In Honor of “Plato: On Beauty and Virtue.” Seminars Begin at Halkyon Academy, Tomorrow July 27th, with Thomas Jockin
IV
Does everything in the world “call” like Ulysses? Perhaps: I don’t believe it’s possible for anyone to say for sure that any given thing couldn’t “call” to at least one person in the world, if not all of us (with most perhaps being deaf to the summons). What about a dead rat? This brings us to the question of if it is possible for something to be so ugly, offensive, rude, etc. that it cannot be beautiful to at least one person on the planet (which is to say no “strike of beauty” would prove possible). If this is so, it would be inaccurate to say that “everything is potentially beautiful.”
Christians can find the cross “beautiful,” but many early Romans found it ugly and monstrous, though it should be noted that Christians perhaps only found the cross glorious because they believed Christ rose from the dead; had this not occurred, the cross, like an electric chair, would probably prove hideous to Christians as well. Considering this, the beauty of the cross to Christians is tied to what it means to them: it is not the cross “in of itself” which they find beautiful, but the cross plus its symbolism, “what it points to.” Hence, if a person finds something like a dead rat “beautiful,” it is probably because the dead rat means something to the person (though I don’t mean to say it is impossible for someone to exist who finds beautiful the particular way the dead rat lies on the ground, though I would suspect this is likely just “pretty” to them for some reason). Yet if someone finds “the lay of the rat,” beautiful, the dead rat at least means “I am beautiful” to the person observing it (and/or “I am”). Furthermore, all this suggests that it is something through the dead rat that is primary, a “strike” that is easily confusable with the rat but not identical.
Beauty means. It is a meaning, and yet not simply a meaning lest saying “that is beautiful” is no different from saying, “that is a signifier” and/or “that is a symbol.” Beauty can be “pointed to” by signifiers, as words are signifiers of their definitions: to see a tree as beautiful is to see it like a word. What signifies beauty to one person doesn’t necessary signify the same to another person (as not everyone understands the same words), but it is the case that whenever someone experiences a thing as beautiful, the person experiences something “pointing beyond itself” (that, do note, it could somehow be part of: signification could suggest participation, a part of a whole, versus something dualistic). To put this another way, what we experience as beautiful is that which something seems to “come through,” almost like a radio signal: there is both a “pointing” and a “coming through” happening at the same time (an experience of “(in)completeness,” of here/there-ness, as discussed throughout O.G. Rose).
Throughout the day, we experience countless entities, most of which are “invisible” to us (like a doorknob that works, to allude to Heidegger). What is “invisible” is necessarily not “beautiful” to us: beauty is necessarily “visible” in being striking. And as a doorknob that’s unexpectedly broken causes us to stop and look at it, so what is beautiful stops us in our tracks (though that’s not to say there isn’t a difference between a “negative stopping” based on brokenness versus a “positive stopping” based on awe of fullness). We don’t passively say “that’s beautiful” unless we use the word as a mere simile for “pretty”: beauty stops us. We don’t experience most things in life as signifiers, but what we suddenly experience as “beautiful” is different. In a sense, something within us “breaks the thing” from being a non-signifier into being a signifier (to us), making it “point to” something more than itself (that, again, it possibly participates in — language struggles here). As we read meanings onto words from words, we experience beauty onto things from those things. There would be no beauty without observers, and yet things are needed for observers to see and for sight to matter.
Beauty freezes: it is a meaning that suspends us in a moment of life by moving us; beauty is “awe-full.” We are walking through a city, caught up in our own thoughts, and suddenly there is a rose growing out of the concrete. We stop. We look. We see something after hours of watching the invisible movie inside our heads. And there the external world is in the form of a rose in a city. Misplaced. Unexpected. In our eyes. And it means. “You are alive.” We see.
On this point, we might consider how people today say we should find meaning in our lives, but how? There is a lot of talk today about that, and I won’t argue with any of it. If you haven’t read Victor Frankl or Daniel Pink, you should: a life with all the riches in the world but without meaning is a life suffered. However, I think there’s a problem: the advice we’re given is to do whatever it is we are intrinsically motivated to do, and though that’s all the advice a lot of people need, there are lots of people for whom this isn’t enough guidance. They don’t know what they want. They don’t know what they are intrinsically motivated to do. And so their suffering can almost get worse by learning about the importance of meaning. If they didn’t know they needed a meaningful life and didn’t do something meaningful, that would be bad, but now they know they should live a meaningful life and aren’t — that’s worse.
So how do we find meaning? Obviously people find different things meaningful to them, so there’s no general answer, but I’d like to suggest a different question we might ask ourselves to help us if we’re stuck. Instead of asking “What do I find meaningful?” ask “What do I find beautiful?” A life that sees nothing as beautiful is a life lacking meaning. As a corollary, a life that is better trained to witness and observe beauty is a life that will prove more meaningful. It’s not by chance that both beauty and meaning are in the eye of the beholder.
