Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it.
According to this idea beauty is an ultimate value — something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given. Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations.
Why believe x? Because it is true? Why want y? Because it is good. Why look at z? Because it is beautiful. Each brings a state of mind into the ambit or reason, by connecting it to something that it is in our nature, as rational beings, to pursue. Someone who asked “why believe what is true?” or “why want what is good?” has failed to understand the nature of reasoning.
The confidence with which philosophers once trod it is due to an beauty assumption, made explicitly in the Enneads of Plotinus, that truth, beauty and goodness are attributes of the deity, ways in which the divine unity makes it self known to the human soul.
He also thought that beauty and goodness are, in the end, identical, being separate ways in which a single positive reality is rationally apprehended.
Venice would be less beautiful without the great buildings that grace the waterfronts. But these buildings are set among modest neighbours, which neither compete with nor spoil them — neighbours whose principal virtue resides precisely in their neighbourliness, their refusal to draw attention to themselves or to claim the exalted status of high art. Ravishing beauties are less important in the aesthetics of architecture than things that fit appropriately together, creating a soothing and harmonious context, a continuous narrative as in a street or a square, where nothing stands out in particular, and good manners prevail.
Much that is said about beauty and its importance in our lives ignores the minimal beauty of an unpretentious street, a nice pair of shoes or a tasteful piece of wrapping paper, as though these things belonged to a different order of value from a church by Bramante or a Shakespeare sonnet. Yet these minimal beauties are far more important to our daily lives, and far more intricately involved in our own rational decisions, than the great works which (if we are lucky) occupy our leisure hours. They are part of the context in which we live our lives, and our desire for harmony, fittingness and civility is both expressed and confirmed in them.
Our second platitude is not without consequences. We need to take seriously the suggestion that judgements of value tend to be comparative. When we judge things in respect of their goodness and beauty, our concern is very often to rank alternatives, with a view to choosing between them. The pursuit of absolute or ideal beauty may distract us from the more urgent business of getting things right. It is well and good for philosophers, poets and theologians to point towards beauty in its highest form. But for most of us it is far more important to achieve order in the things around us, and to ensure that the eyes, the ears and the sense of fittingness are not repeatedly offended.
This point leads to another, which is that “beautiful” is by no means the only adjective that we deploy in making judgements of this kind. We praise things for the elegance, their intricacy, their fine patina; we admire music for its expressiveness, its discipline, its orderliness; we appreciate the pretty, the charming and the attractive — and we will often be far more confident in such judgements than in an unqualified assertions that a thing is beautiful. To speak of beauty is to enter another and more exalted realm — a realm sufficiently apart from our everyday concerns as to be mentioned only with a certain hesitation. People who are always in praise and pursuit of the beautiful are an embarrassment, like people who make a constant display of their religious faith.
Somehow, we feel, such things should be kept for our exalted moments, and not paraded in company, or allowed to spill out over dinner.
Another way of putting the point is to distinguish two concepts of beauty. In one sense “beauty” means aesthetic success, in another sense it means only a certain kind of aesthetic success. There are works of art which we regard as set apart by their pure beauty — works that “take our breath away.” Such works are sometimes described as “ravishing,” meaning that they demand wonder and reverence, and fill us with an untroubled and consoling delight. And because words, in the context of aesthetic judgement, are loose and slippery, we often reserve the term “beautiful” for works of this kind, meaning to lay special emphasis on their kind of enrapturing appeal. Likewise with landscapes and people we encounter the pure and breathtaking examples, which render us speechless, content merely to bathe in their glow. And we praise such things for their “sheer” beauty — implying that, should we attempt to analyze their effect on us, words would fail.
We might even go so far as to say, of certain works of art, that they are too beautiful: that they ravish when they should disturb, or provide dreamy intoxication when what is needed is a gesture of harsh despair.
“All art is quite useless,” wrote Oscar Wilde, not wishing to deny, however, that art has very powerful effects.
