Hello once again, dear readers. I apologize for my extended absence, I'm still getting a hang of the whole "regular updates" thing, but I should be back on track now, so fear not!
Anyway enough about me. Let's talk about Beauty.
The other day, I was talking with my friend about the philosophical branch of aesthetics, the black sheep of the Ivory Tower, and I came to realize that while he was content to talk down at it, I realized that I myself was in no position to actually judge, chiefly because I had no idea what aesthetics was actually about. It turns out what I thought, that it was the study of beauty, artistic merit and taste, was in fact correct, but my research spurred me to think about it more heavily.
Now, for the record, I have no idea what the fuck "beauty" actually means. Like "to be" it's just a sort of random generality of something in particular, something that everybody understands so inherently that most people never get around to actually considering what it means. Now, I absolutely these sorts of intuitive understandings of things, because everyone has a slightly different interpretation of what it even means and as such they cause any sort of rational discussion to devolve into a shouting match of who's definition is right and usually ends with somebody getting stabbed, which is no way to win a philosophy debate. Definitions are basically axioms which, in order to be effective exist independently of any personal or cultural bias, sieved down to the most basic understanding. As such, keywords from which logical arguments are likely to be constructed have to be agreed upon before anything else, and if this doesn't happen, then the debate is entirely pointless; (in addition, moving the goalposts of the definition while making an argument is an underhanded stratagem only used by feeble minded fuckwads, for whom the only fitting rebuttal is a shiv in the solar plexus). Because of this, we must define Beauty before we go any further.
For as much as I don't like Plato, I feel like he had a pretty good idea of what beauty is. While he never specifically defines it to my knowledge, he characterizes it in the Symposium as a state of being which is pleasurable to an observer. Of course, "pleasure" too is a bad word, because, as the Epicureans learned while facing their critics, pleasure is usually associated with some sort of physical and sensory excitement, and then out come the anti-hedonism guns and then nothing can get done because we are awash in negative connotations. No, that won't do at all. Well then, let's define beauty as a state of being which brings a sense of satisfaction to the observer. I think that if we get any more bare bones than that, then the word starts loosing meaning entirely, so we'll leave it at that.
"AHA!" exclaim the critics who I presume are lurking about somewhere "But that as well is not a good definition! Do you mean to say that beauty can only be found in things which are satisfying? Well what about Dada, whatever the fuck this is, and all the other shitty art which is pretentious and stupid? Can't things be objectively beautiful without an observer? I've got my Art degree and Rothko said blah blah blah bullshit bullshit." To whom I say, yes, fuck that, no, don't care, Rothko was an asshole.
I'll elaborate on this. Suppose you are a connoisseur of high art and liked to go to gallery openings and eat cheese, drink wine and complain with your fellow art patrons about the appalling nature of the plebs. You spend several thousand dollars to go to the latest work of an up and coming young artist. You and your snub nosed compatriots are soon giddy with anticipation as the work of art which you all invested a great deal of physical, intellectual and social capital to see as the artist comes and spends two hours explaining how his work is a commentary on social inequality and the decadence of the upper crust. With the irony flying leagues above your heads, as it often does, you applaud him on his learned and passionate speech and the curtain is finally drawn. Before you now is a stick figure, drawn in feces, lovingly excreted and smeared across a canvas by the artist, hand woven by an elderly Bengali woman. Even for a stick figure, it's crude: the lines are shaky, the circle was hasty and left open and there is no more detail than a basic humanoid shape. The stench is still pungent and horrible, though the dung has long since cooled. If you look closely enough, you can even spot an undigested bean string (no doubt organic and locally grown). The entire room is silent. Then, suddenly from one part of the crowd you hear a quiet "it's beautiful." Everyone breaks into applause. "Brilliant, brilliant," one man shouts. "What an artist," another woman cries. Everyone is in an uproar; the artist is flushed with joyful pride, everyone sing's the pieces praises and you even overhear talk of someone commissioning the boy. You finally leave that night happy knowing that you have experienced something beautiful in what was, in every sense of the word, a very shitty drawing.
So now, I bet you expect me to give some sort of commentary on how deluded everyone in that story was, and how they didn't actually experience beauty, they just thought they did. Well, I'm not going to. The fact of the matter is that there was beauty in that shitty drawing. Sure, the characters of the story were all hypocritical imbeciles. Sure, their pleasure was probably derived entirely from a mix of the drunkenness, the confirmation bias which told them that anything this difficult to access must be good, the satisfaction that they understood the meaning of an entirely incomprehensible work, and the group mentality which only served to reinforce all the prior things, (by the way, if your art requires a lengthy exposition to be understood, you have fundamentally failed as an artist). There was beauty in the drawing, but that beauty was entirely contextual. There was no beauty in the shit-stained bolt of cloth, but rather the beauty was experiencing the shit-stained bolt of cloth. Likewise, in Dada, the beauty was the catharsis in the artists and the savvy audience when they denied art as an institution. The creepy pole sex ballet thing is beautiful in two entirely different ways: the first is the smug satisfaction experienced by the live audience, the other is the joy in the face of ridiculous stupidity experienced by everyone else. There are some things, like the shit-scrawl above, which can only be beautiful in the context in which they occur, and there are other things, like this horrifying scourge of humanity, which is only beautiful outside of it's given circumstances (I am certain that the people caught up in the infernato would not appreciate the colors and shapes nearly as much as we can). As such, does not exist within the context of the beautiful object, but within the context of the observer.
So then, can we ever find an objective form of Beauty? Short answer: no. Long answer: no, but there is a limited spectrum of what is beautiful. The ability of an observer to experience satisfaction is limited in what is satisfying to him, how it's satisfying to him and how much it's satisfying to him. The human experience, though inconceivably vast and detailed, is still fundamentally limited. I'll explore this further next time.
Sincere Regards,
Michael Coffey
(P.S. Some people *choughJohnKeatscough* posit that beauty is truth, truth beauty. I am well versed in the truth regarding the nature of sebaceous cyst removal, but the last thing I would call it is beautiful. Link for the incredulous: WARNING NSFL)
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