I have always felt that todays cities and the houses they are building are suppressing the spirits and always felt admirations for real and beautiful works of architecture. This article resonated deeply with those observations. My heart bleeds as it is one more proof for me that right now our culture (writing from Germany) died and thats also why so many people are depressed.
I will always chase truth, goodness and beauty, also in this dark times.
I had a really interesting conversation a few years ago with a work colleague that I will never forget about how in a few hundred years from now, antiques will become flat pack and flimsy ikea furniture. Reading your comment reminded me of that conversation…
What makes beauty so elusive is that it’s never just essence, and never just ornament.
It's in the balance between them.
Ornaments can either draw our eyes toward the essence of what a thing is, or it can mask it. Beauty arises when the ornament knows its place and serves the essence.
Byzantine mosaics or Gothic vaults adorn, but always in service of the essence (in this instance, the church and its purpose).
The right amount and type of make-up enhances the best features. But too much make-up hides and becomes a mask. In the same way the right amount and type of poetry enhances the best features of a story. But too much poetic language hides and veils the true story. Hence why Plato was afraid of letting poets into his imagined perfect city.
Beauty’s task is to show us reality more intensely. But in doing so it risks hiding it.
"It all begins at home, with how you live: the way you dress, the books you read, the music you listen to." Amen--thank you, Evan, for another inspiring article!
"While it is true that personal aesthetic preferences exist, it also appears that there is a universal ideal of Beauty that we can all access and appeal to. After all, if Beauty did not exist, our aesthetic preferences would be meaningless."
"our disagreements over Truth, Goodness, and Beauty seem to indicate more about ourselves as subjects and our perceptions and desires, rather than Truth, Goodness, and Beauty themselves."
"man’s first religious impulse can be said to be the Pursuit of the Transcendentals, and Religion itself could be defined as The Investigation of the Transcendent. Truth, Beauty, and Goodness draw us out of ourselves and lift us towards something higher, something overarching that transcends our subjective experience – which is why we call them The Transcendentals."
"Christianity is Beautiful, therefore Christianity is True"
"What’s more, beauty is an essential mode of passing on culture."
What a great insight! I've been engaging with the transcendentals for the past few years but never drew this connection. When we stop creating beauty, we have nothing left to pass on! Yes, cultures die of uglification, the blanking out of experience of beauty. Relationships also die when we stop making the effort to make them beautiful. There is so much to be drawn from this insight. Thank you again for your words.
And I'm looking forward to being part of the bookclub.
Can I make a suggestion? Not just a book club but an art and music club as well? Guiding us toward and through the great works of music would be as valuable, perhaps more so since we are immersed in music and I has a huge impact on us emotionally as well as spiritually but so much is (deliberately) rubbish.
I was thinking along the lines of a series of musical topics which club members could source and listen to prior via personal CD collections, or for new listeners, via subscription music services such as Spotify or Idagio (which I think is best for its exclusive classical focus, fullest range of classical albums, and an app which allows easy comparison of multiple versions of the same work by different perfomers).
I was envisioning a series of topics across the history of the Western "classical" tradition from the Plainchant era, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical and Romantic. Some more modern music might be examined for comparison and contrast (there are some relatively unknown composers in the tradition who have attempted to use some of the new approaches while remaining true to the traditions). I have listened to the Teaching Company audiocourses of Music Theory and the history of Western music. I'm sure other experts might offer different interpretations, but the model of exposing club members to an appreciation and understanding of the workings of the Western classical musical tradition, styles and formats, historical periods, basics of music theory and tonality, major composers and their works, with perhaps some individual works given club listening topics of their own - for instance Bach's Matthew Passion would need a full month to cover the theological and musicological wonders containined in that work!
I meant to add, I have been impressed by some of the writers on Imaginative Conservative website, who have written on musical topics. In particular Michael De Sapio who recently introduced me to the works of the mid-20th century Swiss composers Frank Martin and Arthur Honegger. I thought some of them might be willing to host a music club topic if invited!
I believe there is a strong correlation here with music also. These same philosophers amongst others in classical education also highly regarded music and considered it mathematical. Just as the golden ratio (which many of these beautiful structures mimic) exemplifies a kind of inherent beauty beyond human understanding, so does music and the way it is composed. I’ve spent a lot of time pondering this question of whether there is an objective or inherent truth in beauty. This article explores many of the factors which I find rich and challenging. Thank you for writing this.
Imagine my surprise upon seeing a picture of our bungalow on Substack! We bought it in 1991, did a complete renovation and I housed my building design business there for 15 years. Thanks for using it for illustrating Beauty.
