Friday, February 19, A.D. 2010

McGuckin on the Beautiful

I hope that Christians, West and East, are having a productive Lent. I know that several people refrain from the internet during the fast to spend more time in prayer, study, and charitible activities. I am not among them, but I wish them well. I have found that when I am “stranded” from the web while on trips or during projects, it is quite refreshing. In my normal life in East Coast exile, though, I find the net quite useful in maintaining sanity. In the film, Shadowlands, C.S. Lewis, played by Anthony Hopkins, asks a student why we read. The student responds—with his father’s wisdom—that we read to know that we are not alone. Lewis repeats the line later in the movie, and it is the sort of line that one remembers. I find it truthful. Though the internet is not a substitute for good books or personal conversation, it is a way to encounter other human minds—some quite excellent in insight and in wit.

Rather à propos, on the Serbian Church’s web page, I found a short essay by J.A. McGuckin, “The Notion of The Beautiful in Ancient Greek Thought and its Christian Patristic Transfiguration.” After summarily discussing how the Christian theological and philosophical tradition interpreted and transformed the Socratic notion of the beautiful, McGuckin suggests that this forsaken synthesis serve as medicine for Western civilization’s current malady:

The one reconciliation possible for a society that is in danger of losing even the distant memories of its religious civilisation, at a time when its preferred religions have turned solipsistic, and its schools of political, philosophical, and artistic thought have elevated short-term self interest to new heights, is no less than the return to a renewed sense of the Beautiful. It is, in the Christian reinterpretation of the Greek notion of kalokagaqon, the ideal synthesis of a religious, mystical, and moral transcendental. It is, if the Church can still act decisively enough to be the intellectual midwife and interpreter, the one concept and experience that can still be remembered well enough by a generally ‘paganised’ society to serve as the basis for a new pro-paideusis of what civilisation and human aspirations to ascent are all about. If the Church can find the wit, and the voices in the present generation who will be up to the task as were the farseeing saints, founders and teachers in the past, ( who dealt with an equally ambiguous and decadent society ), then this pro-paideusis will be no less than a re-evangelisation of the western world which has already declined far from its once high standards of civilisation, and now urgently needs catechising about the very nature of the simplest truths - what constitutes Beauty ; and where lies the reconciliation of Aesthetics and Justice - central ideas constitutive to a civilisation that even a few decades ago might have been thought to be hardly capable of being forgotten in so short a time and so widespread a fashion.

It delights me to find contemporary scholars who acknowledge the complementarity of Platonism with the gospel. It is no surprise that Plato has served as the paedagogue who has led many thoughtful people to Christ for two millennia. From men on the Areopagus who heard Paul’s sermon to Augustine to Lewis to many people whom I know, that beautiful transcendent vision has led philosophical minds to meet the God of Abraham as the God known by λόγος.

Posted by Joseph on Friday, February 19, A.D. 2010
Aesthetics • Anthropology • Epistemology • Ethics • Metaphysics • (0) Comments • Permalink

Wednesday, January 27, A.D. 2010

New World Byzantine

On Leitourgeia, I read a quote from architect Andrew Gould about church architecture that I found quite on target:

We don’t want to have a stage set, we don’t want to have a building that superficially looks like an Orthodox church, because that’s a stage set, that’s sort of what Baroque architecture is. That’s sort of trying to use plaster and ornament to give a theatrical impression of the Beatific Vision. But Orthodoxy’s not about that, Orthodoxy’s about building something absolutely solid, and permanent and honest that conveys the real ethos of the eternal Kingdom of God.

I then visited Gould’s architectural site, New World Byzantine, and it brought me great joy. We are, even in this age of ugliness, still capable of constructing fitting monuments for the faith. The soul stifling spirit of the present age makes one lose hope and think that we are only in a state of decay. Yet, here in the States and throughout the world, there is a resurgence of artists who value beauty, order, and the aesthetic tradition before the age of shocking originalism. The Intercollegiate Review had an interesting piece a few years ago by Noah Waldman, “On the Meaning of the Classical Movement in Architecture.” It gives me a reason to hope that the return to beauty is not simply a preoccupation of Christian artists but that the West in general is waking from its nightmare. Last year, I wrote about the architecture of Thomas Aquinas College in California in “Overcoming the Cult of the Ugly,” where even Novus Ordo folks have returned to the tradition of sacred and beautiful space. More recently, I attended liturgy in the newest church in Rome, Saint Catherine of Alexandria. It was a traditional and well situated temple. I believe that Christian architects are more comfortable now returning to the models of the past for inspiration instead of feeling like they need to ape rootless contemporary styles. Mencken remarked that Americans have a libido for the ugly, but perhaps enough people have been thoroughly satiated by the modern trough to know that they hunger for purer, wholesome food. I am not holding my breath, but I do wait for a modern renaissance. It must come, right?

