Beauty and the Beast: An Essay in Evolutionary AestheticMcDowall, Stewart Andrew
Religion
Beauty and the Beast: An Essay in Evolutionary Aesthetic
McDowall, Stewart Andrew
Aesthetics
Throughout this essay, in our quest for the meaning of Beauty we
have been driven to reject the ground of the Natural as the proper
standpoint for viewing the Beautiful. Rather, in Nature regarded from
the point of view of ultimate Reality, we have found a value only
through relation; and it is the intuition of this relation, expressed
to conscious mind, that constitutes Beauty. No relation is, however,
satisfying but one which is mutual. There is beauty in all expressed
relations, even those of mathematics and physics, but because these
relations are primarily expressed for the purpose of the science as
between thing and thing, and their relation to the perceiving mind is
relegated to the background, the sense of beauty is not roused in any
great degree. By scenery a far more vivid sense of beauty is kindled,
and hand in hand with this goes a keener sense of dissatisfaction and
creative longing. By pictures and the like we are brought into touch
with the mind of the artist; he has felt a relation and given to it
technical expression, and we follow anew his creative intuition. In
doing so we get in some degree into relation with his mind as well as
with the thing in which he saw beauty; and we derive additional joy
from this personal relation, mediate though it be. But still there is
dissatisfaction, as well as creative desire. This longing is identical
with the longing of one-sided love. We receive and cannot give. Only in
perfectly reciprocal love is the longing absent, while yet the creative
aspect is most vividly present.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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