BEAUTY AND THE SOUL

The experience of beauty is multidimensional: when it happens, we feel it to be a unitary and homogeneous event. What produces the experience, however, is a variety of independent, and at times coincidental, factors. For instance, I see a Greek temple, I am moved and overcome by a sense of harmony and perfection. What causes this feeling? Is it the perfect proportion of the temple, the Golden Mean – that code of proportion which for classical Greece was the core of all beauty? Or is it the reds and yellows of the poppies and brooms (ginestra), the fragrance of the sea, the clear air and staggeringly beautiful landscape all around the temple, which are part of my experience? If, instead, I see the temple on a November morning, as it mysteriously emerges from the fog, perhaps it is precisely this gradual revelation that makes it beautiful for me. Or maybe it is the echo of Greek mythology: in this temple I feel the numinous (arcano, divino) presence of the gods, or I am reminded of Greek and Roman classical poetry. Or perhaps what moves me is the rough texture of ancient stone, the special fascination of ruins, and if I were to look at a brand new copy of the same temple I would be indifferent. Last but not least: I am looking at the temple with the person I love and that makes this moment intense and memorable. What if, instead, I were with a group of coarse (rozzi) tourists, who make loud remarks, carve their names on the columns and throw their trash around?

The poverty of the affluent: Roberto Assagioli the first to emphasize the importance of beauty in the field of psychology.

At this time in our history, in Western society, our situation is both promising and terrifying. On the one hand, we are in contact with the whole world, our knowledge is multiplying immeasurably, barriers are falling. On the other we are risking impoverishment. We are becoming slaves dashing from one errand (commissione) to the next, or trapped into suffocating cities. Because we are submerged by some many stimuli, and we end up too distracted, to the point of being absent. This is the poverty of the affluent: the painful lack of meaning, values, beauty.

In this amazing and frightening era, institutions are losing their force and can no longer help us. The values of justice, freedom and love are becoming abstract and distant, outshone (messe in ombra) by the lure of a thousand seductive promises. In such a critical situation, beauty can be a lifesaver – because it is all around us, if we know how to find it. It is beyond any dogma. It answers a deep need. It is immediate and spontaneous. It can be the way back to ourselves.

Beauty is not a whim (capriccio) but a vital need. Often, we are not aware of this need. It can be compared to thirst: many people are thirsty without knowing it. They do not drink enough, their body desperately needs water and becomes dehydrated and they feel some kind of malaise. Yet they are not aware of thirst. It often like that with beauty.

Resistance to beauty : the problem is that the need for beauty, however strong and vital, is easily pushed aside by the

distractions and thoughts that everyday life brings us. In the story “The Door in the Wall” by H. g. Wells, a child finds a mysterious door, opens it, and enters a marvelous garden, so beautiful that spending even a short time there makes him overwhelmingly happy. The next day he looks for the door but cannot find it. Later the door appears again, but in difficult moments, when he is busy with other matters, such as when he is on his way to the very first day of school. The child grows, and in rare moments he remembers the wondrous garden and seeks the door without finding it. Nut when by chance he does find it, he is caught in some commitment he is not able to postpone. He cannot find the time for beauty. Only in death is he to enter the garden again.

We too are distracted, too busy and hurried. And we often forget about beauty. This is a tragedy, because without beauty we die. We lose contact with our feelings, the world appears harsh or banal to us, others do not interest us, and life loses its bright colors. Why, then if beauty is available all around us, do we end up ignoring it? There are several answers to this question.

1) First of all, like the protagonist of the H. G. Wells story, we are too busy and worried about what we have to do. Beauty is right there, but we are occupied elsewhere. After all, haven’t we been taught since childhood to be this way? We are not allowed to look out the window at the birds flying or to be caught daydreaming, instead of paying attention to our lessons. Often, too often, beauty is taken as a synonym for frivolity.