So very eloquent and well examined of the topic. I've thought deeply about this over the past few years - and although less well-written, I tried to capture some thoughts to dwell on this topic as well:
I have had both old houses and new houses and there is no comparison. I sit on the porch of a house built in 1902, the amount of human craftsmanship employed in older buildings gives them a soul that cannot easily be replicated in modern buildings. My house would cost millions to replicate and some of it could not be replicated no matter how much money. The skills and materials are gone for these kinds of structures. If your ever in Butte Mt, go see the Clark mansion truly a masterpiece of architecture and craft.
I feel like a crucial part of beauty is irreducibility. Beauty (like similarly terminally human concepts like humor and cool) is an untameable animal - if you try to cage it in a concrete definition, it will either escape or wither and die. It's tempting to say that the only law beauty follows is Goodhart's law, but beauty is so anarchic that it breaks this one as well. I guess the short way of saying this is - beauty is when beauty is balanced with ugliness.
Classically beautiful tropes like symmetry, complexity, proportionality and expressions of precise skill can lose their potency by oversaturation (e.g. the golden ratio becoming boring, or the first four chords of Pachelbel's Canon in D getting squeezed dry by Pop music). When that happens, in order to experience beauty again you need to synthesize the old tropes with their antithesis (e.g. juxtaposing rigid geometry against wild nature, using nonfunctional harmony). Then the new tropes become established and the process repeats.
It's tempting to say that specific tropes are just instrumental tools and the goal is the neurological reaction, but this would degrade beauty to mere junk food for the soul. When art stimulates the pleasure center a bit too directly, it becomes kitsch. Real beauty, at least for me, has an element of authenticity in it.
Almost all of the music I consider beautiful incorporates some form of ugliness - distorted guitars, analogue warmth, glitchy sound effects, a blend of consonance and dissonance etc. And it's not like there is a predictable recipe for the kind of music I would like. When I think of beauty as transcendental, the impossibility of pinning it down is how I think of it.
I have always felt that todays cities and the houses they are building are suppressing the spirits and always felt admirations for real and beautiful works of architecture. This article resonated deeply with those observations. My heart bleeds as it is one more proof for me that right now our culture (writing from Germany) died and thats also why so many people are depressed.
I will always chase truth, goodness and beauty, also in this dark times.
I had a really interesting conversation a few years ago with a work colleague that I will never forget about how in a few hundred years from now, antiques will become flat pack and flimsy ikea furniture. Reading your comment reminded me of that conversation…
Beautiful robots are already comforting lonely Japanese women!
Very inspiring! Life feels so much better when we surround ourselves with beauty.
Marlene, don't look for beauty external to yourself; look within.
Interesting connections.
What makes beauty so elusive is that it’s never just essence, and never just ornament.
It's in the balance between them.
Ornaments can either draw our eyes toward the essence of what a thing is, or it can mask it. Beauty arises when the ornament knows its place and serves the essence.
Byzantine mosaics or Gothic vaults adorn, but always in service of the essence (in this instance, the church and its purpose).
The right amount and type of make-up enhances the best features. But too much make-up hides and becomes a mask. In the same way the right amount and type of poetry enhances the best features of a story. But too much poetic language hides and veils the true story. Hence why Plato was afraid of letting poets into his imagined perfect city.
Beauty’s task is to show us reality more intensely. But in doing so it risks hiding it.
"It all begins at home, with how you live: the way you dress, the books you read, the music you listen to." Amen--thank you, Evan, for another inspiring article!
Another good article addressing the subjective vs. objective elements of Beauty, and its importance as one of the Transcendentals. I have some similar takes that may be of interest in "The Transcendental Argument for Christianity" - https://open.substack.com/pub/christendomcoalition/p/the-transcendental-argument-for-christianity?r=2efta9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Some on-point excerpts:
"While it is true that personal aesthetic preferences exist, it also appears that there is a universal ideal of Beauty that we can all access and appeal to. After all, if Beauty did not exist, our aesthetic preferences would be meaningless."
"our disagreements over Truth, Goodness, and Beauty seem to indicate more about ourselves as subjects and our perceptions and desires, rather than Truth, Goodness, and Beauty themselves."
"man’s first religious impulse can be said to be the Pursuit of the Transcendentals, and Religion itself could be defined as The Investigation of the Transcendent. Truth, Beauty, and Goodness draw us out of ourselves and lift us towards something higher, something overarching that transcends our subjective experience – which is why we call them The Transcendentals."
"Christianity is Beautiful, therefore Christianity is True"
"What’s more, beauty is an essential mode of passing on culture."
What a great insight! I've been engaging with the transcendentals for the past few years but never drew this connection. When we stop creating beauty, we have nothing left to pass on! Yes, cultures die of uglification, the blanking out of experience of beauty. Relationships also die when we stop making the effort to make them beautiful. There is so much to be drawn from this insight. Thank you again for your words.