You might reasonably say that, until you know what the thing is supposed to do, you can have no view in the matter. Learning that it is a boot-pull, you might then respond: yes, as boot pulls go, it really is rather beautiful, but how shapeless and clumsy as a knife.
The architect Louis Sullivan went further, arguing that beauty in architecture (and by implication the other useful arts) arises when form follows function.
The issue here might seem to be simple: is the pleasure in beauty a sensory or an intellectual pleasure? But then, what is the difference between the two? The pleasure of a hot bath is sensory; the pleasure of a mathematical puzzle intellectual. But between those two there are a thousand intermediary positions, so that the question of where aesthetic pleasure lies on the spectrum has become one of the most vexed issues in aesthetics.
Moreover, if we tie beauty too closely to the senses, we might find ourselves wondering why so many philosophers, from Plato to Hegel, have chosen to exclude the senses of taste, touch and smell from the experience of beauty. Are not wine-buffs and gourmets devoted to their own kind of beauty? Are there not beautiful scents and flavours as well as beautiful sights and sounds? Does not the vast critical literature devoted to the assessment of food and wine suggest a close parallel between the arts of the stomach and the arts of the soul?
Here, very briefly, is how I would respond to those thoughts. In appreciating a story we certainly are more interested in what is being said than in the sensory character of the sounds used to say it. Nevertheless, if stories and novels are simply reducible to the information contained in them, it would be inexplicable that we should be constantly returning to the words, reading over favourite passages, allowing the sentences to percolate through our thoughts, long after we have assimilated the plot. The order in which a story unfolds, the suspense, the balance between narrative and dialogue and between both and commentary — all these are sensory features, in that they depend upon anticipation and release, and the orderly unfolding of a narrative in our perception.
To that extent a novel is directed to the senses — but not as an object of sensory delight, like a luxurious chocolate or a fine old wine. Rather as something presented through the senses, to the mind.
Tastes and smells are not capable of the kind of systematic organization that turns sounds into words and tones. We can relish them, but only in a sensual way that barely engages our imagination or our thoughts. They are, so to speak, insufficiently intellectual to prompt the interest in beauty.
We call something beautiful when we gain pleasure from contemplating it as an individual object, for its own sake, and in its presented form.
Imagine a mother cradling her baby, looking down on it with love and delight. We don’t say that she has an interest that this baby satisfies, as though some other baby might have done just the same job for her. There is no interest of the mother’s that the baby serves, nor does she have an end to which the baby is a means. The baby itself is her interest — meaning, it is the object of interest for its own sake. If the woman were motivated by an interest that she has — say, in interest in persuading someone to employ her as a baby-minder — then the baby itself would cease to be the full and final focus of her state of mind. Any other baby that enabled her to make the right noises and the right expressions would have done just as well. One sign of a disinterested attitude is that it does not regard its object as one among many possible substitutes. Clearly, no other baby would “do just as well” for the mother doting on the creature that she holds in her arms.
In another sense, however, the moral motive is interested: the interest of reason is also the determining principle of my will. I am making up my mind to do something, and to do what reason requires — that is what the word “ought” implies. In the case of the judgement of beauty, however, I am purely disinterested, abstracting from practical considerations and attending to the object before me with all desires, interests and goals suspended.
We can approach Kant’s thought more sympathetically, however, if we distinguish among pleasures. These are of many kinds, as we can see by comparing the pleasure that comes from a drug, the pleasure taken in a glass of wine, the pleasure that you son has passed his exam and pleasure in a painting or a work of music.
When my sons tells me he has won the mathematics prize at school, I feel pleasure: by my pleasure is an interested pleasure, since it arises from the satisfaction of an interest of mine — my parental interest in my son’s success. When I read a poem, my pleasure depends upon no interest other than my interest in this, the very object that is before my mind.
Intentional pleasures, by contrast, are part of the cognitive life: my pleasure in the sight of my son winning the long-jump vanishes when I discover it was not my son but a look-alike who triumphed.