Posted by Joseph on Wednesday, January 27, A.D. 2010
Aesthetics • (0) Comments • Permalink

Saturday, January 16, A.D. 2010

The Splendor of Being

There is a wonderful thread currently on View from the Right, “Can an atheist believe in the good?” I addressed the question somewhat two Decembers ago in “Being Good for Goodness’ Sake,” but Auster approaches the question a bit differently:

So what I’m suggesting is that a truly atheist position is not possible. Because the atheist is a human being, he cannot help but experience the good and be attracted to the good, even if the good he believes in is a limited form of the good, such as “life is good.” But the fact that he believes in this good already takes him outside pure materiality, to the transcendent, the transcendent being defined as that which cannot be reduced to an immediate object of experience, yet is nevertheless real. And this non-material, transcendent good is part of a hierarchy of non-material, transcendent goods, the culmination of which is God.

The atheist may deny the existence of God. But he cannot deny his own nature as a being who loves the good, even if it’s a limited form of the good, such as simply loving his own life. And that love places him on a continuum of ever greater and larger goods which are ultimately inseparable from God, even if he personally denies that God exists.

So, to boil my argument down to the briefest, most radical form, the fact that the atheist experiences life as good proves that God exists. Even the limited good that he experiences could not exist unless it were on a continuum with, and thus a part of, a larger good, and ultimately that larger good is God.

I have long argued that self identifying atheists were not truly atheists but rather pantheists or some species of closeted pagans who deified nature or some aspect of it. To acknowledge order—to recognize truth—is to admit the transcendent. I have always thought about this in terms of our knowing the world. Auster shows that our desire for the good reveals the same point. Our intellect and our desire indicate the ordered hierarchy of being, and by knowing and by desiring (and valuing), we necessarily reject nihilism. The inconsistent may cling to a bastard theory in mere words disconnected from intelligible meaning, but they are breathing contradictions.

Auster’s frequent commentator Kristor weighs in with characteristic insight and beauty about the precious gift of being:

Every part of the world, every rock and mote of dust, is, just is, an instance of joy, and of pulseless longing. And this enjoyment, this pleasure in mere existence, is so incredibly vast, that the super-added pleasures of beer or wealth or success are like a thin veneer upon its glorious weighty depth. We experience more joy than do rocks, more complex and interesting pleasures; but only by a little. For to be at all is to have been created by God, and is also in some degree to worship and adore him, and to enjoy him (even if one is unconscious that one is doing so).

I may have noted this before, but I wish that Kristor had his own blog; it is such a joy to read his comments. It gladdens me to know that he exists. He has to be a Platonist. I do not know if he would call himself such, but his writing betrays the synoptic vision and the erotic soul of one of the disciples.

I recommend the thread; it even includes a bit of poetry. Again, I think of the best of the Greeks who used both logos and mythos in the pursuit of the truth.

Posted by Joseph on Saturday, January 16, A.D. 2010
Aesthetics • Anthropology • Metaphysics • (0) Comments • Permalink

Wednesday, October 7, A.D. 2009

Rising of the Republic

For most of Western philosophy’s history, the learned considered Plato’s Timaeus to be his most important work. It is clear that the Republic figured prominently, as well. Consider its influence on Cicero with his De Re Publica. However, it was not until recently that the Republic passed the Timaeus in its received importance. I wonder why.

Along with most contemporaries, I share the view that the Republic is one of the finest, most well written, and profoundest works ever created. It is a landmark piece in the history of philosophy for most of its disciplines. Earlier this week, I linked to the web site of Dr. John Mark Reynolds from Biola University. In its list of recommended books, his site has the following:

The two years spent with this book and Al Geier were the most academically productive of my life. Since then, I have come to find almost every truth needed in the pages of this book, saving only the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I do not find such to be hyperbole. Granted, the Timaeus is brilliant, but it does not appear superior to the Republic. Why should our age’s estimation differ so from that of the past?

