I once staged a little experiment with the young designers on my staff. They all worked in the same room, with pop music providing background noise. Since I can’t stand that din physically, I told them to turn that abomination off whenever I entered the room.
“You just hate all vocal music,” they said. Not at all, I replied. The next day I brought in a CD of some Bach cantata and put the chorale on.
The youngsters showed acute discomfort. One nice girl simply couldn’t stand the pain. She plugged up her ears with her index fingers and walked out. Tastes differ, commented another nice girl.
Hence this little contemplation.
Homespun proverbs usually make sense, if only on a basic level. Some, however, such as the one alluded to in the title, are wide of the mark.
The implication is that beauty doesn’t exist objectively. Whatever someone – anyone – considers beautiful, is.
You find a Schubert lieder beautiful, he opts for pop, they prefer rap. So all these are different facets of beauty. It’s all a matter of opinion, isn’t it?
So it is – these days. But such totalitarian subjectivity defies not only taste but also logic. If beauty can mean anything at all, it’s so undefinable that for all intents and purposes it’s nonexistent.
Yet beauty does exist, and it allows for valid disagreement only within a narrow range. One man may discern more beauty in the finale of St Matthew Passion, another may argue in favour of the parallel part of St John. However, if either of them insists that a Beatles song is as beautiful as either Passion, albeit in a different way, he has no idea of beauty.
What is beauty? Pontius Pilate once asked a similar question (“What is truth?”), which did his posthumous reputation no good at all. For he tried to apply relativist criteria to an absolute, implying that absolutes don’t exist.
However, three centuries earlier the greatest minds of Hellenic civilisation had no problem answering either question. Or rather they considered the two questions one and the same.
Thus Plato identified Truth, Beauty and Goodness as the inseparable ontological properties of being (note the prefiguration of the Trinity). Beauty is thus inextricably – and invariably – linked with both high reason and morality.
A materialist may argue that, in that case at least, Plato thought in strictly metaphysical categories. Once you’ve accepted such terms, you may accept his argument. But here, in our physical world, nothing is absolute, everything is in flux.
Yet the materialist refutes himself. He is using thought, a metaphysical entity, to argue that metaphysics doesn’t exist. That makes it hard to take him – or any materialist argument – seriously.
Now, if beauty is an inalienable ontological property of being, we must be born with an aesthetic receiver, an innate sense of the beautiful. And not just we.
Let’s ask that same materialist why male birds are so brightly coloured. A peacock’s plumage, for example, dazzles with its profusion of lurid hues.
If the peacock is but a product of evolution, and if evolution is always ameliorative, improving the survivability of each species every step of the way, then how does a peacock’s tail make the species more resilient?
Easy, smirks the materialist with characteristic smugness. The male bird uses his bright vestments to attract females, thereby enabling him to pass on his genes and ensure the survival of the species.
Splendid, yet another mystery solved. However, it’s not, not really. First, that same gorgeous tail attracts not only panting females, but also predators. They can espy a male peacock from a mile away, and then pick him off at their leisure.
For that gorgeous tail makes a peacock cumbersome. He can barely fly, and when he tries, he can’t stay airborne for long. Hence he can only perform his evolutionary duty if a female gets to him before a predator, which isn’t the way to bet.
Thus his tail may spell suicide, not survival (the same argument goes for birdsong, which not only woos females but also betrays the male’s location). So shall we agree, at least, that the problem is less easy than it seems to our materialist?
If this question puts the materialist argument in a coffin, then the next one nails the lid shut. Whence does the female bird get the aesthetic sense to appreciate the beauty of the male’s plumage? It has to be innate, for a bird can’t refine its taste by going to concerts and galleries.
Furthermore, the bird’s taste coincides with ours. We too are dazzled by the beauty of a peacock’s tail, and we too find the sounds of a nightingale’s voice beautiful.
Suddenly, Plato’s idea gets wings. Beauty is indeed an ontological property of being, and not just of the human variety. This doesn’t prove that beauty is absolute and objective, but it certainly makes this view plausible.
We are all born with an aesthetic receiver but, like a wireless, it may be primitive or state-of-the-art. One receiver may filter out interferences and let us hear every note clearly; another one may let us hear only a hissing, crackling noise. But the music we are trying to listen to is the same in both cases.
Therefore, those equipped with only a dud receiver are in no position to judge beauty or speculate on its nature. It takes a fine-tuned apparatus of the highest quality to perceive beauty properly.
That’s where sanity ends and modernity starts. For modernity is defined, inter alia, by repudiation of hierarchies, emphatically including the hierarchy of taste, which is to say the ability to tell real beauty from fake surrogates.