Men do not merely wear feathers and tattoos; they paint pictures, write poetry, sing songs. But all these things are signs of strength, ingenuity and prowess, and therefore reliable indices of reproductive fitness. Women are struck with awe, wonder and desire by these artistic gestures, so that Nature takes her course to the mutual triumph of the genes that carry her lasting messages.
Men appreciate women for their beauty just as much as, if not more than, women appreciate men; that women too are active in the production of beauty, both in art and in everyday life; that people associate beauty with their highest endeavours and aspirations, are disturbed by its absence, and regard a measure of aesthetic agreement as essential for life in society.
By contemplating beauty the soul rises from its immersion in merely sensuous and concrete things, and ascend to a higher sphere, where it is not the beautiful boy who is studied, but the form of the beautiful itself, which enters the soul as a true possession, the the way that ideas generally reproduce themselves in the souls of those who understand them. This higher form of reproduction belongs to the aspiration towards immortality, which is the soul’s highest longing in this world. But it is impeded by too great a fixation on the lower kind of reproduction, which is a form of imprisonment in the here and now.
Someone, looking at the face of an old man, with many interesting creases and wrinkles, with a fine and placid eye and a wise and welcoming expression, might describe the face as beautiful. But we understand that judgement in another way from “She’s beautiful!” said by an eager youth of a girl. The youth is going after the girl; he desires her, not just in the sense of wanting to look at her, but in that he wants to hold her and kiss her. The sexual act is described as the “consummation” of this kind of desire — though we should not think that it is necessarily the thing intended, or that it brings the desire to an end, in the way that drinking a cup of water brings the desire of water to an end.
In the case of the beautiful old man, there is no “going after” of this kind: no agenda, no desire to possess, or in any other way to gain something from the beautiful object. The old man’s face is full of meaning for us, and if we are looking for satisfaction we find it there, in the thing that we contemplate, and in the act of contemplation.
Suppose you want a glass of water. There is no particular glass of water that you want. Any glass of water would do — nor does it have to be a glass. And there is something that you want to do with the water — namely, to drink it. After which your desire is satisfied, and belongs in the past. That is the normal nature of our sensuous desires: they are indeterminate, they are directed to a specific action, and they are satisfied by that action and brought to an end by it. None of those things is true of sexual desire. Sexual desire is determinate: there is a particular person that you want. People are not interchangeable as objects of desire, even if they are equally attractive.
In certain circumstances you may be released from your desire for one person by making love to another. But this does not mean that the second person has satisfied the very desire that focused on the first.
There is, he believed, a base form of desire, which targets the body, and a higher form, which targets the soul, and — by means of the soul — the eternal sphere from which we rational beings are ultimately descended.
The mouth is not, for us, an aperture through which sounds emerge, but a speaking thing, continuous with the “I” whose voice it is. To kiss that mouth is not to place one body part against another, but to touch the other person in his very self. Hence the kiss is compromising — it is a move from one self towards another, and a summoning of the other into the surface of his being.
We are disgusted by obscenity for the same reason that Plato was disgusted by physical lust: it involves, so to speak, the eclipse of the soul by the body.
Whether it attracts contemplation or prompts desire, human beauty is seen in personal terms. It resides especially in those features — the face, the eyes, the lips, the hands — which attract our gaze in the course of personal relations, and through which we relate to each other I to I. The eyes, mouth and hands have a universal appeal. For they are the features from which the soul of another shines on us, and makes itself known.
Reason, freedom, and self-consciousness are names for a single condition, which is that of a creature who does not merely think, feel, and do, but who also has the questions: what to think, what to feel and what to do? These questions compel a unique perspective on the physical world. We look on the world in which we find ourselves from a point of view at its very edge: the point of view where I am. We are both in the world and not of the world, and we try to make sense of this peculiar fact with images of the soul, the psyche, the self or the “transcendental subject.” These images do not result from philosophy only: they arise naturally, beauty in the course of a life in which the capacity to justify and criticize our thoughts, beliefs, feelings and actions is the basis of the social order that makes us what we are. The point of view of the subject is therefore an essential feature of the human condition. And the tension between this point of view and the worlds of objects is present in many of the distinctive aspects of human life.
