Rediscovering Beauty

7/31/2019 Rediscovering Beauty

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rediscov


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He emerged rom the metro

LEnant Plaza stat ion and po

himsel against a wall beside

basket. By most measures, h

nondescript: a youngish whit

jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt a

Washington Nationals baseb

From a small case, he remov

violin. Placing the open case

eet, he shrewdly threw in a

dollars and pocket change as

money, swiveled it to ace pe

trac, and began to play.

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, Ja

the middle o the morning ru

In the next 43 minutes, as th


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pythagorean beautybeauty as a dened constant

beauty in the eye o the behHume and the Greeks denebeauty as fuid and changing500 BC

17th century

part athe struggle for beauty


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At the close o one o those

nature documentaries the ca

lingers over the sight o a mo

gorilla seemingly lost in conte

tion o a spectacular sunset.

to avoid the conclusion how

anthropomorphic it may be

gorilla is starring long and ha

sunset because he nds it be

There would seem to be no

purpose in this contemplatio

gorilla is (likely) not going to u

sunset or landscape. Philoso

such as Kant have argued tha

pragmatic disinterest is a de

eature o aesthetic experien

untouchable beauty


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Beauty isnt xedIts fuid.

beauty is in the eyeo the beholder.

However, in ancient Greece there was

also a popular proverb:

While Pythagoras argument

provides, to this day, a justication or

all those elitist snobs who proclaim

that they and not the rest o us plebs

know what beauty is and what it

isnt (because they alone are capable

o discovering its objective rules), it

was actually this humble yet sensible

proverb which has come to the ore

in more recent Western philosophy.

Centuries o attempts to calculate the

undamental, unalterable equations o

beauty having ailed to reduce beauty

to a universal ormula, the Scottish

philosopher David Hume, writing in

1772, proclaimed, Beauty in things

exists only in the mind which

contemplates them. So instead o

residing out there and being universal

and orever, Hume (like the Greek

proverb) was suggesting that what

is and what isnt beautiul

depends on us.

We, not nature, create (and can

thereore recreate, reinvent and

rediscover) beauty.

The Age o Exploration and then

the more systematic endeavours o

anthropologists have demonstrated

the truth o Humes argument, with

each and every culture encountered

throughout the world proving to have

its own views on what is and what

isnt beautiul. O course, in the early

days we in the West dismissed these

other views o beauty as heathen,

primitive nonsense, but as our

respect has grown or the leg

and the sophistication o non

cultures we have been orce

conclude that beauty is indee

eye o the beholder and ur

more, that dierent beholder

have remarkably dierent eye

beauty.


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the dictatorship of beauty

Why should this interest us h

Because i beauty is in the ey

beholder, then it raises the q

o whose eye is doing the be

To promote and energize a

rediscovery o beauty in ou

era it is essential that we

appreciate that it is our ow

not some ancient and eliti

o beauty which we are

rediscovering.

To really rediscover beauty w

to also reinvent it and that is

possible once we begin to qu


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Leonardo da Vinci painted The Last Supper in the 15th century. Failing to recognize the essence of the painting, a door was built in

of it by the Milan churche / Santa Maria delle Grazie churche.


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This thing about not only

rediscovering beauty but rein

ing our own personal ideals o

timely issue. It is o our time

because we have recently se

an extraordinary fowering o

independence o matters o

when it comes, or example,

and appearance style. Not th

ago most people like sheep

passively accepted the dictat

ashion designers and gurus

however, most o us reuse t

dictated to in this way. But w

have extended our independ

part bchallenges to rediscovering beauty in our tim


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pop beauty is not beauty

I we put it to a vote Do yo

beauty is a good thing? the

armative response might w

unanimous. A rare unanimity

increasingly complex and conworld. Yet in practice, typicall

lives in the 21st century seem

to be graced with signicant

encounters with true beauty.

There is to be sure plenty in

contemporary world, which i

downright ugly. But this is on

part o the problem. For a lot


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The problem (as Breton was

aware) is that opening oursel

to encounter ull on the posublime beauty can be an

whelming experience invo

loss o control over oursel

emotions, our decorum.

For centuries within the Wes

potentially destabilizing enco

with sublime beauty was cas

appreciating beauty means losing control


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you cant work beauty

In act, time-travellers rom any

previous era o history or visitors

rom any non-western culture would

be shocked and stunned by the

astonishing ast pace o the rhythm

o our lives. Ever since the Industrial

Revolution we have taken it not only

as given but as benecial that lie

will be raced through at ever greater

speed.

First it was work and transport but

inevitably this same drive or upping

the RPMs o lie has penetrated and

now structures our leisure and private

lives as well. Fast ood is not only

cooked quickly, it is also cons

haste. In the evening, to rela

play a computer game which

against not only our opponen

also the clock. To simply sit a

nothing goes against the gra

new kind o Puritanism whic

at us that we are bad slack

wasting time.

But the contemplation o b

cannot be rushed. It needs

to gradually seep into our s

There is no such thing as

beauty.


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to see speed as a virtue, so, too, have

we multi-tasking. We pride ourselves

on our capacity to split our brains into

ever smaller but still (or so we be-

lieve) ully unction systems

dealing with an innity o separate

tasks simultaneously. O course, in

truth the result is that no part o our

brains and most certainly not our

souls is ully unctioning in such a

chaotic situation. Again, as with our

addiction to the ast lie, such

multi-tasking is precisely the opposite

o what is required or the contem-plation o beauty which demands

ocused as well as sustained

concentration.

No, lets not say concentration. This

sounds too much like it is work and

that isnt what we need at all. Indeed,

Yet even when we travel (oten, so

we say, specically in pursuit o

beauty) we race rom one scenic

location to the next, snapping our

cameras at every photo opportu-

nity, telling ourselves that when we

return home we will give the images

the time they deserve. O course, in

truth, when we get home there isnt

time or anything but a quick, hurried

glance and all these beautiul mega

pixels just clog up our hard drives. So,

ironically, our addiction to photogra-

phy has become yet anothertechnique by which we insulate

ourselves rom the whirlwind o

sublime beauty staring into a view-

nder rather than encountering the

world directly.

And not only do we do everything too

quickly, we also try to do too many

things at once. Just as we have come


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part csome prerequisities for rediscovering beauty

Slow down. A orm o medit

the contemplation o sublime

marvellous beauty takes time

Stop multi-tasking. We are no

computers not, at any rate,

comes to the really importan

in lie. Focus.

True beauty shouldnt be con

with the simply attractive. B

Beauty-Lite. As Breton said,

marvellous is beautiul. I it d

bowl you over, then its not th

thing.

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Rediscovering Beauty

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