The Purpose of Beauty

     It has been an interesting week for seeing and recognizing beauty. Let me try to draw together a few things.

     In class on Thursday, we went through the Bible – not all of it, of course, that would take weeks, but we hit a major portion of the books. Several of the verses jumped out at me. First, in Exodus 32:1a, the Israelites complain to Aaron after Moses has been on the mountain for a long time. But they say to Aaron “As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him” (NIV).

     So many times I’ve questioned how the Israelites turned from God so quickly; they had just left Egypt after nine miraculous plagues, went through a divided Red Sea that closed up behind them and swallowed the pursuing Egyptian Army – and here they were, less than forty days later, building a carved image to follow. I always think “Well, if I had been there, I don’t see how I could have fallen away so quickly.” Now, many I’ve heard might mention the fact that, after Jesus, we have the Holy Spirit empowering us, and the early Israelites – at least, not en masse – did not. And there is, of course, truth to that. But I think more telling is what is in the verse itself. Notice the Israelites say: “As for this fellow, Moses, who brought us out of Egypt...” But it was not Moses who had brought them out; God had brought them out. It may sound like a fine line, like maybe in their minds they still meant “God through Moses” but I would not say necessarily. It’s very possible – at that time – that they had somehow given more credit to Moses than God for their deliverance. So when Moses was no longer there, their faith waned. Which leads me to my first point: If our faith is in something temporary, our faith will only be temporary.

     Now we look at Kant once more, and what he is saying. Because aesthetic beauty is fleeting and subjective (often), it cannot ground our perception of beauty. If I am raised seeing piercings as beautiful, and you are not, then our perceptions of beauty will be different simply because our minds were shaped differently growing up. Thus, beauty cannot be objective, argues Kant, unless it can be grounded in something else. The thing that has worth, then, is the thing which can more easily be quantified; human ability is finite, we can all agree on that. So if the sublime, then, is dependent on limited human ability, there is common ground, there is basis for objectivity. And that which can be “conquered” only by the mind, then, is what is truly important; the “sublime,” according to Kant. I think starting with Descartes, the mind and its ability has increasingly become the measuring stick by which we view the world; if our minds can do it, it is important; and if only our minds can do it, it is of greater importance still; meanwhile the physical is marginalized more and more, and become more “subjective” and less an authority of “what is.” It is a strange trick that a pursuit of rationality is becoming more and more irrational.

     This brings me to point number two, which I raised in my last post: beauty’s purpose is what defines it, and what makes it objective. Kant – and others – removed the purpose of beauty, and thus removed any sort of solid foundation for defining it.

     One man I heard speak once mentioned that philosophy has searched everywhere for objective truth, but has not found it; and so, now they have said there is no objective truth. Nothing has meaning or purpose. So we deprive ourselves of any foundation for answering anything. In the time of the judges, every man did what he saw fit; the time of the judges has come back.

     Thursday afternoon, in science class, we watched a movie on “the Privileged Planet” (Earth). An idea that a scientist and a philosopher stumbled across was the idea that the factors (they listed about 20) that were necessary for life to thrive – life advanced enough, such as humans, to have rational, thinking brains – those factors were also uniquely suited to observing and learning about the universe in which it was possible for them to exist. The philosopher asked, then, why? Now, many scientists these days will not ask “why” because there is no “why,” there just “is.”

     This blew me away. I played a game several times called “Myst III: Exile.” It’s a puzzle game, where you, the character, must solve a number of different puzzles in order to set the fictional world right again and make your way back home. Not only are the graphics and the worlds incredibly and beautifully rendered, but the puzzles themselves are simply amazing. Many times I wondered to myself how someone could even conceive a puzzle such as the one I was attempting to solve.

     So it is very easy for me to make the jump in incredulity to God’s creation. If, as many believe today, the universe was created “ex nihilo,” from nothing, then none of these rules and elements necessarily exists. Nothing of how our universe works is “natural” if there is no basis for “natural” outside of the universe. Unless these rules existed before matter existed, in which case where did those rules come from? So the fact that the elements we need for an atmosphere are also elements which are remarkably transparent, and thus allow us to observe the heavens, is not a necessary fact – unless it came about specifically so we could observe the heavens. Where our solar system resides within the Milky Way Galaxy is perfect for advanced life forms; it also gives us the best position with which to view our own galaxy and other galaxies, and learn even more about the universe in which we live.