2) Or it is seen as useless. Beauty is free, A piece of poetry, a sonata, a dry leaf, a dragonfly: all apparently useless. Beauty is not useful for anything. So why waste out time with futility?

3) What is more, some of us feel they do not deserve beauty. A luxury we should not afford-

4) Or else we are convinced that we need to be highly educated to appreciate beauty. Be well-read. Possess some special competence. While it is true that some reading and studying at times help us understand and enjoy beauty, it is also true that beauty is free, available to everyone in many ways and forms. Beauty is democratic.

5) Yet others find beauty frightening, They instinctively know that to appreciate it, they have to lower their defenses, become more vulnerable, more open. This state spells danger. They are afraid they will be overwhelmed. Exposed and hurt.

6) A further obstacle, similar but even deeper, is the fear of disintegration. It is a fear that, if we appreciate beauty, if we really let ourselves go, our personality will change forever, As in the African story, we are afraid that beauty will be intolerably strong and upsetting, that it will make us die. And in a way we are right. But we forget the essential point. After death comes rebirth.

Ugliness: James Hillman asks what is he cost of ugliness: “What does it cost in absenteeism, in sexual obsession, school drop-out rates, overeating and short attention span; in pharmaceutical

remedies and the gigantic escapism industries of wasteful shopping, sports violence, and the disguised colonialism of tourism? Could the causes of major social, political and economic issues of our time also be found in the repression of beauty?” Yet to understand beauty fully, we have to meet ugliness face-to-face, and acknowledge its power. Otherwise beauty will remain a sentimental and superficial concept.

Aesthetic Intelligence: How can we stimulate and deepen our perception of it? We need to see that we are endowed with a capacity to appreciate beauty, a kind of intelligence: the aesthetic intelligence, the faculty of perceiving the beautiful. Where one sees a dump, another sees an enchanted castle. The sounds that one person finds boring may make another’s heart leap. In any situation one person may sense beauty and another may not.

Aesthetic intelligence has various aspects. First, the aesthetic range. Those who have a wider aesthetic range will be able to experience beauty in many more situations. Instead of finding it, for instance, only in a Beethoven symphony, they can also find it in poetry, understand it in the inner qualities of people, feel it in a book, in the sound of the rain on the roof, and a thousand banal situations of everyday life. Second the depth of experience varies, Some people are just barely touched by beauty. They notice it, but are not really moved. It remains an external and temporary fact. Some, on the other hand, feel that beauty penetrates them. They can feel that beauty pervades their whole being, moves them, perhaps overwhelms them. Third, the capacity to integrate beauty also varies, If I appreciate the beauty in a piece of music, or a poem, for example, I can let this beauty not only touch me, but also change me: it alters my thinking, continues to work inside me. Influences my way of relating to others, of acting in the world. Even my relationship to the planet I inhabit. I see and feel the connections that an experience of beauty makes in all sectors of my life.

The exploitation of beauty: meanwhile however our society does not recognize our need for beauty. Or rather, it recognizes it only to exploit it. The beauty and fashion industries are bent on convincing us that they can sell us beauty and that we can possess it. But only if we are beautiful. Beauty is a product you can buy. It is a paradoxical situation because, in fact, beauty has never been as accessible as it is now. Just enter a large bookstore and you find all the great literary and artistic masterpieces of

humankind. Not to mention the Internet. The risk of making everything too easy, and therefore banal, lurks. Beauty is not an object but a way of being.

Beauty and evolution: aesthetic intelligence is present in every human social group. It is an ancient faculty which we have developed in the course of millennia. We know it was active at the dawn of human evolution, and that it is also present in the animal world. Darwin himself spoke of the sense of beauty as a determining element in natural selection.

