What is the Nature of Beauty?

Flowers bloom in the gentle golden light shining upon the morning meadow mist...and soon die. But that quality which they briefly possess endures. A blossom is a cloak Beauty fleetingly wears. Who is She, and where does She go, when the adornment falls away? At the level of gross matter, the blossom is nothing more than a stationary carbon organism seeking to entice the complicity of a mobile carbon organism (bees and moths, etc.) ‑ by employing the compelling qualities (like color and smell) of complex organic compounds ‑ in its efforts to fornicate with another stationary carbon organism and thereby perpetuate itself. When we see the glory of the meadow in summer, we say that it is beautiful. And we think this beauty is highly evanescent: the winter will come and all beauty in this meadow will die. So the winter comes, and the gross matter of every blossom perishes. When we revisit the meadow in the Spring, we say that the beauty has returned. We understand that not even a single ...  more