     And what blows me away, is God did it for us. As a Christian, there is much God calls me to submit to His will – my entire life, in fact; and he could have also asked us to live in an environment of thick, opaque gases, and trust in Him for whatever knowledge He feels like giving to us. But He didn’t. He created this universe and its rules for us to admire His workmanship and give Him praise. Which leads me to my final point:

     God created beauty for us to admire and give Him praise. He created that which is beautiful, and He created in us the capacity to recognize it. When it points back to Him and His perfection and His glory, it is beautiful; because that is beauty’s purpose. That is why it exists. And from there, I think, we can begin building a more perfect definition of what is beautiful.

On Kant

     There are two places I want to go with Emmanuel Kant. Obviously, I could probably find pages and pages of things to write on Kant, and that’s without really knowing what I’m talking about. I mean, I don’t study Kant. And I don’t know responses to Kant. But I have some pretty strong opinions, and I’m going to share two of them.

     First, we talked in my class about the move from “beauty” to “the sublime,” specifically that beauty is rested in the object itself, but the sublime focuses on our reaction, what’s happening in us. And a lot of this has happened, this shift from outside to inside. Tying into this, I also want to talk about Kant’s view that the sublime stirs us because, mentally, we have “subdued” the infinite, the powerful. That when we see something grand and powerful and massive and nigh incomprehensible, we fear it until we get to a point where we gain dominance, in our minds, over the object – at which point it is no longer fearful.

     But first, this idea that the individual is the most important thing: that what we think and what we do and how we feel is completely up to us, and it relates to no one else but us. Kant speaks about this idea that when we value beauty, we want everyone to agree with us; we know they won’t, but that’s what happens. And this again is where I want to draw a line between aesthetic beauty and, shall we say, inherent beauty.

     Aesthetic beauty is a personal judgment. If something or someone appeals to my eyes, or ears, superficially, that is my judgment of the item. You may agree with me, you may not. Usually I can tell when I appreciate something that no one else is going to appreciate. It has no inherent ugliness that makes it evil or bad; I am not speaking of beauty with a moral component here.

     In my last post, I spoke of Annie Dillard, and her views of beauty. Often I don’t recognize the things she sees. But it is not that I don’t find them beautiful, I just usually don’t find them in the first place. There is an inherent beauty in things, whatever certain philosophers might say. This has annoyed me since I first heard people argued against any sort of ontological Truth. If other human beings exist, beings which think and rationalize apart from ourselves; and those beings encounter the same objects we do whether we are present or not, how can we argue that “things” do not exist? And if the “thing” exists, does it not possess some properties of its own? Forgetting animate objects – plants, other creatures, etc., -- even inanimate objects have substance, and have qualities inherent to them. Like Plato argued, how do we know what a chair is when we have not seen every form of chair there is? True, some people have never seen a chair before in their life; but many people have not heard the word “ontological” either; but once they become acquainted with the chair, there is something about it that signifies any other chair we come across as being a chair. Once we recognize its purpose, we recognize its form; does beauty not have a purpose that, once recognized, we can recognize it in all of its forms?

     That’s why beauty is not merely valuative, and not inherently moral; because beauty has different forms. Though it has a purpose, that purpose can be twisted. A chair can be made to recline against, to give relief to the one it bears; or electricity can be run to it, and it can kill the one it bears. Are both not chairs? Evil can appear very beautiful, aesthetically. It is that deeper beauty, the inner beauty, the beauty of purpose which contains the moral and valuative elements of beauty. Occasionally, yes, that beauty extends to the outer, and there should be no shame in proclaiming outer, superficial beauty, as long as that outer, superficial beauty is not masking and excusing and dismissing and marginalizing ugliness of purpose.

      I’ll leave that alone for now, and talk about this idea of dominating things – about the sublime. After reading this, it is curious to me how legitimate a point feminist philosophers have that rational thought through the ages has been dominated by men. I could feel the testosterone dripping from Kant’s words as he talked about valuing the general over the statesman, and that war, if “properly conducted” is still something that stirs us; that when magnificence and grandeur is “subdued,” that is what stirs us. I wondered if Kant has ever been in a Category 5 hurricane when he thinks about mankind “subduing” nature – that simply because we have fathomed it in our minds, it is somehow dominated by us. Nature just spins these little pinwheels of joy off every year; and the only way to survive some of these is to get out of the way. Countless hundreds have died in rugged terrain, the kind of mountainous regions that look really good on a canvas. I think God likes a good joke, but the idea of man “dominating” this world has to just make his jaw go slack. Well, if the world lives only in our minds, then rule by the mind is rule over reality, right? How can we think to say we have fathomed what God has created, simply because we can talk about it, can sort of kind of grasp it with our imaginations?