Perhaps no sexual experience differentiates human beings from animal more clearly than the experience of jealousy. Animals compete for partners and fight over them. But when victory is established in the conflict is over. The jealous lover may or may not fight: but fighting has no bearing on his experience, which is one of deep existential humiliation and dismay. The beloved has been polluted or desecrated in his eyes, has become in some way obscene, in the way that Desdemona, her innocence notwithstanding, becomes obscene in the eyes of Othello. This phenomenon parallels the sense of desecration that attaches to the misuse of holy things.
There is hardly a person alive who is not moved by the beauty of the perfectly formed child. Yet most people are horrified by the thought that this beauty should be a spur to desire, other than the desire to cuddle and comfort.
The idea that the sacred takes us to the upper end of the beauty scale, and it would be wise to come down a step or two, and to remind ourselves of our second platitude, that beauty is a matter of degree.
It is true that human beauty — the beauty of the true Venus or Apollo — can call forth all the epithets that naturally belong with the divine. But most attractive people are beautiful to some lesser degree, and the language used to describe them avails itself of a host of quieter predications: pretty, engaging, charming, lovely, attractive.
People may seem to live n an aesthetic vacuum, he would say, only to those who believe that aesthetic judgement must be exercised in some specific area, such as music, literature or painting. In fact, however, appreciation of the arts is a secondary exercise of aesthetic interest. The primary exercise of judgement is in the appreciation of nature. In this we are all equally engaged, and though we may differ in our judgements, we all agree in making them. Nature, unlike art, has no history, and its beauties are available to every culture and at every time. A faculty that is directed towards natural beauty therefore has a real chance of being common to all human beings, issuing judgements with a universal force.
Birds, bees, and flowers, by contrast, have boundaries — they are framed by their own nature. And their individuality is a deep characteristic, which they possess in themselves, regardless of how we perceive them. Like paintings, which are shielded from aesthetic pollution by their frames, organisms possess an air of aesthetic untouchability. Bathed by the aesthetic gaze they separate themselves from all relations, other than the relation with the one who studies them.
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a Heaven in a wild flower
The experience of natural beauty is not a sense of “how nice!” or “how beauty pleasant!” It contains a reassurance that this world is a right and fitting place to be — a home in which our human powers and prospects find confirmation.
When you pause to study the perfect form of a wildflower or the blended feathers of a bird, you experience an enhanced sense of belonging. A world that makes room for such things makes room for you.
Some argue in response that we attribute beauty to natural things only by analogy, seeing the works of nature as though they were works of art. But this is surely implausible. Works of art interest us in part because they represent things, tell stories about things, express ideas and emotions, convey meanings that are consciously intended: and to approach natural objects with similar expectations is to misunderstand them. It is also to miss the true source of their beauty, which is their independence, their apartness, their capacity to show that the world contains things other than us, which are just as interesting as we are.
There is truth in Oscar Wilde’s quip, that it is only a shallow person who does not judge by appearances. For appearances are the bearers of meaning and the focus of our emotional concerns.
Works of art are expressively presented as objects of contemplation.
They are framed on the wall, contained between the covers of a book, installed in the museum or reverently performed in the concert hall. To change them without the artist’s consent is to violate a fundamental aesthetic propriety. Works of art stand as the eternal receptacles of intensely intended messages. And often it is only the expert, the connoisseur of the adept who si fully open to what they mean. Nature, by contrast, is generous, content to mean only herself, uncontained, without an external frame, and changing from day to day.
