Beauty is meaningful, not decorative
The claim
The same universe that produced equations also produced Bach, Chartres, the Iguazu falls, and a face you cannot stop looking at. Beauty is not a survival hack. It is a hint.
If the cosmos were brute matter, we would expect indifference to its arrangements. Instead we encounter a hierarchy of value where a sunset is more than warm photons and a cathedral is more than stacked stone. Beauty rewards attention with meaning. That fact is data.
Beauty is the form being takes when it shows itself.
The transcendentals — being, truth, goodness, beauty — are how reality discloses itself to a mind capable of receiving it. To deny beauty's objectivity is to deny that reality has a face.
A naturalist account of beauty as 'pattern recognition + reward' captures the response without touching the object. The object — the actual glory of a fugue or a galaxy — is exactly what is missed.
We cannot worship matter. We cannot help worshipping beauty. The asymmetry is a clue.