This is what I had for the Linden Ridge UU worship service today. Beauty gave me a heckuva difficult time. So far, I have a good start on the intellectual background, but can't quite see how to get from ideas to the heart of the topic.
The next draft will likely jettison most of the Kant (How did that get into a sermon?!) to focus on . . . ? . . . beauty as a source of hope, of motivation to live a beautiful life and make the world a more beautiful place? that we can choose to seek out and create beauty instead of ugliness . . .
Beauty (July 27, 2014)
The next draft will likely jettison most of the Kant (How did that get into a sermon?!) to focus on . . . ? . . . beauty as a source of hope, of motivation to live a beautiful life and make the world a more beautiful place? that we can choose to seek out and create beauty instead of ugliness . . .
Copyright 2014 Dr. Jennifer Thomson
Non-commercial use encouraged with credit to author and source.
Beauty (July 27, 2014)
One early June
day, a friend and I visited Boerner Botanical Gardens in Brookfield. The peonies
and irises were in bloom—riotously in bloom. I loved the peonies in all their
varieties of pink and coral and white, their luxurious profusions of double blossoms
and more delicate singles. But the irises absolutely transfixed me, called to
me, drew me to them. These weren’t the homey blue flowers of my own garden.
These irises unfolded in opulent shapes and marvelous combinations of
colors—bold browns, intense golds, rich purples, all blended in glorious
combinations. I felt compelled to reach out and touch those fantastic colors,
to experience that intensity through as many sensory perceptions as
possible—drink them in with my eyes, taste them with my hands, inhale the
richness of their beauty.
That day was over
ten years ago, but I can close my eyes right now and see—almost feel—the beauty
of those impossible colors amidst the new green grass warmed by the early
summer sunshine and still dewy wet where the trees cast morning shade on the
ground. And I still feel the overwhelming joy I felt that day.
Take a minute now
to close your eyes and imagine something beautiful that you’ve
experienced—remember the beauty, remember:
·
the
sights,
·
the
sounds,
·
the
touch,
·
the
smells,
·
maybe
even the tastes
of your beautiful experience.
Remember how you felt then, your emotions. . . . [wait]
I invite you to share your memories of beauty and the
emotions the experience evokes.
. . .
Clearly, the
experience of beauty touches us profoundly, often in ways we find difficult to
express in words.
Beauty is and always has been
important to us as human beings. Some of you may remember the 36,000 year old
cave paintings I showed you during a sermon some time ago. Artifacts, such as
beads and remnants of body-painting accessories and crafted stone tools, have
been found in gravesites much older even than those cave paintings. My question
isn’t why—our joy in our memories of beauty explains why. My question is so
what? I want to know what’s so important about beauty to us as human beings.
Just so you don’t
feel cheated at the end of this sermon, let me tell you now that I don’t know
the answer to my question. But I have found—in typical UU fashion—that the
search for answers and even the question itself have led me on interesting
journeys. And those journeys promise to continue.
When I started research on ideas of
beauty, I found unexpected volumes of words on the topic—so many, many words!
All these words added up to the idea that beauty is a very difficult concept to
express in words. The most common definitions state that beauty involves a
combination of elements into a pleasing form or order[i].
Other words that appeared over and over in discussions of beauty include:
·
desire
and pleasure
·
judgment
and taste
·
aesthetics
and art
·
the
universal and the particular
·
beauty
as opposed to the sublime
·
and
creation.
These recurring words suggest that beauty involves some
really big ideas and that we’re only going to be able to scratch the surface of
those ideas today.
Each path I followed
in my search for the importance of beauty led me down ever-branching pathways. For
example, the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder sounds simple and
self-evident. The beauty of a thing depends on the perception of the person who
experiences it. Simple.
Except—that means
beauty exists separately in each person’s separate mind and if that’s the case,
it doesn’t seem possible that so many of us would agree on what’s beautiful.
