauty?

The story of the forming and evolution of life on earth, as told by contemporary life scientists, is explained through the concepts of emergence, creativity, connections and relationships. They tell us that the earliest roots of life are burrowed deep in physics and chemistry. It goes something like this:

Once upon a time there were no biological forms, just the elements – atoms and molecules, the primary ‘stuff’ of life. These began to combine and connect through chemical processes, which formed the ‘metabolic pathways’ of life. These multiple chemical bonds formed the basis for the complex biochemical structures of organisms that were to follow.

The strongest bonds were made by the lighter elements such as hydrogen (H), nitrogen (N), oxygen (O), and carbon (C). These along with phosphorous (P) and sulphur (S) formed the compounds that became the major components of prebiotic evolution. What is interesting is that these are the main atoms of all biological structures even today. Some phosphates were instrumental transformers and distributors of chemical energy in prebiotic life and they continue to be just as critical in contemporary cellular metabolisms. This universality of a small number of types of atoms and molecules in today’s living cells and in the first protocells helps us understand the common origin and our continued connections through shared patterns and structures with the many forms and levels of life.

Biotic life emerged when certain molecules formed primitive membranes that created closed bubbles within which molecular complexity developed and thrived. These membranes were the early enablers of stable structures and of the processes of growth and replication, which flourished in them through the flow of energy and matter. Membranes sustained dynamic internal relationships as well as exchange relationships with the external environment.

We can see how the human body itself acts like a membrane. Its skin, nose, mouth and waste-eliminating orifices conduct complex and fascinating exchange relationships with the environment and maintain an inner physical life. Our senses too are a part of our mind–body membranous functions as indeed are our brain, ego and consciousness. They are all engaged in supporting a level of autonomy and, simultaneously, our massive interdependence with others and the external environment.

All life, inanimate and animate, is nested in relationships, internal and external. Relationships, such as the membranous ones, are inevitably based on balance, harmony, proportion and rhythm. It is important to understand that these are all dynamic and qualitative principles. Balance and harmony in living systems are not rest or stasis but active shapers of relationships that enable balancing and harmonization in processes and in things. In the story of evolutionary change and growth, these dynamic principles have helped shape life at all levels – atoms, molecules, simple and complex cellular life, flowers, butterflies, birds, animals and humans.

Is it then a mere coincidence that the great thinkers of ancient Greece and India saw these very relational qualities or principles, harmony, balance, proportion and rhythm as the basis for beauty? That these qualities seem to be at play when we experience beauty? Perhaps, beauty does reach deep into the relational processes of connecting, bonding and exchanging involved in the story of life’s evolution from prebiotic molecular structures and compounds to the early living systems of cellular biotic life and continues into life in its more complex forms, such as humans and the societies and things we make.

Moreover, if beauty is indeed deeply imbedded in nature’s creation, it would be logical to hypothesize that the relational principles of balance and proportion, harmony and rhythm, beauty in other words, is also vital for the continued resilience, sustainability and well-being of life forms and living systems. Beauty may well be a marker for ecological health and its absence an indication of ecological stress.

Why, then, has science given so little thought to beauty?

This is because modern science that began during the European Renaissance chose to focus on measurable quantities, excluding from its concerns qualities that were thought to reside only in the consciousness of living creatures. Also, since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the basic framework of science has been reductionist. It has attempted to untangle things so that it could study them better. Only recently has science begun to look at things in a more integrated manner through quantum, systems and networks perspectives. Therefore, it is no surprise that science has given little thought to beauty in a relational and systemic sense in the forming and evolution of life. Nor is it startling that science has not asked what qualities make things beautiful and whether these qualities cut across evolutionary time and species. Science has largely ignored the possibility that the reason we experience beauty and why there is so much of it in nature may be because it is fundamental to the generation and sustenance of life.

Evolutionary scientists have seen a limited and entirely functional role for beauty. They have regarded it as a marker for genetic vitality for the purposes of mating preferences. Flowers are attractive to butterflies and birds for the processes of pollination and the sexes of species are beautiful to each other in the mating game. But science has neither been interested in asking what is it about some peacock’s tail that suggests vitality, nor what qualities might lead to the perception of beauty in a peahen. Though scientists do tell us they have experienced beauty through their work, there has been little research to understand the perception of beauty other than in a branch of neuroscience called neuroaesthetics, which we will engage with at some length in Part 5.

There are two positions on the cognition of beauty. Some think that beauty is purely a human experience and a human construct. While others, including the author, think that the experience of beauty may not be limited to humans. But we do need to better understand why humans respond to beauty and what is experienced when humans find something to be beautiful. For instance, why do some proportions and combinations seem beautiful almost universally?

Carbon, oxygen and hydrogen atoms when bonded in a certain way form sugar, a compound that has a sweet taste. Sweetness is not the property of any one of the elements. It ‘emerges’ in the pattern of their bonding or relationships. And yet, the sweetness is not in the chemical bonds themselves because it is a sensory experience that arises when the sugar molecules interact with the chemistry of our taste buds, which in turn causes a set of neurons to fire in a certain way. The experience of sweetness emerges from several relationships in and between matter and the mind.