The Timaeus is basically a work on physics and metaphysics. It concerns the nature and order of creation. While the Republic touches on these topics, its concern is more worldly in its focus on man. I suspect that the nobler object of the Timaeus rendered it more esteemed than the Republic for the medieval world. Moreover, the central themes of the Republic became so accepted in the intellectual framework and world view of the Christian world that the dialogue perhaps did not seem as valuable. I am not sure. Yet, with the coming of modernity and with the peculiar experience of the modern democratic West that has entered into a state of decay, the Republic has come to present us with a formidable challenge to modern assumptions. For me, at least, it is a light in the darkness. In our postmodern, nominalist world, I might add that the darkness comprehendeth it not.

There were individual philosophical thinkers and teachers who helped to make the Republic better known. Leo Strauss and his intellectual progeny rehabilitated the Platonic political tradition. I wonder if we could detect a similar phenomenon among the Aristotelians. Like the Straussians with the Republic, the Laws, and the social and civic concerns of the dialogues, have the neo-Thomists reinvigorated the study of Aristotle’s Politics? I can imagine that similar political reflections in reaction to modernity would have led to a renewed interest in premodern thinking about man and his place in community.

If you have never read the Republic and if you have philosophical tendencies, I highly recommend reading it and rereading it. Like most of Plato’s works, it is a dialogue, not a treatise. The work invites you to participate in the discussions of Socrates and his interlocutors. Do not assume that the flow of the conversation is all that the dialogue suggests. For there are many roads not taken because of the interlocutors’ answers and choices. For example, it is up to you to think about why the “healthy city” is not as discussed as the feverish city. Furthermore, read carefully. The Straussians get a lot of grief from many folks in “the profession of philosophy,” but their recommendations of how one approaches Plato’s texts make excellent advice. Approach the works of great thinkers as a student willing to learn—a critical and questioning student, but one willing to invest much time and thinking to understand and to wrestle with the text. Having read the Republic several times, I realize with each new reading major insights that I never before saw. Yet, I am aware of how many bright people in academic philosophical fields fail to read the text. I read their articles and books and wonder how they can write what they write when the text so clearly contradicts their interpretation of it. I suspect that they just have not read it carefully. People project rather than listen. They do this in discussion and they do it in their reading. Perhaps, we should call such a hermeneutic of obstinate ignorance. Do not read that way. Rather, open your mind and enter into the dialogue. You will learn much.

Posted by Joseph on Wednesday, October 7, A.D. 2009
Aesthetics • Anthropology • Epistemology • Ethics • Metaphysics • Physics • Politics • (0) Comments • Permalink

Friday, June 5, A.D. 2009

Aesthetes among the Totalitarians

Both the Communists and the National Socialists understood the importance of art. Frequently, one hears the art of their societies derisively dismissed as “propaganda,” though I wonder what art would not be considered propaganda if one were to think consistently. Should we not apply the term to our avant garde Euripidean social critics? When a regime enlists artists to craft according to its vision, it is only doing artificially what artists have always done in all societies naturally—namely, incarnating the values of society in their works. Obviously, the powerful have frequently conscripted the creative classes to put themselves in a good light. Pharaohs, Roman emperors, medieval bishops, narcissistic merchants, and nouveau riche industrialists have patronized beauty with ulterior concerns of political propaganda—or at least of vanity. Nonetheless, the artists themselves still worked their crafts, and they did so for beauty as for the money that earned them their bread. As I wrote in “Disney the Corrupter of Youth?”, it is inaccurate to reduce art to one dimension of its being.

I do not wish to praise the good taste of fascists. Soviet Realism, Mussolini’s Esposizione Universale di Roma, and Albert Speer’s Great Hall leave me uneasy in the same way as almost all modern art. It is cold, inhuman, and, my soul cries out inexplicably, false. I do not know exactly how to defend the charge of falseness, but I find it to be the most appropriate word.

However, the Soviets made the most beautiful subway system in the world, and the Nazi’s had sharp Hugo Boss uniforms. Moreover, both the Soviet Union and the Third Reich had an impressive share of great artists—perhaps despite rather than because of their social systems. For the Soviet regime had its artistic explosion early on, while its society had still been formatively nourished during the old order, and the Nazis were too shortlived to cultivate a society based on their vision.

For an example of Soviet art, consider the film October: Ten Days That Shook the World by Sergei Eisenstein with music by Dmitri Shostakovich. You may watch a clip of the film here:

You may also watch the entire film on a YouTube playlist in eleven parts:

For the National Socialists, one has to mention Leni Riefenstahl. It is a testament to Hitler’s foolishness and vice that he could have destroyed his adopted country and all of Europe with the incredible talent and resources that even a defeated postwar Weimar Germany had. What a misuse of a nation!