     An earthquake on one side of the world causes 90 foot waves on the complete other side of the earth! Stars, those things that are billions of nuclear explosions all at once, are being born. This gigantic earth rotates around one of them! And I think one hurricane on earth is bad? There’s a storm on Jupiter, been there a while, that could swallow the earth three times over!

     These things are staggering, truly.  But did you know a flower can push through a tiny crack of concrete? Did you know an ant can carry the equivalent of a human carrying a dump truck? Did you know there are engines inside your cells, ferrying bits and strings of amino acids from one part of a cell to another? What is sublime? What is awe-inspiring? What is beauty?

     Beauty points back to God. Whether small or large, whether aesthetically pleasing or functionally exquisite; and one thing is not more grand than the other. Can the hand say to the foot, because it is not a hand, the body has no use of it? What if man made the object? I like the story I heard from a pastor once: a man came to God and said “Alright, we know how to make man from dust; we don’t need you.” God said: “Okay, go ahead.” So the man picks up a handful of dirt; and God says: “Hey, start your own dirt.” What does man create that God has not created? Perhaps a ridiculous sense of what beauty is and what its value should be....

Touring the World with Annie Dillard

     In 2009, I had decided to get pictures of at least one sunset per month for an entire year. In order to keep things interesting, I of course would not always get the pictures from the same place. Sometimes, something else became the subject while the sunset was in the background. One set contained my mountain bike in the foreground, another set with my brother’s cat, Baby.

     As time wore on, it would get closer and closer to the end of the month before I would get the pictures. Eventually, and before the year was done, I had missed an entire month - thirty evenings without once trying to get a sunset.

     Before that happened, though, Thanksgiving rolled around. I was in college, and trying to enjoy Thanksgiving break, though I had a hundred and one things on my plate to accomplish. I had gotten up Thanksgiving morning, looked at how much time I had and all the projects I wanted to complete, and set myself some goals. I forget what all they were, but they kept me mostly in my room.

     As fate – or Providence – would have it, sometime at the end of the evening I came downstairs for something. As you come down the stairs in my house, there is a window directly in front of you facing west. Through that window, I saw the sun setting, and immediately my sunset project came to mind. It didn’t take me long to decide; I grabbed a coat and boots and my camera and headed outside to snap a few pictures, including the one at the head of this post.

     Eugene Peterson, in his article titled: Annie Dillard: With Her Eyes Wide Open, says of Annie: “She has assimilated Scripture so thoroughly, is so saturated with its cadences and images, that it is simply at hand, unbidden, as context and metaphor for whatever she happens to be writing about....Her knowledge of Scripture is stored in her right brain rather than her left; nourishment for the praying imagination rather than fuel for the apologetic argument.¹”

     Similarly, I believe, Annie stored her appreciation for beauty in her right brain. She recounts, in her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, this story of a mocking bird:

“The mocking bird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still tightly folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight.²”

     I am not a slow reader, and still that took me a few seconds to read. The act, however, would take a split second. And yet Annie Dillard, always keen to beauty in this world, caught it and marveled at it.

I do not have beauty in my right brain. I don’t know if I ever can. I am very much more a left-brain kind of guy. But far from deploring those who don’t use their left brain, I am eternally grateful for those like Annie Dillard who can show me where the beauty is in every-day life. I had to set out specifically to capture the beauty of sunsets, and still I can go an entire month without paying attention to a single one. I saved the end of Annie’s quote for this point; at the end of the mockingbird story, she said: “The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.^3” (Italics mine.)

     Sunsets happen whether I will or sense them; and yet how much of my life is spent not being there to enjoy them? Earlier in the chapter, Annie quotes Einstein who said: “God is subtle...but not malicious...nature conceals her mystery by means of her essential grandeur, not by her cunning.” God does not hide the beauty from us, He doesn’t need to. We have enough work getting ourselves to look for it, to take time from our day to seek it out, and to recognize it when it happens.