And I'm looking forward to being part of the bookclub.
Can I make a suggestion? Not just a book club but an art and music club as well? Guiding us toward and through the great works of music would be as valuable, perhaps more so since we are immersed in music and I has a huge impact on us emotionally as well as spiritually but so much is (deliberately) rubbish.
I really like that idea! Let me think on how that could work...
I was thinking along the lines of a series of musical topics which club members could source and listen to prior via personal CD collections, or for new listeners, via subscription music services such as Spotify or Idagio (which I think is best for its exclusive classical focus, fullest range of classical albums, and an app which allows easy comparison of multiple versions of the same work by different perfomers).
I was envisioning a series of topics across the history of the Western "classical" tradition from the Plainchant era, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical and Romantic. Some more modern music might be examined for comparison and contrast (there are some relatively unknown composers in the tradition who have attempted to use some of the new approaches while remaining true to the traditions). I have listened to the Teaching Company audiocourses of Music Theory and the history of Western music. I'm sure other experts might offer different interpretations, but the model of exposing club members to an appreciation and understanding of the workings of the Western classical musical tradition, styles and formats, historical periods, basics of music theory and tonality, major composers and their works, with perhaps some individual works given club listening topics of their own - for instance Bach's Matthew Passion would need a full month to cover the theological and musicological wonders containined in that work!
I meant to add, I have been impressed by some of the writers on Imaginative Conservative website, who have written on musical topics. In particular Michael De Sapio who recently introduced me to the works of the mid-20th century Swiss composers Frank Martin and Arthur Honegger. I thought some of them might be willing to host a music club topic if invited!
I believe there is a strong correlation here with music also. These same philosophers amongst others in classical education also highly regarded music and considered it mathematical. Just as the golden ratio (which many of these beautiful structures mimic) exemplifies a kind of inherent beauty beyond human understanding, so does music and the way it is composed. I’ve spent a lot of time pondering this question of whether there is an objective or inherent truth in beauty. This article explores many of the factors which I find rich and challenging. Thank you for writing this.
Imagine my surprise upon seeing a picture of our bungalow on Substack! We bought it in 1991, did a complete renovation and I housed my building design business there for 15 years. Thanks for using it for illustrating Beauty.
Yes yes yes!
This is such a great piece on Beauty.
So very eloquent and well examined of the topic. I've thought deeply about this over the past few years - and although less well-written, I tried to capture some thoughts to dwell on this topic as well:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dhpeters/p/modernity-forsook-beauty-can-beauty?r=2zfcw7&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Thank you for this very well-researched and written article! An enjoyable and insightful read for a Wednesday.❤️
I have had both old houses and new houses and there is no comparison. I sit on the porch of a house built in 1902, the amount of human craftsmanship employed in older buildings gives them a soul that cannot easily be replicated in modern buildings. My house would cost millions to replicate and some of it could not be replicated no matter how much money. The skills and materials are gone for these kinds of structures. If your ever in Butte Mt, go see the Clark mansion truly a masterpiece of architecture and craft.
Beauty is crucial I think and serves as a bridge. It is a major reason why I write; to capture even a moment's beauty.
Superb essay!
Excellent article, thanks a million.
Thank you.
Seconded, with a beautiful thank you...
I feel like a crucial part of beauty is irreducibility. Beauty (like similarly terminally human concepts like humor and cool) is an untameable animal - if you try to cage it in a concrete definition, it will either escape or wither and die. It's tempting to say that the only law beauty follows is Goodhart's law, but beauty is so anarchic that it breaks this one as well. I guess the short way of saying this is - beauty is when beauty is balanced with ugliness.
Classically beautiful tropes like symmetry, complexity, proportionality and expressions of precise skill can lose their potency by oversaturation (e.g. the golden ratio becoming boring, or the first four chords of Pachelbel's Canon in D getting squeezed dry by Pop music). When that happens, in order to experience beauty again you need to synthesize the old tropes with their antithesis (e.g. juxtaposing rigid geometry against wild nature, using nonfunctional harmony). Then the new tropes become established and the process repeats.
It's tempting to say that specific tropes are just instrumental tools and the goal is the neurological reaction, but this would degrade beauty to mere junk food for the soul. When art stimulates the pleasure center a bit too directly, it becomes kitsch. Real beauty, at least for me, has an element of authenticity in it.
Almost all of the music I consider beautiful incorporates some form of ugliness - distorted guitars, analogue warmth, glitchy sound effects, a blend of consonance and dissonance etc. And it's not like there is a predictable recipe for the kind of music I would like. When I think of beauty as transcendental, the impossibility of pinning it down is how I think of it.