Beauty, Humanity, Life

 What feels like a common theme this morning of extreme cold, a sore arm, and hanging at home rather than work. Be skeptical, this could be happenstance meeting grumpy me.

Aidan Cottrell-Boyce's Notes on Craft by way of Granta started it all:

...She seems momentarily satisfied with beauty. You can tell from her face that there is no information interrupting her experience. It’s so true, so lonely. Carmela is somebody who is always so terrified of being small and in the world, but for this brief moment she seems okay with it. Okay with being small and in the world. The best that life – this chasm – can hold for us, is the marvellous. Where can we live but days, and what more can we do but marvel?

What a question! Nihilism, the nihilism I wandered into, is a manure lagoon denying the possibility of beauty, of being able to marvel at the wonders and beauties of creation.

 Then there was a paragraph from Caroline Reagan's Art as Savior: Against Nature 

 But given that faith is antithetical to cynicism, it is confounding that Des Esseintes holds faith in art, but not humanity. The two are inextricably linked. (Need I say that art is made by people and draws from human experience?) Sure, art is human experience sublimated—raw material kneaded into a separate being, a portal to a richer mode of existence—but it is still born from a person’s experience of reality, regardless of how fantastical the finished product. Like my adolescent self, Des Esseintes seeks to bypass the crude parts of life and skip ahead to a state of steady inspiration and revelation. This proves impossible, and the momentum he has directed towards upholding this extreme, contradictory stance culminates in implosion. Aesthetic immersion could not save Des Esseintes, just like it could not save me.

More troubled and troubling came from The Hedgehog Review's What the Light Says We Are How beauty is a self-begetting force wherein Ryan Kemp examines Nick Riggle's This Beauty: A Philosophy of Being Alive

Expanding on a brief remark from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Riggle offers what we might call a behavior-centered account. Beauty is that which compels us to imitate, share, and self-express in response to it. I see a dramatic sunset, and I’m moved to write a poem; I hear a powerful symphony, and I insist on sharing it with my friends; I see a ridiculous skateboard trick, and I decide to take up the hobby; I eat a gourmet meal, and I try to make it at home; on and on and on. “Beauty,” Riggle writes, “sparks this desire to live for, engage with, and recreate the aesthetic because that is what it means for something to have aesthetic value.”

There’s something undeniably right about this. Beauty is—as Plato long ago noticed—a self-begetting force. The worry, though, is that Riggle hasn’t said enough: He doesn’t move us any closer to answering The Question or, as he announced in the opening chapter, showing that life is beautiful enough to replicate. At best, Riggle has explained why beauty might move us to replicate life, but—as he well knows—this doesn’t amount to a justification. He still needs to explain what it is about beauty that distinguishes the compulsion to imitate and share from the same compulsion I experience after a session with a hypnotist or under the control of addiction. He still needs to explain what beauty is!   

This is where an account like Plato’s—whatever you make of it—proves valuable. In addition to giving us a rich description of what beauty does to us, a Platonic account tells us something about the nature of that motive force so that we can judge whether we approve of it. For instance, what if we said that beauty is the goodness of an object (a table, a sunset, a person, a skateboard trick) made manifest? On this view, to see something as beautiful is to experience it as good. Notice how, in addition to giving us the resources for understanding why beauty compels replication, this definition also purports to justify the impulse. Why should I value this life that I simply find myself with? Because through its beauty I experience its goodness. Life is good!

Philosophy has its problems snaring fecund, multitudinous beauty with reason to a system rather than an aesthetic instinct:

Sometimes we eat a good meal or see a cool skateboard trick or watch the wind blow through the leaves of the silver maple in our backyard, and the beauty moves us to stylize our own lives. But other times, and they are much rarer, the silver maple catches fire with light and we stand transfixed before it. And in those moments, we are moved to say aloud, as Riggle himself did: “Oh, my god.” We stand there—bizarrely, outrageously, idiotically—convinced that it’s all worth it, and—even more—that life demands our devoted love: On earth we are briefly gorgeous.

And so we have to return to Vuong’s novel, because he finally understands that this insistent conviction is not the kind of thing the philosopher can “show.” Late in the book, Little Dog describes his own encounter with “luminescence.”

Three weeks after Trevor died a trio of tulips in an earthenware pot stopped me in the middle of my mind. I had woken abruptly and, still dazed from sleep, mistook the dawn light hitting the petals for the flowers emitting their own luminescence. I crawled to the glowing cups, thinking I was seeing a miracle, my own burning bush. But when I got closer, my head blocked the rays and the tulips turned off.

Our heads have a way of doing this. There is so much else in life that seems to tell against the reality of the light. The abuse, the violence, the filth. But, as Vuong insists, memory is a choice, and thus an act of trust. Trust that “Rose”—Little Dog’s “ma”—can shine with luminescence, but also—and more boldly—that we are “what the light says we are.” Not born from war, but from beauty.  

Life without beauty is inhuman. Beauty without humanity is sterile.

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