I like the idea that understanding something can make you appreciate it
more. This passage says it better than I can.
I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t
agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it
is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this
is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,”
and I think that he’s kind of nutty.
First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me
too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he
is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower.
At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could
imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have
a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter;
there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the
processes.
The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects
to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It
adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms?
Why is it aesthetic?
All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to
the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t
understand how it subtracts.
Richard Feynman, on the beauty of a flower