13. The Soul seeks Beauty first
‘Beauty is the beginning of terror we can still just endure.’
Rainer Maria Rilke — Duino Elegies
‘It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.’
Friedrich Nietzsche
The word ‘aesthetics’ was invented by German philosopher, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. He wrote: ‘The end of Aesthetics is the perfection of sensuous knowledge.’ At once we have the link between pleasure and beauty. This is further discussed by Alexander Lowen:
‘…the body has feeling and it alone can experience pleasure, joy and ecstasy. It alone has beauty and grace, for apart from the body these terms are meaningless. Try to define beauty without referring to the body and you will see how impossible it is.’
Alexander Lowen — Pleasure
Beauty and the experience of beauty are not purely subjective. Beauty is part of the mystery that makes up the larger part of reality. It can therefore never be explained fully, or indeed explained away. We are not simply passive spectators — far less consumers — of beauty. We are part of the beauty of the world. Marsilio Ficino defined love as ‘the desire for beauty’ whilst Stendhal says, ‘beauty is the promise of happiness.’ Gandhi described his motivation as creating beauty. ‘Real beauty is my aim,’ he said. Richard Jefferies says this:
‘The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we are truly alive.’
Whilst poet Robinson Jeffres says:
‘… Integrity is wholeness,
the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things,
the divine beauty of the universe.
It is important to distinguish between the word beauty and words like attractive that we sometimes use when describing another person. Attractiveness is in a way a commodification of beauty. Whilst the word beauty can be used in the context of simply describing a person’s physical appearance it also carries with it at least some connotation of a more general ‘rightness’. This is not necessarily to equate it with moral rightness, but it is certainly a wider affirmation of aesthetics. The word beauty leads us into a broad aesthetic that describes a right way of living — the ‘good life’.
There is a sense in which a beautiful object or experience is not an enclosed sentiment. There is the possibility of danger, unpredictability and chaos lurking on the boundaries of the object or experience of beauty and this seems to accord much more with the experience of life. Beauty can drive us too far. An obsession with a particular aspect of beauty can lead to destructiveness and violence. Whilst it is beauty that inspires us toward creativity, that creativity can it seems also be destructive. Then of course it ceases to be creativity at all, but becomes violence. Beauty can drive us crazy; but there’s good crazy and there’s bad!
In the Arts, as we have noted, the sensuous has become suspect in Western culture. Thomas Berry addresses this point here:
‘The world of mechanism has alienated us from the wild beauty of the world about us. Such is the power of art, however, that it can endow even the trivialities and the mechanisms of our world with a pseudomystical fascination. Supposedly this enables our world to avoid the epithet of being caught in an imitative Classicism or in a faded Romanticism. The result is to challenge any traditional norms of beauty by reversion to the wild simply through undisciplined turbulence, at times with an elaborate presentation of the trivial, or even what is referred to as a personal statement.’
Thomas Berry — The Great Work
As well as being reflective of wild nature and the beauty found therein, Art may also serve the function of bringing harmony, and indeed love. Take this quote from Nicholas Gogol:
‘Art is the introduction of order and harmony into the soul, not trouble and disorder…If an artist does not accomplish the miracle of transforming the soul into an attitude of love and forgiveness, then his art is only ephemeral passion.’
Simon Parke (The Beautiful Life) says: ‘Art, religion and philosophy should create a longing for home. The artist/priest/philosopher should bring this longing painfully to the surface.’
A longing for home, a longing for pleasure, are key features of our economy of descendancy, the place of the soul. Alexander Lowen contrasts this with our culture’s longing for power:
‘Despite this interest in beauty, the world grows uglier all the time. I believe this is because beauty has become an adornment rather than a virtue, an ego symbol rather than a way of life. We are committed to power not pleasure, as a way of life, and as a result beauty has lost its true meaning as an image of pleasure.’
Alexander Lowen — Pleasure (My emphasis).
From Lowen then, and dating back to the ancient Greeks, we have beauty as an image of pleasure. For Plato, beauty was the idea (form) above all other ideas. The contrast between sign and symbol is especially important here. Beauty is image in the form of symbol — and as symbol, able to inspire rather than be prescriptive or limiting. Let’s unpack this. We may set up an ‘object of beauty’, a sign, such as how we wish the world to be. In this sense, beauty can be similar to a spiritual quest, or to idealism in morality or politics. But the image then becomes something that we try to own. It is better for beauty to be a symbol in the sense that it can be something that we just become, such that we reflect the beauty that we find in the world. We then reflect our enchantment and engagement with life. Alfred North Whitehead gives a sense of this in his Adventures in Ideas. He says: ‘The teleology of the universe is directed to the production of beauty… The type of truth required for the final stretch of beauty is a discovery and not a recapitulation…. Apart from beauty truth is neither good, nor bad… truth matters because of beauty.’
Friedrich Schelling puts it even more succinctly:
‘The theoretical intelligence merely contemplates the world, and the practical intelligence merely orders it; but the aesthetic intelligence creates the world.’
Although this appreciation of beauty perhaps comes from the unknowable aspect of the universe, it seems to me that there is still part of us that understands and is changed by the experience of beauty. I think that this apprehension of beauty is a bigger clue to what life is about than either goodness or truth. Beauty — which seems the least definable of values — also seems the most real. Beauty speaks to the soul, both as its inspiration and as its goal. Beauty is something given to us first of all, and this sets it apart from other values.
