Love and Beauty

Yesterday, I had a short debate in my mind: Whether we love things because they are beautiful, or is it that things are beautiful because we love them?

It is obvious that the former is true, for one always loves anything that one finds beautiful. But the second is not false either. I was reminded of this Akbar-Birbal story:

Once Emperor Akbar asked Birbal to find out the most beautiful child in his empire. After a few days, Birbal declared that he had found out. He then took Akbar and all the ministers to a slum in the city and pointing to an ugly looking child playing in dirt said, "Here is the most beautiful child in the empire". Akbar and the rest of them made fun of Birbal saying "Are you mad? Do you call this ugly child beautiful?". Hearing these, the mother came out and shouted at them, "How dare you call my child ugly?".

In Tamil there is a saying: Kaakai-kku than kunju pon kunju which means, For a crow, its child is precious like gold.

It is easy to love anything that is beautiful, but not so easy to love something that is ugly. However, if we can love something, even the most ugliest loses its ugliness, and what we see is beauty there. In fact, where there is love, the person ceases to look for beauty. This means there is a subtle difference in the beauty that causes love, and the beauty that is the effect of love. In the former, the beauty needs to be appealing to the senses, whereas in the latter, it need not. Therefore, it seems that the beauty in the latter case is subtler, in the sense that it is more refined, and therefore I would call it true beauty, because this beauty is independent of the object itself, but only depends on the subject's love for it. A thing of beauty is a joy forever. This is because love is forever, and real beauty is seen when it is a result of love.