While freedom is often an experience from which we wish to escape, Beauty, according to Berdyaev, is something for which we hunger. Perhaps it is a strange attractor. It certainly, as Berdyaev (1965, p. 321) suggests, provides a form or pattern that is gratifying to the human spirit:
“The classic is an element just as eternal as the romantic. Human creativity can no more not strive for perfection of form than it can be satisfied with anything final or closed in the world. . . .There is no beauty without form. Form-lessness is not pretty: may even be hideous. Life’s creative force must take form. We see this in the processes of nature, in the formation of the cosmos.”
Yet, along with form and pattern (order), we must also find the disorder (chaos) and the void of nothingness. Beauty requires this interplay between order and chaos (Berdyaev, 1965, p. 321):
“. . . form may stiffen, petrify, quench the creative fire of life, may chill or limit it. And then the creative fire must flame up again, shatter the stiff forms, strive once more for infinite content. This is an eternal conflict, which cannot be ended within the bounds of this world. Beauty is connected with form, but it is also connected with the creative force of life, with the striving for infinity…. The form of great art is never half-dead in formalism; it is related to infinite meaning, the striving for the infinite. . . .”
For Berdyaev, the interplay between order and chaos is evident in all aspects of nature. There is both form in nature and the formless vitality and unpredictability of life. Beauty is to be found in the swirling fractals manufactured by computers and the branching fractals of a river as it reaches the ocean and a pine tree branch as it reaches out for light. Beauty is to be found in the exquisite reasoning (form) and persuasive narratives (creative revelation) of a team proposal for a new social service initiative, and in the interweaving of classical form and improvisation in a contemporary musical composition. And Beauty is to be found in the appearance of human ethics–with human purpose and meaning (form) being evident amid a relativistic VUCA-Plus environment (chaos).
Ethics in the Midst of Nothingness
What then is the nature of human ethics as they are found during the challenging times of the VUCA-Plus saturated mid-21st Century? We turn, as we have in previous essays in this series, to insights offered by Don Howard. Much like the provocative ideas offered by Brugh Joy (1990) in the Epilogue to his book regarding the Avalanche that comes with the interplay of light and darkness, Don Howard (2025, pp. 127-128) offers the following insight about ethics and morality in the midst of nothingness, chaos and relativism in the Epilogue to his book on Nothingness:
“If there is a source–of being, of time, of consciousness-it has not announced itself£ It has not left instructions. It has given no clear sign that it wishes to be found. What we have is a world. Coherent. Incomplete. Capable of meaning, but unwilling to impose it.
Which leaves the question not only unanswered, but entrusted to us.
There may be other theories, other metaphysical sketches. But nearly all of them reduce, in the end, to some version of the same two paths: either being emerged on its own, or it was given. Either it arose from nothing without cause, or it was willed by something not subject to the conditions it created. All other answers tend to defer the question, rede-fine it, or dissolve it into formalisms. But the question remains. And when pressed to its foundation, it seems to leave us with just these two possibilities: that we are here because nothing could not hold. Or that we are here because something wanted us to be.”