Anyway, Riefenstahl was brilliant. You may watch her Olympia, a documentary about the Berlin Olympic Games in A.D. 1936. (Warning: there is some old fashioned Aryan nudity in the prologue.)

Of course, the propaganda element implies that just as the modern games are the successor to the ancient games, so the Germans are the heirs of classical Greece.

It is ironic how, for all their rebellion against decadence and the Last Man, the National Socialists sealed Europe’s declining and wretchedly emasculated fate. Even the Nazi’s love of good things poisoned Europe, making the Europeans ashamed of themselves because of the taint of association. Besides the monuments of the Ottomans’ conquest, every minaret in Europe owes its foundation to Hitler—the father of so many genocides.

Posted by Joseph on Friday, June 5, A.D. 2009
Aesthetics • Politics • (1) Comments • Permalink

Tuesday, May 19, A.D. 2009

Rock and Roll

A couple of years ago, Mark Steyn wrote an article for The New Criterion to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of The Closing Of The American Mind—“Twenty years ago today.” Steyn focuses on Allan Bloom’s treatment of music in the book and notes how wide is the aesthetic gulf that separates the generations who grew up with rock and roll from their elders.

But Bloom is writing about rock music the way someone from the pre-rock generation experiences it. You’ve no interest in the stuff, you don’t buy the albums, you don’t tune to the radio stations, you would never knowingly seek out a rock and roll experience—and yet it’s all around you. You go to buy some socks, and it’s playing in the store. You get on the red eye to Heathrow, and they pump it into the cabin before you take off. I was filling up at a gas station the other day and I noticed that outside, at the pump, they now pipe pop music at you. This is one of the most constant forms of cultural dislocation anybody of the pre-Bloom generation faces: Most of us have prejudices: we may not like ballet or golf, but we don’t have to worry about going to the deli and ordering a ham on rye while some ninny in tights prances around us or a fellow in plus-fours tries to chip it out of the rough behind the salad bar. Yet, in the course of a day, any number of non-rock-related transactions are accompanied by rock music. I was at the airport last week, sitting at the gate, and over the transom some woman was singing about having two lovers and being very happy about it. And we all sat there as if it’s perfectly routine. To the pre-Bloom generation, it’s very weird—though, as he notes, “It may well be that a society’s greatest madness seems normal to itself.” Whether or not rock music is the soundtrack for the age that its more ambitious proponents tout it as, it’s a literal soundtrack: it’s like being in a movie with a really bad score. So Bloom’s not here to weigh the merit of the Beatles vs. Pink Floyd vs. Madonna vs. Niggaz with Attitude vs. Eminem vs. Green Day. They come and go, and there is no more dated sentence in Bloom’s book than the one where he gets specific and wonders whether Michael Jackson, Prince, or Boy George will take the place of Mick Jagger. But he’s not doing album reviews, he’s pondering the state of an entire society with a rock aesthetic.

Bloom was a Straussian sort of Platonist, and he thought that Plato’s discussions about the power of music in the Republic and in the Laws were central to his understanding of a healthy political order—and correct. I agree, and I often think about the power of music to ennoble or to debase. I frequently note to myself in religious services how the (Orthodox) Church’s liturgical tradition is a historical expression of the Athenian Stranger’s musical program in the Laws. For therein people constantly sing measured music in praise of good men and of God. They continually reaffirm and remind themselves of the tradition’s doctrines and values. They incorporate into the Church through song, becoming one with it—the musical equivalent of communion. One sees in the Church the old proverb further developed: lex orandi, lex cantandi, lex credendi, lex agendi.

Yet, I did grow up on rock and roll, and though I love older forms of music, too, I still appreciate rock. I wonder, at times, if rock music is as destructive, nihilistic, and animalistic as its critics claim, and I worry that it might be so. I like it anyway; my soul has been permanently tainted as it has developed in the aesthetic environment of contemporary popular music.

However, I believe that something else must be at work besides familiarity. I also grew up surrounded by hideous international style architecture, but I have never liked it. I have always found it inhuman and ugly. If I can resist the nihilistic allure of modern architecture, why can’t I resist that of music? Is it possible that rock and roll is more redeeming than Bloom thinks? For rock derives much of its character from older popular music, and I doubt that Bloom would have found old peasant music a harbinger for civilizational ruin. Nonetheless, when I visited the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland last summer with my sister and nephew, I thought a lot of Bloom and of Plato. Our health depends on our nutrition, and we consume a lot of poison.

