Elegant Universe

A reader writes:

Dear Sir: You are reported to have said that there is no order or disorder in the universe apart from what man himself puts there — this in spite of your well-known preoccupation with a fluid and congruent universe. Can you tell us how you reconcile this, with regard in particular to your views on God?

Sincerely,

Sarah H

Dear Sarah H: I don’t recall my exact wording of that statement, but I’m certain it’s not as you recapitulate. Presumably you’re referring to my conviction that order and disorder are epistemological words, not metaphysical. By which I mean, they are products of the human brain, and nothing in nature is “disorderly” as such: It simply is. To speak of order or disorder apart from the human mind is like speaking of color to a person born without sight.

Using a slightly less elaborate analogy, I might, however, concede that nature is “congruent” in the sense that each thing in the universe, however small or large, has a specific nature and must act in accord with that nature.

In this way — and this is also known as the law of essence or identity — the universe is congruent and elegant.

Matter acts and reacts as it must. Matter does not possess will. That is why there’s really no such thing as chance.

It’s in this sense that the Nobel Prize winning doctor Christian de Duve, in his fine book Vital Dust, speaks of the universe as a “cosmic imperative.” By that he means nature does not possess volition — or, if you prefer, nature does not possess choice, as humans do.

Nature must act as it does because the identity of each thing determines how it must act. This applies as much to a bursting star as it does to a microscopic particle.

As for God, I can only explain Her popularity by an atheist’s nighttime sweats.

What Is Beauty?

A reader writes:

Dear Sir: What is beauty? Is it anything?

– Lily Alderman

Dear Lily: It is everything. Beauty is the esthetically pleasing, it is the lovely. Aristotle wrote: “Beauty depends on size as well as symmetry” (ahem, ahem). But beauty is symmetry. Beauty is congruence. It is the bah-bah in black sheep. Beauty is not, finally, inexplicable or ineffable, but it is elusive.

Darwin noted that a streak of stew in a man’s beard is not beautiful, but he pointed out also — and sagely so — that neither the soup nor the beard is inherently non-beautiful.

Beauty requires, among other things, that sensory data bring with it a very specific kind of emotional pleasure — one which awakens “the contemplative in man,” as Kant said — such as you might feel, for instance, when you see the Northern Lights, or hear a profound song. Beauty even encompasses melancholy.

Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-colored world. No object is so ugly that, under certain conditions, it will not look beautiful; no object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

Said Oscar Wilde.

Beauty, properly defined, is part of the science of axiology, which is the study of values. Axiology, in turn, is a sub-division of aesthetics. The science of beauty is called aesthetics.

But that’s all purely academic.

Here, Lily, is the only thing you really need to know about beauty:

Sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds:
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

(Sonnet 94.)