Humans’ aesthetic sense apprehends the presence or absence of life contained in these flows unconsciously.

In the world of music, too, features such as harmony and Bach’s equal temperament show how humans find beauty in the fluctuation between regularity and irregularity. The beauty we sense in scattered cherry blossoms, dwindling fireworks, and the transience of life and death might likewise be explained as our perception of fluidity, the very basis of life, in such ephemeral transformations. 

Beauty is not absoluteness: it is fluctuation between instability and stability. The poet Kamo no Chomei captured this idea of recurring change in nature in his famous lines: “Ceaselessly the river flows, and yet the water is never the same. The beauty of nature is an ambiguous aesthetic residing in the space between opposing flows. It is  born somewhere between the act of designing and that of not designing.

To live is to move.

At the root of all nature is the quality of movement from an unstable state to a stable one. Diamonds, for example, certainly have beauty in their stable, symmetrical crystalline forms, and humans are often moved by their perfection. This does not mean, however, that imperfection is unattractive, or that we can simply conclude that a state of perfection is always beautiful. Instability is just as important an element of beauty as stability is.

For example, why do humans find more beauty in a surface of water punctuated with waves or droplets than in one that is still? When we drop something into a liquid, it becomes unstable, and responds rapidly by seeking a more stable state. As it approaches stability, it grows less active, and finally becomes still when it regains horizontal symmetry. Lancelot Law Whyte said that the movement from instability to stability was the defining process of life. Static symmetry is no less than death itself. We could say that to live is to move from an imperfect, asymmetrical state of life toward the stability of death. Alan Turing defined the patterns created by life as forms that come about through convection. Almost all of life’s forms are generated by employing fluids that flow from within the organism itself.

Humans’ aesthetic sense apprehends the presence or absence of life contained in these flows unconsciously.

In the world of music, too, features such as harmony and Bach’s equal temperament show how humans find beauty in the fluctuation between regularity and irregularity. The beauty we sense in scattered cherry blossoms, dwindling fireworks, and the transience of life and death might likewise be explained as our perception of fluidity, the very basis of life, in such ephemeral transformations. 

Beauty is not absoluteness: it is fluctuation between instability and stability. The poet Kamo no Chomei captured this idea of recurring change in nature in his famous lines: “Ceaselessly the river flows, and yet the water is never the same. The beauty of nature is an ambiguous aesthetic residing in the space between opposing flows. It is  born somewhere between the act of designing and that of not designing.