The most ordinary people fall in love: but how many can describe the intentionality of this strange emotion, or find the concepts which describe the way in which lovers experience the world? Similarly, the most ordinary people make judgements of natural beauty, even though few if any could express what they perceive, when the world before them suddenly changes character, from a thing to be used to a thing to be witnessed.
Burke discerned two radically distinct response to beauty in general, and to natural beauty in particular: one originating in love, the other in fear.
When we are attracted by the harmony, order and serenity of nature, so as to feel at home in it and confirmed by it, then we speak of its beauty; when, however, as on some wind-blown mountain crag, we experience the vastness, the power, the threatening majesty of the natural world, and feel our own littleness in the face of it, then we should speak of the sublime.
Both these response are elevating; both lift us out of the ordinary utilitarian thoughts that dominate our practical lives. And both involve the kind of disinterested contemplation that Kant was later to identify as the core of the aesthetic experience.
The beautiful landscape prompts us to a judgement of taste; the sublime vista invites another kind of judgement, in which we measure ourselves against the awesome infinity of the world, and become conscious of our finitude and frailty.
In the experience of the sublime, Kant went ton to argue we are presented with an intimation of our own worth, as creatures who are both conscious of the vastness of nature, and also able to affirm ourselves against it. Somehow, in the very awe that we experience before the power of the natural world, we sense our own ability as free beings to measure up to it, and to reaffirm our obedience to the moral law, which no natural force could ever vanquish or set aside.
The goal is to capture the uniqueness and fleetingness of the occasion, as conveyed by the words ichigo, ichie: one chance, one meeting.
Anything is a joke if somebody says so. A joke is an artefact made to be laughed at. It may fail to perform its function, in which case it is a joke that “falls flat.” Or it may perform its function, but offensively, in which case it is a joke “in bad taste.” But none of this implies that the category of jokes is arbitrary, or that there is no such thing as a distinction between good jokes and bad.
I might try to put my thoughts and feelings into words. “It is an invitation to see the life that spreads from people into all their products, the way in which life radiates from the meanest things, so that nothing is at rest, all is becoming.” But couldn’t he have written that message on the bottom of the canvas? Why does he need a chair to communicate a thought like that? I am likely to respond that my words are only a gesture; that the real meaning of the painting is bound up with, inseparable from, the image — that it resides in the very shapes and colours of the chair, is inseparable from Van Gogh’s distinctive style, and cannot be translated completely into another idiom.
First, there is the fact that a line of poetry can express several thoughts simultaneously, whereas a paraphrase will at best lay them out in succession. A paraphrase would give one of those readings, and then the other, but the power of the line consists partly in the fact that you hear them together, like simultaneous voices in music — and then the doom of autumn invades the image of the ruined monastery, just as the idea of sacrilege invades the image of the leafless tree.
Secondly, there is the fact that poetry is “polysemous”, developing its meaning on several levels — the levels of image, of statement, of metaphor, of allegory and so on. A paraphrase would have to spell out the levels of meaning separately; whereas the power of poetry depends on their being presented simultaneously.
Thirdly meaning is lost in paraphrase.
Most B-movies are good representations of absurd events involving boring people to no artistic purpose.
One suggestion is that works of art express emotion, and that this is of value to us because it acquaints us with the human condition, and arouses our sympathies for experiences that we do not otherwise undergo. But clearly works of art don’t express emotion in the way that you express your anger by shouting at your son, or you love by speaking to him affectionately. Most works of art are not created in a sudden heat of passion; nor do we have the knowledge that will enable us to say that passion (if any) motivated the artist. Even when artists refer to the emotion that is allegedly conveyed by their work, we may not believe that their description is the correct one.
Why is Beethoven any better placed than you to put words to the feeling convey by his music? Maybe you, as critic, are better able to describe the emotional content of a piece of music than the composer. There are plenty of artists who are awoken by criticism to the meaning of their own works.
In fact all attempts to describe the emotional content of works of art seem to fall short of their target. The feeling does not have an independent life: it is there in the notes, the pigments and the words, and attempts to extract it and trap in a description seem lame and inadequate when set beside the work.
