Image from Creative CommonsAt college, in a class called The Biology of Nonvascular Plants, I was looking at an acrasid slime mold through the microscope. These plants have a fascinating mode of reproduction, and their fruiting bodies, which are called corocarps, are rather striking under magnification. The professor was walking by and I mentioned to him that I found these corocarps quite beautiful, and he haughtily replied to me, “we are not in this class to look for beauty.” Oh well!
I find the world beautiful; I find beauty in all manner of things. Contemplating the beauty of the particulars of this world, and contemplating the Creational Process from which this beauty arises, is how I pray. If there were a God, I think that God would be rather proud of the handiwork of the Creation, and be well disposed to those who appreciate it.
It seems that whenever I write about my love of beauty, someone feels obliged to remind me of the horror and suffering in the world. I am well aware of it. As a student of biology, I’m aware of the suffering behind the evolution of life. As a student of anthropology and human history, I am aware of the great hardship that preceded my appearance on earth, including the hard life that each of my parents lived.
Ignoring the beauty of the world does nothing to redeem that suffering and hardship. Perhaps, though, to relish the beauty of this world helps to redeem it in some way. At least I know my parents would be happy that I find such delight, just as I greatly hope my children can.
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I failed to become a scientist, but I spent several years as a park naturalist and an outdoor education instructor. In this role, I always tried to integrate an appreciation for natural beauty into the presentation of scientific fact. At that time, a fellow naturalist introduced me to the writings of Loren Eiseley. Eiseley is one of that rarest of breeds, the hybrid scientist and poet. Reading Eiseley taught me much about how to bring out the mystery and wonder hidden in scientific fact.
There is a significant portion of the population who have little understanding of science, and many who are hostile to it. I think that if the findings of science were presented in a more humanistic, even more poetic way, some of these people would be more drawn to it. Unfortunately, those who really know their science, often have very little sense of the poetic, which is to say the beautiful; those with a sense of the poetic, often know only a scattering of science.
(Having said this, I should mention that the physicist Paul Dirac wrote: “It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit the experiment.” Einstein also found that beauty can be a guide to scientific truth. For anyone interested, I posted an article here many years ago titled Beauty in the Equation that explores this further.)
The methodology of science and indeed all scholarship requires an ideal of objectivity. But when we gather together the findings of science and other scholarship into a worldview, it is not only permissible, but probably necessary, to integrate a sense of value and meaning into those otherwise objective findings.
Finding value and meaning in the world is a most human thing to do. It is, I think, a necessary part of human flourishing. This is why scientific fact alone or a bare naturalistic outlook isn’t enough, at least for most people. We need these to relate to our sense of life, to what we care about and find meaningful.
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One of those long debated, ultimately unanswered questions of philosophy regards whether values in general, and beauty in particular, is a property of the objective world, or purely subjective. The ancient and medieval philosophers, particularly Aristotle and Aquinas, tended to regard it as objective. Modern philosophers, for the most part, regard it as subjective.
As with a lot of these long debated issues, I think that both sides are partly correct. I find that the experience of beauty occurs in a dynamic interaction between a variety of subjective aspects of myself, and certain qualities in the world. The subjective aspects include my awareness and understanding of the potential for beauty around me, my openness to the experience of beauty, the associations I bring to the experience, and it certainly helps if I feel healthy and safe.
As for the objective aspect, Aristotle considered unity within variety to be key. Thomas Aquinas believed there were three things necessary for something to be beautiful: integrity, correct proportions, and clarity. Just what he meant by each of these is beyond my scope here. But the kind of symmetry we find in a rose at full bloom is a good example of both unity in variety and integrity, proportionality and clarity of a pure color.
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As mentioned above, one of the subjective aspects necessary for the experience of beauty is an openness to that experience. And whether a person is open to it or not, is dependent on many factors. A couple I’ve run across is the puritanical belief that the enjoyment of beauty is a form of idleness and idleness is the devil’s playground, and that a love of beauty is feminine, thus not proper for a man.
Fortunately, we can move beyond prejudices inflicted on us in our youth and an appreciation of beauty can be cultivated at any age. Through such cultivation, we can gain a better understanding of the subjective aspects that are required for the experience of beauty, and learn to be more open to the experience.
And here is the ultimate point of this rather rambling article: the very things by which we cultivate a greater appreciation of beauty are the things that give us a greater appreciation of the world, of reality. It is in such an appreciation that science and beauty can meet.
The poet John Keats famously wrote: “beauty is truth, truth beauty.” To what extent that statement is true is questionable, but I think both the lover of truth and the lover of beauty are united in seeking a greater understanding and engagement with the world. And I think such an understanding and engagement with the world is promoted by the Spiritual Naturalist Society.
Which brings me back to my statement above that “contemplating the beauty of the particulars of this world, and contemplating the Creational Process from which this beauty arises, is how I pray.” Perhaps this is the kind of prayer proper to Spiritual Naturalism. And in the spirit of such prayer, instead of attending some ritualistic Sunday service as do our Christian brethren, we keep the Sabbath like Emily Dickinson, who writes:
Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –
I keep it, staying at Home –
With a Bobolink for a Chorister –
And an Orchard, for a Dome –
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SNS strives to include diverse voices within the spectrum of naturalistic spirituality. Authors will vary in their opinions, terms, and outlook. The views of no single author therefore necessarily reflect those of all Spiritual Naturalists or of SNS.
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