There is exciting work happening in neuroscience and life sciences on brain, mind and consciousness. In life sciences, the old Cartesian idea of the mind as a thing has been abandoned and mind and consciousness are seen as processes rather than things. Cognition and experience are viewed as relational and the relationship between mind and brain is seen as one of process and structure. The central insight of the Santiago Theory of Cognition, developed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in the 1970s, is that cognition, which is the process of knowing, is inseparable from the process of life. According to them cognition is the activity involved in the self-generation and self-perpetuation of living networks, and that the entire structure of the organism participates in the process of cognition. Cognition does not necessarily require a brain and a nervous system. A plant turning towards the sun is a cognitive process, and consciousness is viewed as part of the continuum of cognition. According to this theory, consciousness emerged to handle increased complexity as life forms became more evolved.

The latest thinking in the life sciences points to relationality as a basic force in the formation and evolution of life at all levels – molecules, cells, plants, animals, humans, and the environment. This idea, along with the idea of a cognition continuum of which consciousness is a part, throws up the intriguing possibility that the cognitive experience of beauty may be an inherent part of the processes of creation, self-management, and interrelationships that exist in the evolving forms and networks of life. This in turn suggests that a focus on beauty might help in the well-being of the environment, of society and of humans. These are some of the ideas that I explored with Fritjof Capra, Pushpa Mittra Bhargava and Rupert Sheldrake.

FRITJOF CAPRA

Fritjof Capra, who was born in Austria and trained as a physicist, now considers himself a life scientist and an eco-educationist. He is author of the paradigm-altering book The Tao of Physics and of several other books that explore life from a systems, complexity and interrelational perspective. When we met, he had recently finished a book on Leonardo da Vinci, a brilliant scientist and artist and, therefore, an ideal godfather to these dialogues that attempt to explore beauty through both the sciences and the arts. Capra’s most recent published book is The Systems View of Life – A Unifying Vision, co-authored with the Italian biologist, Pier Luigi Luisi.

Shakti Maira: Did you have any new insights about beauty while researching and writing your recent book, The Science of Leonardo?

Fritjof Capra: Yes, I did. My explorations of Leonardo’s unique synthesis of science and art forced me to think more deeply about the nature of beauty because it is a subject Leonardo addresses frequently. He was famous during his lifetime for the ‘air of sweetness and gentleness’ manifest both in his personality and in his art, for the gentle beauty radiating from the faces of the young men and women he portrayed and of the angels in his religious paintings.

Leonardo associated the experience of beauty in the mind of a viewer of paintings with an experience of proportion and harmony. He also compared visual experience with the beauty of a musical composition. ‘The beautiful proportions of an angelic face in painting,’ he wrote in A Treatise on Painting, ‘produce a harmonious concord, which reaches the eye simultaneously, just as a chord in music affects the ear.’

So, my studies of Leonardo’s art and science confirmed an intuition I had had before of beauty as an experience of proportion and harmony, both in space and in time.

SM: Do you see or smell any opportunities of synthesis and integration between the classical axioms of beauty – balance, harmony, proportion, rhythm – and the new thinking in the life sciences?

FC: I do indeed ‘smell’ an opportunity for synthesis and integration, which is suggested by cognitive science, a new interdisciplinary field for the study of mind and consciousness, which transcends the traditional frameworks of biology, psychology and epistemology. According to cognitive science, mind and consciousness are not ‘things’ (‘thinking things’, as Descartes put it in the seventeenth century) but processes. Cognition is the process of knowledge and it is closely linked to the process of self-organization in all living systems. When we perceive something, our perception is not some representation of an independently existing objective world but rather a ‘bringing forth’ of a world through the process of living. This radically new theory of mind, known as the Santiago Theory of Cognition, may offer an exciting scientific interpretation of Leonardo’s views on beauty.

SM: If the mind is viewed as a process rather than a material thing, is the experience of beauty a state of mind when the mind itself transiently comes into harmony, balance and rhythm? Is the neurological core of this experience a transient synchronization of diverse, rhythmically oscillating neural circuits?

FC: According to modern cognitive science, our minds (or processes of cognition) are embodied in the structures of our bodies and brains, and hence, all the structures and patterns we perceive are conditioned by those in our bodies and brains. It seems to me that the experience of beauty may arise when the proportions and rhythms we perceive mirror our own bodily (and especially neural) proportions and rhythms very closely. In those cases, we perceive those proportions as harmonious and beautiful because, in a sense, we recognize ourselves in them. Beauty may, perhaps, be the experience of a certain resonance phenomenon. So far, this is just a vague intuition but I think it might be worthwhile to explore it further.