Art moves us because it is beautiful, and it is beautiful in part because it means something. It can be meaningful without being beautiful; but to be beautiful it must be meaningful.
Hence, as soon as we are engaged in generating and appreciating objects as ends in themselves, rather than as means to our desires and purposes, we demand that those objects be ordered and meaningful. This “blessed rage for order” is present in the very first impulse of artistic creation: and the impetus to impose order and meaning on human life, through the experience of something delightful, is the underlying motive of art in all its forms. Art answers the riddle of existence: it tells us why we exist by imbuing our lives with a sense of fittingness. In the highest form of beauty life becomes its own justification, redeemed from contingency by the logic which connects the end of things with their beginning. The highest form of beauty, as exemplified in those supreme artistic achievements, is one of the greatest of life’s gift to us. It is the true ground of the value of art, for it is what art, and only art, can give.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all.
We know what is to love and be rejected, and thereafter to wander in the world infected by a bleak passivity. That experience, in all its messiness and arbitrariness, is one that most of us must undergo.
During the 19th century there arose the movement of “art for art’s sake”. That if art is to be valued for its own sake, then it must be detached from all purposes, including those of the moral life. A work of art that moralizes, that strives to improve its audience, that descends from the pinnacle of pure beauty to take up some social or didactic cause, offends against the autonomy of the aesthetic experience, exchanging intrinsic for instrumental values and losing whatever claim it might have had to beauty.
It is certainly a failing in a work of art that it should be more concerned to convey a message than to delight its audience.
In a democratic culture people are inclined to believe that it is presumptuous to claim to have better taste than your neighbour.
By doing so you are implicitly denying his right to be the thing that he is. You like Bach, she likes U2; you like Leonardo, he likes Mucha; she likes Jane Austen, you like Steele. Each of you exist in his own enclosed aesthetic world, and so long as neither harms the other, and each says good morning over the fence, there is nothing further to be said.
But things are not so simple, as the democratic argument already implies. If it is so offensive to look down on another’s taste, it is, as the democrat recognizes, because taste is intimately bound up with our personal life and moral identity. It is part of our rational nature to strive for a community of judgement, a shared conception of value, since that is what reason and the moral life require. And this desire for a reasoned consensus spills over into the sense of beauty.
This we discover as soon as we take into account the public impact of private tastes. Your neighbour fills her garden with kitsch mermaids and Disneyland gnomes, polluting the view from your window; she designs her house in a ludicrous Costa Brava, in loud primary colours that utterly ruin the tranquil atmosphere of the street, and so on.
Implicit in the sense of beauty is the order thought of community — of the agreement in judgements that makes social life possible and worthwhile. That is one of the reasons why we have planning laws — which, in the great days of Western civilization, have been extremely strict, controlling the heights of buildings, the materials to be used in construction, the tiles to be used in roofing, even the crenelations on buildings that face the thoroughfares.
First, taste is rooted in a broader cultural context, and cultures are not universal. The whole point of the concept of culture is to mark out the significant differences between the forms of human life, and the satisfactions that people take in them.
But that brings me to a more important observation, which is that, in the matter of aesthetic judgement, objectivity and universality come apart. In science and morality, the search for objectivity is the search for universally valid results — results that must be accepted by every rational being. In the judgement of beauty the search for objectivity is for valid and heightened forms of human experiences — forms in which human life can flower according to its inner need and achieve the kind of fruition that we witness in the Sistine Chapel ceiling, in Parsifal or in Hamlet.
Objects can be substituted for each and other, subjects not. Subjects, are Kant argued, are free individuals; their non-substitutability belongs to what they essentially are. Pornography, like slavery, is a denial of the human subject, a way of negating the moral demand that free beings must be treat each other as ends in themselves.
The old language, the historians say, was exhausted: only cliches could result from the attempt to prolong its use. The new language was designed to place music in its historical context, to recognize the present as something detached from the past, a new experience which we seize only by understanding it as “other” than what has gone before. But in the very moment of seizing the present we become aware of it as past and superseded.