When we do agree, that means the beauty exists either outside the mind—or
collectively, within all human minds—or in each separate mind, but we all
agree? Huh? Even trying to explain all the winding pathways I followed in my
search for the importance of beauty makes me feel disoriented.
Let’s try to
construct a map. We just stepped onto one pathway. This path divides into
subjective and objective perceptions. That is, beauty exists either in the eye
of the beholder or it exists within the thing we behold. For our purposes, it
doesn’t matter which path we take. What matters here is the very fact that
questions about the importance of beauty lead to concepts about perception and
even about the nature of reality itself.
18th
Century philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote books—yes, more than one—on the topic
of how we decide what’s beautiful and why that’s important. Briefly, he says
that beauty is the presentation of an imaginative idea that makes people think[ii].
The trick is that beauty makes us think in general and not about any particular
concept that we can put into words.
Another trick here involves pleasure.
Beauty induces pleasure, but not a selfish pleasure—not a desire for the object
or for personal gain. Instead, it’s a pleasure that confirms the correctness of
our aesthetic judgment. That is, the pleasure we feel when we experience beauty
confirms that we have indeed experienced beauty. And that’s important to Kant
because it means that everyone ought to share that experience of beauty[iii].
It’s important to us because Kant’s idea allows us to take both paths—we
experience beauty subjectively, within our own minds, but that it’s triggered
by objective beauty outside of ourselves.
To Kant, figuring out how judgment of
beauty works was the important part. To me, thinking about how my inner
perceptions relate to the inner perceptions of others and to outer reality are
parts of the important part. But the experience of beauty—the emotions it
evokes—is at least as important as the ideas it stirs up. And I haven’t even
mentioned the debates about natural beauty versus beauty created by
people—architecture, music, dance, theater, literature, sculpture, painting and
other arts.
Well, I did mention the prehistoric
cave paintings and burial objects. When I look at those, I don’t see beauty the
way I do when I look at Jan’s clerical couture, for example. I don’t experience
pleasure in the arrangement of elements, such as the handprints and horses and
rhinoceroses. My pleasure in the cave paintings is more intellectual than
aesthetic. For me, intellectual pleasure does add to an aesthetic
experience—ideas aroused by beauty enhance the beauty in my experience.
That’s another controversy on the
topic of beauty, specifically in terms of art. The expression “Art for art’s
sake” takes one side of the controversy: that art is to be experienced for
itself and not for any ideas or meaning outside of itself[iv].
Archibald MacLeish takes a similar stand in a poem about poetry where he writes
, “A poem should not mean / But be[v].”
On the other hand, I have told students outright and often that greater
knowledge of and experience with literature will enhance the pleasure of their
aesthetic experience. The pathway on our journey into beauty diverges
again—does that remind anyone of a poem?
A more difficult
issue related to beauty and art popped up for me a few years ago. I was
watching Saturday Night Live. When the guest band, Nine Inch Nails, started to
play, I channeled the spirit of my father and actually said aloud: “They call
this music? Sounds like a bunch of noise to me!” That raises a question: how
does beauty relate to taste? Kant’s answer, as we heard, is that beauty has
nothing to do with taste. But I’ve heard students say they “just didn’t like”
the literature we read in class. We’ve all heard of people looking at paintings
in museums and saying something like, “You call that art? My kid paints better
than that!” And an artist friend of mine (not you, Jan) finds pleasure in what
she calls “visually interesting” things. One time, she bought a jar of pickled
pig’s feet because they were “visually interesting” to her. And it’s hard to
argue her point—they were interesting in a bizarre and disturbing way.