Brain Imagining and Neuroaesthetics: the aesthetic experience activates specific areas in the human brain. Thanks to new techniques of brain imaging, we know which specific parts of the brain respond to beauty. For example, in an elegant experiment at the University of Parma, subjects were shown images of the Doryphoros of Polykleitos, as statue which, perhaps more than any other, incarnates the Golden Mean of proportion and thus

represents the classical Greek ideal of beauty. The subjects were shown images of the same statue, but slightly changed: longer chest and shorter legs or the other way round. When the subjects were looking at the original image, certain cerebral areas lit up, and thus showed an aesthetic response. But when they looked at the altered images there was no response. An even more recent study shows the importance of empathy in the perception of art. The authors, David Freedberg of Columbia University and Vittorio Gallese of Parma University show the way in which our appreciation of visual artworks is often emphatic and kinesthetic. The subjects, looking at one of Michelangelo’s Prigioni – human figures that seem to be struggling to extricate themselves from matter – felt the activation of the same muscle tensions that are apparently at work in the statue itself. Indeed the muscle tensions were consonant with the sculpture. Similarly, those who looked at a painting by Jackson Pollock felt a bodily involvement with the painter’s dynamic brush marks. This is all due to the presence in certain areas of our brain of mirror neurons, which, when we observe an action, stimulate the same responses that we would have if we ourselves had to perform that action. Mirror neurons are at the basis of empathy, and empathy plays a part in the aesthetic experience.

Plan of the book:

1) Part I talks about how beauty is a potent tonic: it gives us hope and strengthens our connection with the world. Beauty makes us love life.

2) Part II : beauty can stimulate the development of personal atste and the sense of identity. It teaches us to live in here and now, to catch the fleeting moment.

3) Part III shows how beauty generates physical and mental health, it heals our wounds and gives us a sense of wellbeing. It responds to the pain of the soul and redeems it.

4) Part IV: the inner beauty of people and their actions. Aesthetic intelligence is essential for having good relationships with others.

5) Part V describes the knowledge factor in beauty. The beautiful not only evokes emotion in us, it opens our mind.

It helps us think differently and make more enlightened decisions.

6) Part VI: how beauty can promote respect for the environment and peace between peoples. It helps us to see the absurdity of war and to respect the magnificent planet we inhabit.

The Universal Man by Leonardo da Vinci : representing the harmony and supreme beauty of the human being, the microcosmos, which contains in itself the beauty of the universe.

The Chinese ideogram representing beauty: at its base is represented again a human being with arms and legs wide apart as though opening the whole world. As if to touch the Earth, its flowers and trees, its rivers and seas; and also the air surrounding us, the sky and the stars, Crossing the ideogram are four lines. The bottom three represent the three levels: the Earth, the human world and the divine world. The topmost line is the energy that pervades the universe.

Both images remind us that beauty is a primary principle that touches all parts and functions of our being. It opens us to the world and bring harmony to our relations with others and with nature; it help us reach out and touch the entire universe.

CHAPTER 1

Joy: It is hard work to describe the essence of the aesthetic experience – subtle and imponderable as it is. Luckily mythology comes to our help. Think of Orpheus, for instance, His music reached everyone and everywhere and touched all. At times it was sad, at times happy, but always unspeakably beautiful. The birds, forgetting the joys of the sky, flew down in flocks and gathered, silent, around Orpheus and his lyre. They did not want to miss a single note. The river, too, was stunned by the melodies and deviated as far as it could, flooding the fields, woods, and crags (rupi), desperately trying to get as close as possible to this music. The plants were saying farewell to the world in the late autumn. They were dying. But, touched by the miraculous sound, they regenerated instantly. For them it was spring once more.

Orpheus and Eurydice. Beauty let us glimpse an alternative even to the most tragic situation.

The Enigma of existence: it feeds our hopes and helps us dream.

http://www.onbeing.org/blog/the-subversive-power-of-beauty/6201

https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/e/etcoff-prettiest.html

http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/04/08/anna-deavere-smith-sarah-lewis-nypl-beauty/

http://www.englishcentral.com/video/11472/the-door-in-the-wall

http://www.amazon.com/Beauty-Invisible-Embrace-John-ODonohue/dp/0060957263