Can you imaging a couple of cows walking through a museum, enjoying art? What about a horse, a kangaroo, or a cat sitting and staring at a painting for five minutes. It’s a rediculous thought. You might have seen such a thing on an animated television cartoon, but that’s not reality.
If only human beings have an appreciation for beauty, what does that mean? What is beauty?
There is a whole branch of philosophy dedicated to this very question called aesthetics (or esthetics). It differentiates and defines two concepts – “a thing that is beautiful” and “beauty itself.” When I speak of beauty, I do not mean a beautiful day, or a beautiful woman, or a beautiful painting. What I do mean is the common characteristic among all three of those things – Beauty.
Beauty has three components: Proportion, Order, and Harmony. Proportion refers to the size of something, and order has to do with the arrangement of something’s parts. Harmony is similar to the concepts of “unity” or “togetherness.” Easy to remember, right?
Proportion
The things that are around us that are close to our own size like a desk, or a bike, or a dog seem ordinary to us in a certain sense. On the other hand, we are amazed at the very large things like mountains and universes. Likewise, we are amazed at the very small things like the microchip and the atom. Why do we find ourselves amazed? That’s our human response to proportion.
Order
Order has to do with relationships between things, and which things come before other things. For example, a body can live without one of its hands, but it cannot live without its heart, and therefore the heart is of a greater importance than the hand to the body. This is mysteriously true of all things in one way or another. When things are recognized in their proper order we have a deeper understanding of them, an understanding of them in relation to other things.
Harmony
Have you ever hear someone call a car or a boat a “beauty?” This is because it somehow seems whole, with all of its parts working together. That’s what harmony is. Harmony is in music too – a chord is combined of several notes, several sounds that work well together. Although tastes in music change, the need for harmony in good music has always been a given.
When Order, Proportion, and Harmony are recognizably combined, the sum of the whole is greater than the three parts. The proportionate things are harmoniously well-ordered, and the ordered things are approportionate to and unified with one another. That’s Beauty.
Sometimes people write about it or draw a picture or sing about it. It’s called art. We wish to recreate that experience, and so we try to combine words of a certain size into a certain order, we try to paint images of a certain size in a certain order, and we try to make music with tone and volume and tempo all orderly intertwined.
Proportion and Order can be found in other things too, even in things you can’t see.