What Beauty is and why we need it.
Roger Scruton.
Thinking about Beauty, right now, might seem a bit pointless. Maybe now is not the time: there are realities that cannot be simply waved away, and worrying about the decorative is not going to solve anything.
Nevertheless, there are solid reasons to think about it, even now. As philosopher Roger Scruton said, it is not about the pretty or the eye-catching. It is about the intrinsically meaningful, and is part of what makes living in the real world bearable. And, rather than being some effete affectation, the beautiful is important to nearly everyone, even if they don't talk about it in that way:
"As you know from your own lives, when given a little territory of your own - whether a room to live in, or an event to dress for, or a speech to make, or a ceremony to attend - your first thought is to look for the beautiful. Everybody has an instinct to decorate the room in which he lives, according to his own taste.""another use of Beauty ...in ordinary everyday life is the ornamenting of things, making objects into something more human than they would otherwise be... We have the consciousness of our being and our surroundings, through which we have a sense of the purpose of our own existence. And when we encounter objects, we transfer that sense of subjectivity to them. The objects with which we surround ourselves tend to look back at us with the same subjectivity that we look on them... Everyday life is like that. This is how people create a home.. and that, again, is a deep feeling in human beings, that need to be at home in the world, to belong to things, to be part of the everyday conduct of everyday arrangements of the things around you." And, whilst our individual aesthetic judgements are our own, they are part of the pool of shared meanings that makes social life possible:
"There is a natural instinct that we all have, an instinct to beautify our lives. It is an instinct that belongs to our natural politeness, our ability and desire to respect each other…And also to compare that taste with others - to stand back from the painting that he's applied to the wall and ask himself whether it's right or wrong, whether it would look good in such-and-such circumstances; how the furniture should be put in place and what others would think."What makes all this relevant right now, though, is that a robust pursuit of the beautiful allows us to respond to the punishing ugliness of the modern world:
"There has been what Milan Kundera calls the uglification of modern life - that wherever we turn, we will find a deliberate desecration of beautiful things. Shapes, forms and gestures are employed which are calculated either to repel us, or or simply to annihilate the surrounding experience of beauty.... ""For example, I've just been speaking about the architectural destiny of Washington. Postmodern architecture is now accumulating on the edge of the old center - these great big blocks; boxes of glass, often of mirror glass, which are not just characterless in themselves but obliterate the whole sense of the city as a settlement. A shared settlement - a place where you would want to make your home. Post modern architecture is turning it from a settlement into a kind of transit camp, where you appear in an office for a few hours of the day before escaping from the center. And everybody knows this kind of architecture is growing everywhere. It is obliterating our cities by turning them into places where we don't really want to be. We have to come there to work, but we don't want to remain there when the hours of work are over. "For example, Art now is about activism, which is why it has interminable lectures about what beauty is and who is entitled to pontificate about it:
"Nobody wants ostentatiously to give offense. Or, rather, they didn't want ostentatiously to give offense until that became part of what it is to be a creative artist - which, of course, is what is taught in the art schools today...it's only the shocking and the disturbed that can give us any sense of saying something new. But of course what they're saying is the same as they've always been saying: namely, that the world is not worth living in, so nothing else, only ugliness, can capture our jaded attention. That seems to be the the basic assumption behind the the uglified society."These are all parts of a full-spectrum attempt to drain the value from every aspect of life:
"Uglification goes along with the deconsecration of the sacred things. It's obvious that this has happened in the most important events of personal life, of birth and reproduction and death... Marriage has been deconsecrated, handed over to the state and then uglified by being made into a mere pursuit of me and my gratification rather than a devotion to you. And this deconsecration has led also to a desecration of things."And the uglier it is, the more it intensifies isolation:
"And that's part of what uglification is: turning everything into an instrument of some purpose of the individual in defiance of any sense of community or belonging." After a few decades, you might feel like taking advantage of the self-service euthenasia booths. However, the pursuit of beauty, as Sir Roger describes it, is a defence against these dark arts. An active, focussed comparison between beauty and ugliness reveals what has intrinsic meaning and what sustains you. Then, rather than the exhausting attempt to constantly block it out, the ugly can be faced squarely. Once its purpose is uncovered, modern ugliness is less mysteriously overwhelming and easier to resist.
A strong account of what is valued can become a powerful shared language, one that can be understood visually and intuitively, without any sophisticated education or rhetoric. Sir Roger gave Venice as an example:
"And this is something which everybody would recognize if they visit Venice. Venice is full of grand palaces. It contains the greatest interior of any building anywhere, the golden tent of Saint Mark's Basilica. But that's not what most inspires the visitor. Much more astonishing than St Marks and all the other great monuments, more touching than the Ducal palace, these ordinary doorways on the backwater canals, those little marble-lipped bridges, shrines and niches that punctuate the walls. You have a sense it's all about you as a meticulous but effortless aesthetic order in which all the residents have willingly collaborated over centuries.
And the result of this is that their city - which is as you know planted against the odds in the swamps of the Adriatic - is the greatest shared space that's ever been made, and that kept itself in being for a thousand years. There's not a wall or a doorway or a window frame that hasn't been furnished in the spirit of love, and adjusted to its neighbours, so to express the power and the grandeur of the would-be resident.
So things built in Venice were all built for others, for how they look to the neighbour and to assert yourself, side by side, with the neighbor and perhaps a little bit over and above him as well. And those people - those residents - are immortalized in the architecture of their city. And the buildings that result are not great works of art. They're just ordinary buildings, but they fit together in this harmonious web and the people fit to them as well making a background to human life. And that's such a tiny city...
It has existed in a continuous state of peaceful revelry and lawful self-government for a thousand years. And why did it do that? How was it able to defend itself? Because the people loved it. They were prepared to sacrifice themselves in its defense until the first idea of a European Union was imposed upon it by Napoleon ...this everyday beauty that to me is typified by Venice is a rare achievement. And it shouldn't be a rare achievement, because there it was simply the byproduct of what ordinary people naturally are inspired to do. "The clearer you can see it, the more internal strength you'll have, and the easier it becomes to give your attention to it. Other people are also starved of pleasure and meaning, and you can expect them to be drawn to it. And, however distant it might seem, ultimately any realistic hope for better times needs solid ideas of what matters, and what is sustaining. Without them, that is just magical thinking.
"And that - I think - is the point on which I'd like to leave you. That the answer to the uglification that is growing all around us, is a gesture of reconsecration, however we arrive at it. We must reconsecrate the world as a place where we can belong as complete beings, and belong to others, and to the community around us, and to the world as a whole; and expel this uglification from the middle of our lives."Examples of Roger Scruton’s extensive thought on aesthetics
Address to the Union Club of the City of New York, October 4, 2018.
"Beauty in a World of Ugliness," October 10, 2018, at the Catholic University of America.