Moreover, since modernity described on its banners the elevation of the common man, it’s also egalitarian aesthetically. Hence, affirmation of any kind of hierarchical ascendancy threatens to undermine the very foundations of modern society.
Even the hierarchy of wealth may be deemed offensive, which is the psychological basis of socialism. Yet rankling though such inequality may be, it’s palpable.
No one can argue that a chap who has a million is no richer than one with only a thousand to his name. The latter may resent and try to dispossess the former, but he won’t deny the obvious evidence before his eyes.
Appreciating the difference between wealth and poverty is easy, while appreciating real beauty requires attuning one’s receiver to the right wavelength. That takes an effort, and most people aren’t going to make one in the absence of an immediate pecuniary gain.
But that doesn’t mean they can’t perceive beauty. They can but, every time they are exposed to it, they feel that the walls of their complacency are being breached. The whole fortress of modernity is about to come tumbling down, leaving them defenceless and despondent.
That’s why they may react passionately and even violently to any suggestion that some tastes are inferior to others. They are eager not only to assert any grotesque parody of beauty, but also to destroy the real thing.
This sentiment resides at the grassroots of modernity, and this weed grows taller and mightier all the time.
If you could only carry out the last remaining copies in existence of either Shakespeare’s works or Bach’s from a fire, which would it be?
Bach’s, no question. It’s more vital to our civilisation, its ultimate expression. Still, I hope I won’t have to make this choice.
Besides, Shakespeare has plausible rivals, such as Sophocles, Seneca and Racine in the genre of tragedy alone. But Bach is supreme, not only in our civilisation but in any known or imaginable civilisation, because nobody anywhere can ever hope to rival his combination of baffling complexity with simple appeal to the emotions.
Adaptation in nature does not have to be perfect. It merely has to be evolutionarily stable. Hence why certain creatures may have useless features. The human appendix for example.
I don’t quite follow your point in regards to Plato, the fact that our very physical brains produce immaterial thoughts hardly proves the existence of some metaphysical realm, from which spring Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.
They certainly don’t spring from a material realm — by definition. Hence the only possible argument against what I said is that none of those thing exists, or at least that they are so relative that they might as well not exist. That’s exactly the altar at which modernity prays, which is why I fight it every step of the way. As to the whole body of this argument, you can find it in the works of any number of philosophers. But you’ll certainly find only snippets of it in the format of this blog.
At least with the renowned Quentin Crisp you had an Englishman who was eccentric but merely moderately so in the famed tradition of the English eccentric.
Excellent article, as always. Indeed, not everyone is capable of perceiving beauty. Great musicians can hear things that I can’t; they possess a musical sensibility that I lack. They have privileged access to an aesthetic reality far beyond my grasp. But I’d be foolish to deny the existence of that reality – that would be like a blind man saying the visual world doesn’t exist. Despite my deficient, yet not entirely undeveloped ear, I am able to perceive that Bach is higher than, say, Justin Bieber, from which I conclude that the Bach lover has better musical taste than the Justin Bieber fan, just like a French food lover has a more refined culinary taste than someone who prefers McDonald’s. Perhaps the reason many in today’s egalitarian culture cannot appreciate such a statement is because it sounds like a moral judgement – as if the Bach lover would be a better person than the Justin Bieber fan. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. Among Nazi Party leaders, there were a large number of classical music enthusiasts, and yet, they were moral monsters. This in no way undermines the truth of Plato’s claim that Truth, Beauty and Goodness are inseparable as ontological properties of Being. After all, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness do not come from within us but from without as properties of God, and therefore they do not depend on our dispositions for their existence. They do, however, depend on the existence of God; if God doesn’t exist, beauty does not exist objectively and the question of whether Bach is better than Justin Bieber is just a matter of personal preference.
Excellent article! Beauty is in the eye of the beholder – only if the beholder is able to appreciate beauty. But in a world gone democratic, every person’s vote is equal. Bah! I am not able to appreciate the full beauty of Bach’s work (though I have signed up for a lecture series on appreciating fine music!) but I can tell it is more beautiful, and required more talent, than pop music.
When I came across your blog and read the entire history here, I read an article on architecture, and the Soviet influence of ugliness. Since then, I think of you every time I pass our local junior high school (grades 7 – 8; ages 12 – 14). The original buildings were erected in 1916 and represent what might be called the Spanish Colonial style: tall, grand buildings with white plaster walls and red tile roofs, high arched doorways and porticos (and what I think are two magnificent examples of Norway spruce). An addition was made in the 1960s. Said new buildings pale in comparison to the original: low and wide, consisting of red brick walls and metal roofs. The most recent additions, made hurriedly in 2001, consist of “temporary” trailers made of the cheapest siding available. It is sad to see utilitarianism triumph over aesthetics.