What Is The Meaning Of Beauty? And Is It Really Superficial?

Beauty is often regarded as a superficial, unimportant category. What does it mean next to the grand ideas of truth, or fairness, or even democracy? It hasn't always been like this: for the ancient Greeks, beauty was an important means to measure the world. Euclides put it into his formula of the golden ratio of 1.618, the measure that, to this day, can be seen in the lines of a well-proportioned building, and which, despite its seemingly abstract mathematical nature, is originally derived from the well-proportioned human body. It is natural for us, humans, to find such proportions beautiful. The notion of beauty, despite its seemingly secondary position, heavily influences our ethics and worldviews. Countless gestures, ideas, and even mathematical formulas are defined as beautiful. In religion, beautiful objects are seen as the traces of the beautiful god. Beauty is something that can hardly be measured, as it enters a human mind through its senses. It can give such a strong impression that the observer will be shaken, and forced to forget what he was thinking before. And in that lies its best use for a practical mind: an awakening.