Beauty, Life

 Let me commend Psyche's Beauty is not an ornament to the good life, it is at its heart. Looking back, my depression saw everything as ugliness, that there was no escape from the ugliness of human beings. That kind of thinking did not profit me. Reevaluating my approach to beauty was one of the many, many things I have done to get myself back to the shore of lucidity. I offer this as well put an argument for beauty as I have seen of late. Just a taste of the essay's argument:

Why is beauty like this? Why is it a value that we can live amid and for? It is difficult to know how to approach these questions, but one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s quirky remarks about beauty is suggestive:

If I say A has beautiful eyes someone may ask me: what do you find beautiful about his eyes, and perhaps I shall reply: the almond shape, long eye-lashes, delicate lids. What do these eyes have in common with a gothic church that I find beautiful too? Should I say they make a similar impression on me? What if I were to say that in both cases my hand feels tempted to draw them? That at any rate would be a narrow definition of the beautiful.

What does the beauty of an almond-shaped eye with long lashes and delicate lids have in common with the beauty of a gothic church, with its pointed arches and arcades, its sharp and reaching spires? Nothing: their geometries are orthogonal, their aesthetics antithetical. So how are they both beautiful? If you look to the beautiful objects themselves, you will struggle to discover their commonalities, but Wittgenstein suggests that you will notice something when you look to what you do in response to them: the hand wants to draw what the eye sees as beautiful, whether that’s a gothic church, a handsome face, or a stunning landscape. Maybe you don’t draw. You take a picture, write a description, linger in the space, or let it echo in memory. In response to rhythm, you move your body; the dish is delicious, so you ask for the recipe; the outfit is stunning, so you comb through your wardrobe to recreate it. Like Cohen and Casals, you imitate and recreate the beautiful.

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 Aesthetic life is driven by cycles of imitation, expression, and sharing. But notice that you cannot do this alone. Aesthetic life requires another person – the one you imitate or who imitates you; the one who gifts you their song or who is open to your works. When we engage in aesthetic life in this way, we connect ourselves to others doing the same: we share with them, imitate them, or become imitable to them, receiving their aesthetic offerings in turn. When you live your aesthetic life well, you distribute and create new value that resonates with community: you imitate, express and share, and when you succeed, you become genuinely funny, stylish, playful, discerning, musical, poetic, quirky, bold or creative. In doing so, you augment the aesthetic value in the world by adding to it your own beauty – your riffs and tweaks, your insights and enthusiasms – thereby yourself becoming a source of imitation, expression and sharing. In doing so, you keep collective aesthetic life, our practice of aesthetic valuing, alive.

I like that idea that we are all contributing beauty little by little, bit by bit, to the collective whole that is human existence. This I do not write idly, I know all too well how we can do ugly.

Less philosophical, more plain-spoken is NEA Chair Maria Rosario Jackson on the Importance of Artful Lives

Get to it, folks. It is in our hands to make things better. 

sch 12/23/22