I don’t say that works of art are sacred things — though many of the greatest works of art started life in that way, including the statues and temples of the Greeks and Romans, and the altarpieces of medieval Europe. But I do say that they are, or have been, part of the continuing human attempt to idealize and sanctify the objects of experience, and to present images and narratives of our humanity as a thing to live up to, and not merely a thing to live.
Just as there is sex addiction, arising from the decoupling of sexual from pleasure from the inter-personal intentionality of desire, so too is there stimulus addiction — the hunger to be shocked, gripped, stirred in whatever way might take us straight to the goal of excitement — which arises from the decoupling of sensory interest from rational thought. The pathology here is familiar to us, and was interestingly caricatured by Aldous Huxley, in his account of the “feelies” — the paranomic shows in which every sense-modality is engaged. Maybe the Roman games were similar: short cuts to awe, horror and fear which reinforced the ensuring sense of safety, by prompting the visceral relief that it is not I but another who has been torn to pieces in the ring. And maybe the 5-second cut which is the stock-in-trade of the B movie and the TV advert operates in a similar way — setting up addictive circuits that keep the eyes glued to the screen.
Addiction, as the psychologists point out, is a function of easy rewards. The addict is someone who presses again and again on the pleasure switch, whose pleasure by-pass thought and judgement to settle in the realm of need. Art is at war with effect addiction, in which the need for stimulation and routinized excitement has blocked the path to beauty by putting acts of desecration centre stage.
Without the conscious pursuit of beauty we risk falling into a world of addictive pleasures and routine desecration, a world in which the worthwhileness of human life is no longer clearly perceivable.
The paradox, however, is that the relentless pursuit of artistic innovation leads to a cult of nihilism. The attempt to defend beauty from pre-modernist kitsch has exposed it to postmodernist desecration. We seem to be caught in between two forms of sacrilege, the one dealing in sugary dreams, the other in savage fantasies.
Both are forms fo falsehood, ways of reducing and demeaning our humanity. Both involve a retreat from the higher life, and a rejection of its principal sign, which is beauty. But both point to the real difficulty, in modern conditions, of leading a life in which beauty has a central place.
Kitsch deprives feeling of its cost, and therefore its reality; desecration augments the cost of feeling, and so frightens us away from it. The remedy for both states of mind is suggested by the thing that they each deny, which is sacrifice. Love and affection between people is real only to the extent that it prepares the way for sacrifice. Sacrifice is the core of virtue, the origin of meaning and the true theme of high art.
Sacrifice can be avoided, and kitsch is the great lie that we can both avoid it and retains its comforts. Sacrifice can also be made meaningless by desecration. But, when sacrifice is present and respected, life redeems itself; it becomes and object of contemplation, something that “bears looking at”, and which attracts our admiration and our love. This connection between sacrifice and love is presented in the rituals and stories of religion.
In my view all such definitions start from the wrong end of the subject, which is not about “things in the world” but about a particular experience of them, and about the pursuit of meaning that springs from that experience. Does this imply that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, that there is no objective property that we recognize about whose nature and value we can agree? My answer is simply this: everything I have said about the experience of beauty implies that it is rationally founded. It challenges us to find meaning in its object, to make critical comparisons, and to examine our own lives and emotions in the light of what we find.
Art, nature and the human form all invite us to place this experience in the centre of our lives. If we do so, then it offers a place of refreshment of which we will never tire. But to imagine that we can do this, and still be free to see beauty as nothing more than a subjective preference or a source of transient pleasure, is to misunderstand the depth to which reason and value penetrate our lives. It is to fail to see that, for a free being, there is right feeling, right experience and right enjoyment just as much as right action. The judgement of beauty orders the emotions and desires of those who make it. It may express their pleasure and their taste: but it is pleasure in what they value and taste for their ideals.