     Finally, in her chapter Seeing, Annie relates the stories of people who had been blind since birth from cataracts, have surgery performed, and now can see but have not had the chance to develop in their brains exactly how to interpret colors and lights. For some, it is too difficult a transition and they continue to walk around with eyes closed, blind as they are accustomed to being. Other make the transition, but with difficulty. One in particular Annie quotes that:

“When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw ‘the trees with the lights in it.’ It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame.⁴”

     What strikes me about this passage is not necessarily what she saw; although, if I saw it, it might strike me more. But what struck me is Annie read an experience of one who had been blind and could suddenly see, and in Annie’s mind she must have thought “this girl saw this; why shouldn’t I be able to?” One does not search for something they do not believe to be real or true. Yet if I had read the story of the girl, I would assume it was an anomaly of newly-gifted sight. But not for Annie; she went through the next few years looking for this “tree with the lights” until she saw it.

     Oh that we all would see the tree with the lights, and give thanks to our Father who is in heaven. Beauty is fleeting, and beauty will not trumpet its existence; we must search for it and be able to recognize it when it is upon us.

¹ Peterson, Eugene. “Annie Dillard: With Her Eyes Wide Open.” Theology Today. 43.2. (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1986).

² Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. (New York; Harper & Row, 1974), p.8

³ Pilgrim p.8

⁴ Pilgrim p.33

Starting on Beauty

What is beauty? The question has perhaps been asked for centuries. I want to attempt to answer it now, then revisit the question in several months after study in a college course dealing with the very subject of beauty. The following essay details my current beliefs of what beauty is, and what beauty should be. I do not exclude the possibility of coming across ideas and facts which will alter my belief; in fact, I hope for it, and I will seek it.

First, there can be no one-sentence definition of beauty, for there are different kinds of beauty, and I will discuss each at length. There is aesthetic beauty, beauty which we see, hear, and smell. There is also what I will call functional beauty, that is, beauty of operation, efficiency, and grace. I wish to first discuss both aesthetic and functional beauty as it appears most often, and then go on to discuss what aesthetic and functional beauty should be.

In the secular world, aesthetic beauty is king and queen. Aesthetic beauty has been demonized of late, and its definition broadened; but all is still in response – and is therefore subservient to – aesthetic beauty. For a time, and still in many circles, aesthetic beauty is valuative; that is, aesthetic beauty is preferred to aesthetic non-beauty. The person or thing which has beauty is valued over the person or thing which does not have beauty, to the extent that the non-beautiful person or thing is somehow lesser than the beautiful. Rather than beauty being the superlative, beauty is the norm and non-beauty is the short-coming. In response, in the realm of beautiful or non-beautiful persons, there has come the sense of an “inner-beauty,” but often this is said in the sense of making up for a lack of aesthetic beauty. “Well, I have an inner beauty...” But such a response does not nullify aesthetic beauty as the most desired; rather, it reasserts it, but then excuses the lack.

Also in the secular world, and closely linked to the above, is a sense of morality attached to aesthetic beauty. Because aesthetic beauty is desired, it is therefore “good.” The next logical step is that things which are beautiful are good, and things which are not beautiful are not good. Thus we give ourselves over to our lusts in the belief that if it is beautiful, it is good.

Among Christians, it seems, the aesthetic is vigorously ignored or explained away or normalized. One notion is that “if God created it, it is beautiful.” Though, since God created all things, everything is beautiful; which makes beauty – at least aesthetic beauty – the common denominator, something to be canceled out. Or Christians turn to functional beauty and say since aesthetic beauty should not be valued above non-beauty, it is meaningless and only functional beauty should be contemplated. As Eugene Peterson puts it, in The Jesus Way: “[Beauty] is evidence of and witness to the inherent wholeness and goodness of who God is and the way God works.” Thus, much may be perceived as “functional beauty;” the wings of a dragonfly, a dog’s nose – any part of Creation which reflects the glory of God – and so much, yes, almost everything, attests to His glory – that beauty may be found anywhere, if one only contemplates it long and hard enough.