As we’ve seen in the previous chapter, there is another side to beauty that is less about aesthetics and more about seeing others in their personhood and in their humanity. Perhaps inevitably that connection reaches us at a deep emotional level. It is a step change from superficial prettiness or attractiveness to a profound beauty. It resonates with the awe that we feel in contemplating the universe as a whole.
Beauty then is not simply concerned with the arts or aesthetics or with attractiveness of physical appearance. Whilst emanating from mystery, it is nevertheless within the province of everyone to make beauty manifest in the world. Beauty inspires beauty — it inspires us to creativity. This can be in such things as our response to nature, care of others, friendships or good business practice. All these things, both simple and profound, can be gifts to the world. We are touching the void of mystery when we seek to bring beauty into the world. It is a means of grace, a pragmatic rather than an abstract spirituality. Making grace manifest in the world is a beautiful act.
A further paradoxical aspect to beauty is that beauty and imperfection go together. Otto Rank describes the quest for perfection as fundamentally an ego quest rather than a genuine spiritual quest. The search for beauty however, and discovering beauty in the midst of imperfection, is ultimately a quest which will transcend ego. It cannot be differentiated from a quest for the highest good. Richard Jefferies says: ‘He who has got the sense of beauty in his eye can find it in things as they really are.’ So, even in the imperfections of our world, beauty can be found. Even in the humdrum practicalities of an ordinary life, beauty can be brought forth and creativity can be inspired. Thomas Hardy says:
‘The business of the novelist is to show the sorryness underlying the grandest of things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest of things.’
In similar vein, ‘We ordinary people…’ says Kenji Miyazawe, ‘…must forge our own beauty. We must set fire to the greyness of our labour with the wit of our own lives… What is the essence of this art of living? Of course, even this art should have beauty as its essence.’
Beauty is not something that we might respond to or might not. Beauty demands a response. Confucius was once asked to summarise his teachings in a simple manner and he did so with one word — reciprocity. Beauty — as in the beauty of the essence from which we have emerged, and the beauty of nature — requires a reciprocal response from us. Elaine Scarry addresses this point:
‘Beauty seems to place requirements on us for attending to the aliveness … of our world, and for entering into its protection.
‘Beauty is, then, a compact, or a contract between the beautiful being (or person, or thing) and the perceiver. As the beautiful confers on the perceiver the gift of life, so the perceiver confers on the beautiful being the gift of life. Each “welcomes” the other.’
Elaine Scarry — On Beauty and Being Just
The beauty and wildness of nature are likewise seeking a response from us. We ignore this at our peril. Psychologist James Hillman tells us that the ecological crisis is essentially an aesthetic problem. Humans however have a deep-rooted anger against nature for not being compliant to our wishes. We aspire to power over nature, but nature will not comply. Instead, she seeks our awe and our gratitude — and our humility. Our resistance — our lack of reciprocity — is having its consequences. In taming the wildness of nature outside ourselves, we have also tamed the inner wildness of our own souls. Creativity is thereby frustrated and trivialised. Reciprocity then is not an optional extra — in fact reciprocity is the soul’s adventure in the world.
Often for those of us born into modern Western cultures, nature simply doesn’t speak. Only those steeped in her language from birth will learn to hear her voice. Instead we are steeped in our own language of purely human signs — our letters and words, phones and the internet. All that is left is a dull vacancy, a sense of profound unease and guilt when we do occasionally stop to listen. Hearing nature and seeing beauty is a lifetime’s work. This too takes grace and love.
Love sees beauty and responds to beauty with love. Plato said: ‘Love’s function is giving birth in beauty, both in body and in mind.’ We have seen that to some extent this can be conflicted. Our relationship to wild nature and indeed to our own bodies is always somewhat unrequited. But we owe something back to beauty, to nature, to wildness! We must respond in kind by creating beauty in the world, both in terms of the physical things we make and also the relationships we form with other people, and with animals and plants and the environment. Keats may have said ‘beauty is truth and truth beauty - that is all to know on earth and all ye need to know’, (Ode on a Grecian Urn); but Aristotle saw instead a relationship between the beautiful and virtue, arguing that:-‘Virtue aims at the beautiful.’ The big link then is less between beauty and truth, more between beauty and goodness.
Beauty brings about a radical ‘de-centre-ing’ — takes us out of ourselves. This is a necessary process for bringing about good in the world. Another passage from Elaine Scarry takes up this thought and leads us into the further discussions of this work:
‘…beautiful things give rise to the notion of distribution, to a life-saving reciprocity, to fairness not just in the sense of loveliness of aspect but in the sense of ”a symmetry of everyone’s relation to one another”.
‘It is clear that an ethical fairness which requires a “symmetry of everyone’s relation” will be greatly assisted by an aesthetic fairness that creates in all participants a state of delight in their own lateralness [radical de-centring].’
Elaine Scarry — On Beauty and Being Just
To summarise, the danger is that beauty is regarded just as an adornment, an aesthetic that is detached from anything such as rightness, harmony or love. Beauty then becomes mere attractiveness, as a commodity, that inspires only superficial pleasure at best, but at worst may be used as a means of power or destructiveness.
With beauty we have a connection with the wholeness of all things, the wildness of nature and the wildness within ourselves - our own bodies and souls. The wonder and awe that we feel as a result of beauty leads to gratitude and a creative response to the world. Beauty is the inspiration and creating beauty is the essential response — and with this, celebration, joy and compassion.
