22 April 2023
Getting Directions to the House of Beauty
On Youtube there are, now and then, posts that attack modern art. These posts seem to appear once or twice a year; at least the ones that get a large viewership. Some of these posts are very witty and get millions of views.
The other day I came across a post that was a defense of modern art; it was a response to one of those Youtube posts lambasting modern art that had received a very large number of views. I’m not familiar with the individual who posted the defense but from the way he spoke he sounded like a young academic, though I could be wrong about that.
During the defense of modern art he presented a series of famous, canonical, paintings from the Western canon ranging from medieval icons to French Impressionism. He noted that these were considered to be beautiful and he agreed. Then he added, “I don’t care. So what if they are beautiful.” He explained that he had no interest in beauty and that one of the things that he liked about modern art is that it had put aside beauty. What replaced beauty among the modern artists he admired? He said he was looking for art that generated ‘engagement’, that worked to lead to a conversation.
The example he gave of a good modern painting was a distorted rendering of the Madonna that was smeared with feces. He liked this painting because it was controversial which means that people are engaged with it and he considered this engagement to be deeper than the experience of beauty.
(As an aside I want to mention that there is a lot of modern art that I like and that I think is beautiful; it was the Youtube presenter who argued that the lack of beauty in modern art is a good thing. In addition, I don’t know how widespread this view is, though I have heard it before. Perhaps it is a fringe view, but I tend to think that is not the case.)
This reminded me of my own experience with poets inspired by Japanese forms and writing in the English language. I am specifically focusing on English language haiku. English language poets who write haiku are divided into two camps; I refer to the first as ‘free verse haiku’ and the second as ‘formal haiku.’ The formal haiku poets write a three-line verse with 5-7-5 syllables. The free verse haiku poets do not use counting as a means for determining line length; consequently, their haiku look a lot like free verse poetry. Japanese haiku came to the English-speaking world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, right at the time when free verse was taking a stance against traditional English poetry. Because of these circumstances I think it is natural that English language haiku reflects the larger context of the formal/free verse divide in contemporary English language poetry.
While reading older issues of English language haiku journals I came across essays that argued for the idea that English language haiku was not concerned with beauty, that other ideals, such as disjunction, or obscurity, have displaced the ideal of beauty. I found these essays baffling since the great haiku poets of Japan were strongly interested in beauty. To my surprise, at least one essay linked the idea of beauty in haiku to an ‘outdated’ Platonism which modern poets had left behind. At the time that I read these essays I thought of myself as a Buddhist, but even so I found the essays very strange. I still do, though now I am more inclined to think that the conscious rejection of Platonism for an unexamined empiricism has something to do with the ejection of beauty as a, or the, central concern of a poet.
My third observation is one that, I understand, comes from Silicon Valley. I don’t remember where or when I first heard this possibly apocryphal anecdote, but the situation is that a conservationist was having no luck getting contributions for their organization from hi-tech firms. He checked in with a friend who worked for one of these firms. The friend told him that, from a hi-tech perspective, “Nature is boring.” Since first hearing this, I have heard several different versions of it.
The link between the first two stories and the third one is that many people experience beauty when engaging with nature. It is common for people to comment about the beauty of a sunset, or of a full moon, or to react positively to a walk in the forest. Many people find spiritual significance in these kinds of experiences, just as many people find spiritual significance when standing in front of a beautiful painting or reading a beautiful poem.
I often think that modernity has created barriers to understanding Platonism that are peculiar to modernity; meaning that these barriers did not exist in previous history. Thinking about the above examples, I have started thinking that modernity marginalizes, or tries to marginalize, beauty and that I do not know of any previous culture that even attempted to do so.
From a Platonist perspective beauty is a symbol of the transcendental, which is immaterial, nevertheless shining forth in the material realm. Platonism comprehends beauty as the presence of eternity within the realm of the ephemeral.
From a Platonist perspective beauty is a signal to those who perceive it to go beyond the perception of the beautiful object to beauty itself. Both Plato and Plotinus wrote a lot about the significance of beauty which is a central theme of the tradition.
From a Platonist perspective perceiving beauty resembles getting directions to the transcendental, nous, and even beyond the transcendental to the source of all things, the One and the Good.
From a Platonist perspective the presence of beauty is a kind of grace. I mean by ‘grace’ that beauty is freely offered, that beauty is not part of a transaction, that beauty is not a commodity.
From a Platonist perspective beauty is the voice of God.
I do not think it is possible to change someone’s mind about the status of beauty if they conceive of beauty in negative terms, or view it as trivial (comparing beauty to, for example, decoration). Dismissing the significance of beauty means that they have rejected symbol, analogy, metaphor, and similar means, as sources of knowledge and wisdom. Instead, only analytic and/or ideological approaches are deemed to be meaningful. The story of how this happened is long and complex and beyond the scope of this post; though I will say that I think the emergence of analytic philosophy in the early 20th century was a major contributing factor.
But once someone has had the experience of beauty, and especially if they have had the experience of the beautiful as such, it is impossible to regard beauty as insignificant. It would be like denying that water is wet.
Fortunately, there are many examples of beauty in this world both in natural settings and in human made things. Even simple things like a well-crafted muffin, or an excellently shaped coffee mug can be an occasion for the experience of the beautiful to unfold. And this unfolding experience of the beautiful leads to the experience of the beautiful as such. And the experience of the beautiful as such leads to the experience of the Good, the One, and the Presence of Eternity.
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