First, I protest this marginalization of aesthetic beauty. If we appreciate aesthetic beauty for what it is, there is no need to demonize or marginalize it. Aesthetic beauty, in my mind, is defined by harmony of lines, shapes, planes, angles, colors, sounds, and smells. I further define harmony simply as working together; contrasting colors may still be in harmony, if by contrasting they illuminate one another. Perpendicular lines may be in harmony if their juxtaposition illuminates and reveals the greater whole. A person is not to be credited if the lineaments of their face or body work in greater harmony than a person whose lineaments to not; thus I protest the timidity in complimenting aesthetic beauty of person, if by so doing the person is not valued above others, or the beauty is not more valued than non-beauty. Yet this is what so often happens; to which I ask, should green be valued above red? Perhaps if your favorite color is green, and you are valuing it for yourself; and aesthetic beauty, often, falls into the same personal-style of preference.

When we demonize those who appreciate aesthetic beauty, we assign to them a shallowness of perception. But we miss a very large part of creation if we focus so much on inner workings that we deny and ignore common, superficial beauty. Of course, we do not want to stop at superficial beauty. But there should be nothing inherently wrong with admitting – non-begrudgingly – that something or someone is aesthetically beautiful. Too often, I think, we assume aesthetic beauty is synonymous with lust; or, often, we act as if they were. But if we have been set free from sin, as the apostle Paul tells us indeed we have, then we are also free to appreciate beauty without simultaneously lusting after it. It is a pitfall – a very common and dangerous pitfall – but to assign that to someone without being in their mind is an identical pitfall, one that often we jump right into just as we condemn the other person for falling into a separate pit.

To set off another example, there are those who call themselves “Goth” who paint their faces white, everything else black, and pierce every part of their body imaginable. They may say of one another that they are “beautiful;” but is this a product of true harmony of pieces, or the feeding of an aberrant lust? Thus, to clarify the above paragraph, “beauty” is not “satisfaction of lust” as seems to be so often the case of aesthetic beauty. Furthermore, aesthetic beauty should not be taught to another as “the” definition of aesthetic beauty, and therefore should carry no valuative quality. It is often the height of narcissism to define something arbitrarily for ourselves, and then demand conformity of everyone else to that standard.

Now, too, functional beauty is harmony of function. In this, I take something of a pragmatic view; the motions themselves may appear incongruent and “ugly,” but if the movements work together brilliantly to bring about the whole, it may be beautiful. This is when creation is beautiful despite absence of aesthetic beauty. This is the beauty in which the reality of God resides. When functional beauty is graceful, it shares a realm with aesthetic beauty, in that it is beauty which pleases the senses. When functional beauty is efficient, often it falls into the realm of contextual beauty. Though he does not make the distinction, this is what I feel Eugene Peterson speaks of, again from his work The Jesus Way, when he cites the verse from Isaiah 52:7: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good tidings,” (RSV). What is the prophet saying here? Are the feet of the messenger somehow changed, aesthetically, by the bringing of good tidings? But if we speak about function only, are the functioning of the messenger’s feet altered by the bringing of good tidings? If there is no change to the messenger’s feet whatsoever, aesthetically or functionally, then why must this statement be made? It is because it is in context that beauty can be applied to something -- beauty if normally ugly, and especial beauty even if already beautiful. Many things and situations in this world are ugly; but through God’s redemptive power, beauty may be extracted. It does not change the ugliness of the situation itself; only that beauty can come forth from the ugliness. As in the old gardening adage “even beautiful roses need manure,” the manure is not beautiful, even though the results of its application are. We transgress true beauty when we apply it to manure simply because manure can aid in the revelation of beauty. If there is beauty in a thunderstorm, it is from the harmony of elements of God’s creation at work (functional) or in the watering of His earth and the clearing of debris (contextual). Slate-gray skies and fog and damp are not beautiful in themselves; but how they act in concert and effect the Creation may bring forth beauty. But a sunset is both aesthetic and functional: it is not beautiful because of harmony of lines, planes, angles, and the like that I have associated with aesthetic beauty; it is pleasing to the eye, and also a result of the working harmony of God’s Creation; of sun, and clouds, and slanting, refracted rays.

There is much more I could write on this right now, but a more nuanced definition will certainly emerge as I continue to write; so, let me finish with this. If one sentence or word may try to define beauty, then, it should be harmony. But not all that is harmonious is beautiful; and all that is beautiful may not be easily defined as harmonious. But it is a start. Furthermore, beauty should not attempt to value, but simply to describe; though it is a more profound and complex description than other simple adjectives may give.

But we shall see, as time progresses and knowledge increases, how this definition continues to stand.