Friday, January 9, A.D. 2009

Richard John Neuhaus

Roman Catholic priest, thinker, writer, speaker, and editor and founder of First Things journal Richard John Neuhaus died yesterday. In his honor, First Things reposted his essay “Born Toward Dying” that you may wish to read. It is a mix between near-death autobiography and a somewhat Christian version of the Phaedo. I was fortunate enough to have met him once after a talk that he gave at the John Paul II Cultural Center a few years ago. May his memory be eternal!

I commented upon the passing of Neuhaus in a letter to a friend yesterday in which I marvelled at the lights in the darkness of our inane times. We should be ceaselessly grateful for such luminaries:

When I consider how unworthy our era is of any blessings, it is humbling to think of how many shimmers of truth and sanity have manifested in the world during the past century. Considering just mainly English and French speakers, the list is impressive—to name just a small sample: Gilson, Lewis, Maritain, de Lubac, Popovich, Elliot, Orwell, Chesterton, Danielou, Voegelin, Lossky, Aron, Berry, Kirk, Anscombe, Tolkien, Plantinga, MacIntyre, Strauss, Findlay, F. O’Connor, von Balthasar, Bozell, Schmeeman—not to mention several hierarchs, including the present and preceding Roman pontiffs. Anyway, it is probable that the culture and population at large are the worst that they have ever been in the history of civilization. Never before have so many believed in so much that was so wrong. Nonetheless, it is also possible that we have not had the same level of insightful and wise thinking and discourse in the West, on the part of a growing minority, since the Renaissance. Several centuries of diseased modern ideas have given us both sets of facts. Perhaps, there is hope for the West.

Whenever you get caught up in a fit of desperation, wondering where are our Cappadocians, our Ciceros, and our Thomas Mores today, just consider those names and the thousands like them who have maintained nous in an anoetic age.

Posted by Joseph on Friday, January 9, Anno Domini 2009
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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, Anno Domini 2008
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Friday, October 3, A.D. 2008

Love of Wisdom

Philosophy literally means the love of wisdom, as everyone seems to know but then somehow quickly forgets once that small bit of etymological insight is mentioned. I think that we cannot forget that most basic definition, for philosophy involves a love, an intense love, for wisdom, for truth, and for the “real”, whatever that may be. Other further definitions and distinctions that university types commonly make are often misguided, in that they divide philosophy from the paths to truth and wisdom that do not fit nicely into their latest classification of human knowledge, academic methodology, and the human experience.

Philosophy is not only that phenomenon of critical thinking that has dominated Western thought for almost three millennia or what others may call various forms of east Asian religious and folk wisdom, but it is, I think, the love of truth and the most basic desire to understand and to commune with everything. It embraces inquiry into the most transcendent realities, wonder at the world around us, and inspection into the depths of our minds and souls. For its material, for its evidence, philosophy takes the whole and aims for the whole. The philosopher loves the whole of wisdom.

Now, to what extent critical thinking involves skepticism, the overturning and murdering of mythos, and the other specific characteristics of much of the history of Western thought is a mystery to me. The jury is evidently still out on that case. However, let us demand that it consider all the evidence rather than slipping into sloth and idiocy in attempts to narrow and bracket the tough questions.

Posted by Joseph on Friday, October 3, Anno Domini 2008
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