Posted by Joseph on Tuesday, May 19, A.D. 2009
Aesthetics • (0) Comments • Permalink

Friday, April 10, A.D. 2009

A Letter to the Times

I recommend that you add Cassandra Goldman’s relatively new site, A Letter to the Times, to the blogs that you read. While Goldman does not post as frequently as her readers would like, she is quite insightful and sensible. I have become a fan.

Posted by Joseph on Friday, April 10, A.D. 2009
Aesthetics • Anthropology • Politics • (0) Comments • Permalink

Wednesday, March 25, A.D. 2009

Relative Relativism

Present circumstances force me to interact with many folks who think little but say much about the human condition. Spending so much time in Gomorrah—I mean Washington, D.C.—entails such suffering. One of these folks endlessly harps about cultural conditioning. For her, everything is relative—everything is conventional. By everything, I mean statements made by other people. Her sensitivities to the Leftist Zeitgeist must be exempted from this conscientious intellectual modesty.

I readily grant that culture “conditions” human endeavors. An individual’s peculiar personal experience colors his understanding and interaction with the world. Similarly, a collective human group’s shared experience of life—culture—determines how members of that group approach and interpret the phenomena of existence. Nonetheless, human beings, as individuals and in communities, have certain natures and encounter the same world. Each particular man or group of men has limited experience, and this limitation both emphasizes certain knowledge and values and precludes others. Being a human being means living with such limitations; all human experience with the world is a sort of tunnel vision. However, it is the same world that is being experienced, and men, though quite diverse, have to deal with the same joys and pains of imperfect human nature.

When I explain these arguments to the aforementioned person, she blindly holds that everything is relative because she has traveled around the world and now realizes that everyone does everything differently. I suppose that she has not picked up on some universal patterns. When I attempt to convey recent findings in the human sciences, such as universal human preferences in a variety of areas, she dismisses them. Even number crunching has no effect.

Her most obviously egregious errors involve human sexuality. She holds that the differences in men and women are all culturally based. Studies about the differences in brain function in men and women hold no water for her. She is, in fact, a militant tabula rasist.

I have given up trying to reason with this person; she is invincibly ignorant. It occurs to me, though, that extreme cultural relativists incur the wrath of the retortion argument. The man who claims that there is no truth undoes his own statement because he affirms a truth—namely, that there is no truth. Reductionists who hold that human opinions have no truth value but are merely successful memes that give their holders a reproductive advantage likewise destroy their own credibility as speakers. If they are correct, they cannot be correct—their position has no truth value but merely gives them a Darwinian edge. (Moreover, fertility rates over the past century disprove the thesis, as well. Reductionists have less children, though one could object that they still pass on their ideological genes in educating the offspring of the breeders. Eventually, however, such an arrangement would not sustain itself.) Similarly, cultural relativists argue that everything is mere convention. If so, their insistence on cultural relativism would apply to them, as well. They should dismiss their own relativism with the same cavalier attitude with which they treat all other statements about mankind.

It strikes me as fantastic that people do not realize the glaring inconsistency in their fundamental ideas. The contradiction in these cases is not obscure or hidden in removed logical consequences. Rather, the contradiction cries out from their initial stance. Yet, they have no ears to hear.

Posted by Joseph on Wednesday, March 25, A.D. 2009
Aesthetics • Anthropology • Epistemology • Ethics • Politics • (0) Comments • Permalink

Saturday, December 6, A.D. 2008

Conventional Beauty

As any Platonist, the question of beauty is intriguing to me. I am not sure how best to define it, and I am not sure how it exactly relates to human aesthetic standards. I do have some opinions about the topic, however.

I am committed to the proposition that beauty has a basis in ultimate reality. God is beautiful, and that which reflects God—the creation—is beautiful insofar as it reflects God. Yet, what is beauty, as opposed to being or goodness or truth? The Platonic and later Thomist-Aristotelian traditions hold that these universals are united in God and yet perceived separately by rational creatures. If I remember the scholastic distinctions correctly, unity, being, goodness, truth, and beauty are called the transcendental properties of God—the good is being as desired and the true is being as intelligible and understood. What is beauty, then, which has a role in the good, as beauty is desired, and in intelligibility, as beauty delights the mind as it is apprehended? Thomas teaches that beauty is that which, when perceived, delights. This perception and delight appear to work both in the intellectual and in the moral realm. Do we then have a particular faculty for beauty, or do our various faculties delight in being as beautiful in their own way? Am I simply speaking metaphorically when I say that Thomas More’s actions are beautiful or when I say that Kepler’s laws of motion are beautiful? Or, rather, is there something akin in them to a beautiful landscape or to a beautiful face? Is beauty the manifesting of being through our perception of order? I do not know exactly how to delineate the boundaries in metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics, but I am convinced that there is something natural and supranatural about beauty.