SM: New research suggests that the material universe may contain no fundamental entities and that it is a dynamic web of interrelationships. Do the qualities, consistency and coherence of these relationships determine their strength, sustainability and beauty?

FC: Over the last twenty-five years, a new understanding of life has been emerging at the forefront of science. The universe is no longer seen as a machine composed of elementary building blocks. We have discovered that the material world, ultimately, is a network of inseparable patterns of relationships and that the planet as a whole is a living, self-regulating system. The view of the human body as a machine, and of the mind as a separate entity, is being replaced by one that sees not only the brain but also the immune system, the bodily tissues, and even each cell as a living, cognitive system.

Evolution is no longer seen as a competitive struggle for existence but rather as a cooperative dance in which creativity and the constant emergence of novelty are the driving forces. And with the new emphasis on complexity and networks, a new science of qualities is slowly emerging. Essential to this new science is a new kind of systemic or ecological thinking – thinking in terms of relationships, patterns and context.

SM: Could beauty with its relational qualities of harmony, balance, proportion and rhythm be an adaptive mechanism and an intrinsic part of the self-regulating processes of natural systems?

FC: Because of the close connection of beauty with the relational qualities of harmony, balance and proportions, the emerging science of qualities now opens up the exciting possibility of seriously integrating aesthetic dimensions into science and looking into these questions.

SM: Though your work is now more in the life sciences, your early training was in physics and you famously brought together Nataraja, the iconic dancing Shiva, and particle physics. What experiences of ‘beauty’ have you found in physics?

FC: My experience of the metaphorical identity of the dance of Shiva and the dance of subatomic particles, which happened in the late 1960s and which I described in detail in the preface to The Tao of Physics, was not primarily an experience of beauty, although it had aesthetic elements. It was primarily the experience of a unifying idea that was profoundly meaningful. In my work as a physicist, my experiences of beauty were mainly those of mathematical elegance. Certain mathematical formalisms or equations represent elegant unifications of previously ‘messy’ fragments. The sudden experience of such an elegant unification can be a profound experience of beauty.

SM: In your earlier books you tell the story of evolution in life systems, from single cells to complex networks of cells that make up humans and from matter to cognizant and conscious life. You also suggest that the existence of consciousness became necessary for self-consistency of the whole, as explained by ‘autopoiesis’. Do you think there is something to the Indian model of consciousness that ananda (joy or bliss) is the ultimate purpose of consciousness and the connections the model makes between beauty, art and ananda?

FC: My thoughts on human consciousness have evolved quite a bit since the days of The Tao of Physics. I now see consciousness as a special cognitive process that emerges in evolution at a certain level of complexity involving the brain and higher nervous system: first as ‘primary consciousness’ (fleeting moments of self-awareness) in mammals and then as ‘reflective consciousness’ (involving symbolic language, conceptual thinking and so on) in the great apes and humans. I suspect that this use of the term ‘consciousness’ is quite different from the Indian philosophical model you mention.

SM: Yes, I think in the Indian system life emerges from consciousness, whereas here it is an emergent phenomenon.

In your work in ecological education, do you bring in the dimension of beauty? And if so, how?

FC: At the Center for Ecoliteracy, California, my colleagues and I have developed a special pedagogy for primary and secondary education, which we call ‘schooling for sustainability’. It is a systemic, experiential and community-oriented approach to teaching the basic principles of ecology. We take children out into nature and involve them in growing food in school gardens, restoring rivers and creeks and in other ecological projects. Our aim is not merely to produce first-rate ecologists but to help students make an emotional connection with nature, generating feelings of love, respect and reciprocity that will turn them into environmentally responsible citizens and stewards of the natural environment when they become adults. We have found that the arts – poetry, visual arts and performing arts – are an ideal means to facilitate this emotional connection with nature. Hence, the arts and with them the dimension of beauty play an important role in our pedagogy.

SM: Could you please share a ‘beauty experience’ you have had and say how it felt?

FC: My work takes place mostly in the realm of ideas and I have found that this abstract domain offers aesthetic experiences that can be as deep and real as sensory experiences of beauty. They are akin to the experiences of mathematical elegance I described earlier. For example, it has happened to me several times that I came across a book or an article that provided eloquent answers to some questions I had pondered and that it did so exactly at the time when I needed those answers. The resulting insights generated a feeling of great elation, even euphoria, and experiences of integration, harmony and resonance. At the time, I did not think of those experiences as experiences of beauty but after this dialogue I feel that they were, ultimately, deeply aesthetic experiences.

PUSHPA MITTRA BHARGAVA

Dr Pushpa Mittra Bhargava is a cellular and molecular biologist and the founder director of Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad, India. In the next dialogue, he expresses a resolute belief that science and art are both manifestations of beauty and creativity and that beauty and science are part of nature and evolution. (Under his leadership aesthetics had a priority in the design of the CCMB and it also has one of the larger collections of contemporary art in the country.)

Bhargava has formulated seven postulates for beauty, the first being, ‘There is inherent beauty