Art often represents
bizarre and disturbing images, sounds, issues. As one art philosopher writes:
The beauty (or ugliness) of the
components, and the beauty (or ugliness) of the work as a whole do not directly
determine each other. . . . The fact
that a work distorts conventional beauty images and presents “ugly” images does
not make the work itself ugly, just as a work that portrays beautiful objects
is not necessarily beautiful. This is true of art as well as of every case
where beauty is considered. A collection of beautiful flowers does not
necessarily create a beautiful bouquet. The degree of beauty of a given object
– art as well as non-art – depends on the interrelationships of its components,
that is, its aesthetic order. . . . Its
value is influenced by the values of the components that constitute it, but it
is irreducible to them. Thus, a work can deal with ugly materials and still be
beautiful as a whole.
A brief account of the great works of
the past masters may reveal that art in general, not just modern art, tends to
deal with disturbing, chaotic or painful materials, seeking to re-order them
and reveal their significance for human experience.
. . .
beauty lies in . . . order that
integrates sensual as well as conceptual elements, and offers thereby a new
interpretation of these elements. Whatever makes it a good or great work also
makes it beautiful. [vi]
A Greek tragedy
can be beautiful in its ability to evoke emotional catharsis in an audience. When
Oedipus realizes he has killed his father and married his mother, facts we have
known from the start of the drama, we still feel his utter anguish—because the
art of the tragedy at the same time represents and evokes that feeling, even in
those who don’t particularly like that kind of art.
The artist Paul
Klee expresses a related, but even more complex idea. He says that “Art does
not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.... My aim is always to get
hold of the magic of reality and to transfer this reality into painting - to
make the invisible visible[vii].”
To make the invisible reality visible—reality isn’t always beautiful. Making
the invisible horrors visible is as important as revealing invisible joys,
perhaps more important because we can’t deal with the horrors if we don’t know
about them. And a revelation of invisible beauty inspires hope. That’s one of
the most important aspects of beauty for me. When I asked a non-religious
friend to tell me about beauty, she talked about the wild prairie landscape
near her home. As she spoke, she pressed both hands over her heart; her face
lit up with joy; she told me that the beautiful prairie helps her have hope in
the face of the wars and brutality and horrors in the world.
In a sermon on
beauty, I leave the last word not to a theologian, not to a philosopher and not
even to an artist. The last word on the importance of beauty comes from a
mathematician:
“.
. . our experience of music
is an experience of number. Number,
and the relations of number, provide the hidden order of the universe; and
numbers are known through the intellect, and known with a certainty that
pertains to no other thing.
When understanding mathematics we have access to the order of creation,
and this order is eternal, like the numbers themselves. In music we know
through experience, and in time, what is also revealed to the intellect as
outside time and change.
Just as time is, for Plato and Plotinus, the moving image of eternity,
so is the experience of music the revelation in time of the eternal order. The
beauty of music is the beauty of
the world itself, revealed to the
sense of hearing - a 'point of intersection of the timeless with time."[viii]
May we all walk in beauty today and every day through the
intersection of the timeless with time. In beauty let it be finished.
[ii] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-aesthetics/.
Kant's Aesthetics and Teleology.
First published Sat Jul 2, 2005; substantive revision Wed Feb 13,
2013. Copyright © 2013 by Hannah Ginsborg<ginsborg@berkeley.edu>
[iii] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetic-judgment/.
Aesthetic Judgment. First
published Fri Feb 28, 2003; substantive revision Thu Jul 22, 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Nick
Zangwill<Nick.Zangwill@hull.ac.uk>
[v] http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/6371.
Archibald MacLeish, “Ars Poetica” from Collected Poems 1917-1982. Copyright ©
1985 by The Estate of Archibald MacLeish. Reprinted with the permission of
Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Source: Poetry (June 1926).
[vi] In
Defense of Beauty. Ruth Lorand; 2007 © Ruth Lorand [accessed: 14-07-26]
[vii] http://finitegeometry.org/sc/ph/aesthetics.html.
Paul Klee, "Creative Credo" from The Inward Vision: Watercolors,
Drawings, Writings. Abrams, not dated; published c. 1958.
[viii]
http://finitegeometry.org/sc/ph/aesthetics.html.
Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp.
63-64
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