Nonetheless, I do not think that the relativists are without reason when they claim that the human estimation of beauty is culturally conditioned. Many of them, fully tarred with oozing nominalism, think that such a position makes beauty an accident of human caprice, but we need not besmirch the proposition because of some of its proponents. To some extent, the human estimation of beauty is related to taste, and taste is fickle. Some philosophers of aesthetics wish to sterilize beauty of matters of taste and interest—for them, aesthetics must stand apart from such base values. Yet, they seem to revolve in the same orbit. Perhaps, taste is a parochial and chauvinistically selective estimation of beauty—taste narrowly claims its particular glimpse of the beautiful as the fullness of beauty. Perhaps, the aesthetes have a point in claiming that taste derives from lower human faculties—perhaps the bodily appetites overcome the soul’s perception of beauty and the result of such regicide is taste. Nonetheless, there is a real relation there between taste and the beautiful. It is possible that taste is to opinion as the perception of beauty is to knowledge, in the classic Platonic scheme—taste betrays some awareness of the beautiful, though it only faintly sees it at its own level and it is ignorant of the beautiful in itself.

The inability of most humans most of the time to acknowledge the beautiful in its fullness could explain the varying estimations of beauty in different cultures and according to different individuals. Nevertheless, culture in general and an individual human being’s life experience in particular are both human reactions to what is—culture is an aspect of nature, not an opposition to it. We cannot reduce the conventional to nothingness; rather, it is an incomplete and “mixed” reflection of reality. Custom is nature filtered through human limitation.

There also seems to be a relationship between beauty and utility in culture. What is seen as beautiful often is what is advantageous or a marker of what is advantageous. The common example is our estimation of a beautiful human body. When the rich and well fed were fat and pasty, fat and pasty were seen as beautiful. Then, when the rich and leisurely were thin and bronze, thin and bronze were called beautiful. Currently, we are moving slowly to the rich and healthy, who limit their cancer-causing sun exposure and work out, and now the “healthy” look, most accessible currently to the upper classes, is what is held as beautiful. It seems that the driving determination of what is seen as beautiful is something external to beauty itself. Yet, wealth, leisure, and health are real goods—they are desired rather than rejected by men. Still, it does seem to cheapen beauty by making it simply a slave to other goods.

Perhaps, then, we speak of beauty equivocally, just as we speak of good equivocally. Beauty in the case of fat rich Renaissance women or privileged tan thin Californian babes in the latter half of the twentieth century is something desired, as beauty is ever desired, but it is desired for the sake of other external goods. Yet, I do not think that people would use beauty in this context unless it had something to do with beauty itself. Maybe, the focus on the human form is enough to justify our use of beauty, to which people, in their customs and fashions, add other concerns. I am not sure.

Unlike the multiculturalists and relativists, however, I hold that our minds can rise above and judge convention, though it is terribly difficult to transcend one’s horizon and perhaps impossible to leave it completely. For example, mutilations of the human body are held to be beautiful throughout the world, though which mutilations are acceptable or flattering depend on the locale. East Asian Kayan and African Ndebele women extend their necks with rings of precious metal, rendering them giraffe-like, and one can see how such “beauty” originates with displays of wealth and status. Westerners pierce various parts of their anatomy, and folks in certain subcultures cover their bodies with tattoos. I would say that while all of these practices might be interesting, and while they may allow for their practitioners to assert a certain status—of wealth, class, tribe, or ideology—whatever additions to beauty are negated by their marring of the human body. The beauty of a well-ordered and unmaimed human body is superior to the conventionally inspired aesthetics that mutilate it. Of course, the homo acutorum would disagree and claim that I am simply declaring a matter of taste.

So, I think that the human estimation of beauty has some connection with beauty itself, which I affirm to exist in God and not merely in the beholder’s eye, but I admit that conventionality limits and colors the human appreciation of beauty, tainting it with concerns for other human goods such as wealth, status, survival, leisure, and so on. Beauty is truly seen; though, like righteousness or love, we get rather confused in trying to understand it.

Posted by Joseph on Saturday, December 6, A.D. 2008
Aesthetics • (0) Comments • Permalink