When you were last in the presence of beauty, did you wonder if life had meaning? I’m not necessarily talking about while studying a work of art or while reading Camus — “art” and “beauty” are not similes — I’m talking about when you really beheld something beautiful. Think about that time: maybe it was when you won a State Championship in wrestling or when the family was all together for Thanksgiving or when you saw a certain sunset or when you finished a movie or finished reviewing a masterfully designed argument. Maybe it was when you finished planting your garden or finished a workout or walked to the mountains or spent the afternoon working on a car with a neighbor. Did life feel like it had meaning? Did life feel joyful and worth living?
“Beauty” might sound like a funny word to associate with a workout, but I’m not asking if it’s a funny association in general — is it a funny association to you? Imagine some of the most precious experiences in your life or things you do daily or get-togethers with friends. Now, going through each memory one by one, ask yourself “Is that beautiful?” Don’t ask “Was that meaningful?” because everything has meaning, for one (the word “cat” means cat, for example, while a tree means a seed sprouted) — that question can be too vague. Instead, ask about beauty: go through your life, think up different moments, and keep asking the question “Was that beautiful?” It is precisely because the question can feel odd that it can be useful: the question “Was that meaningful?” has arguably become too common and so lost its power. Fortunately, questions of beauty have the same scope and range, for everything can be potentially beautiful, and so everything can be potentially meaningful.
What we find beautiful is what we don’t merely find meaningful, but what we find deeply and personally meaningful. That’s what we want. Not just meaning, but an “ultimate concern” (as Paul Tillich would say), and asking ourselves about what we find beautiful is going to give us a much better chance of figuring it out. Perhaps this is why so many artists and creatives seem to have meaning: beauty is a natural component of their lives, and meaning can logically follow from this focus.
Whatever it is we find beautiful, we should go do more of it, and increase our ability to see beauty in that thing. Learn about it. Study how it is made and the process. Find out about the history. Find others who find it beautiful too. Do more of it. Dive in deep. And the deeper we dive, the more our sensibilities for beauty will improve. And the more beauty we can take in, the more meaning we can find in our lives.
Do note that there is no guarantee that what we find beautiful will match up with our career options. If you are a lucky person who can start a career in what you find beautiful, more power to you, but many have to choose a job instead of a career in order to have time to do what they find beautiful and meaningful. Jobs provide more flexibility than careers, but they also can provide less pay and status. However, if we’re able to make time for what we find beautiful and meaningful, that can actually fill our job up with beauty and meaning, for it can feel it has a point of helping us make time for what matters to us. Though our jobs might lack meaning directly, they can indirectly still feel meaningful in supporting and enabling what we find beautiful.
Society today can emphasize finding meaning in life but not beauty, which means it might emphasize a location but not the road to it. As a result, it can seem random regarding those who find meaning and those who don’t. Personally, I increasingly feel like meaning is something that the more directly we look for it, the harder it is to find. It can be like waiting for water to boil: the more we try to find meaning, the more difficult it can become to feel like we have it. However, if we just move toward what we find beautiful and increase our capacity to see and create beauty, one day we can just find someone asking us “Is your life meaningful?” and thinking “Yes.” Meaning can just seemingly appear — there. Sure, feel free to ask yourself “What do I find meaningful?” — it might work for you — but if it doesn’t, don’t lose hope. Instead, try asking, “What do I find beautiful?” This might be the question that finally breaks the ice and helps you figure out what you should do.
Alright, but why not ask “What is fun?” Couldn’t that and similar questions help? As I’m sure many of us have discovered, the problem with “fun” (and things like it) is that if that’s all something has going for it, it feels shallow and like a distraction from the reality of meaninglessness. However, experiences of beauty can help us feel like there is something bigger out there than ourselves (that isn’t dependent on our emotions), like transcendence is possible. Even if somehow ultimately subjective (we can’t be certain either way), it doesn’t feel arbitrary but deeply purposeful. It can shift our focus from asking “Am I happy?” to “Am I living for something more?” Certainly, transcendence can entail happiness, but life ceases to be a question primarily about pleasure and pain. Instead, life can become a question about if it all adds up, and if we’re spending each day helping it all add up.
Meaning seems to be something found indirectly more than directly, while beauty is a thing we can more directly approach and seek without losing it, precisely because it’s hard to pin down, fleeting, and requires conditioning. This is because beauty is something we can recognize as beautiful much easier than we can recognize something as our ultimate concern independent of beauty. It’s much easier to wonder if the Grand Canyon has meaning at all than it is to wonder if it’s beautiful — after all, we can see it — and yet if we find it beautiful, it’s meaningful too.
We just know what’s beautiful when we see what’s beautiful to us, and sure, maybe some people can just know what their meaning is in life. But for many, we can know beauty before we know meaning, and if we recognize that beauty is the road to meaning as opposed to something unrelated to it, we can know what to do to live a meaningful life. We can try to walk down a road to arrive where we want to go instead of stand in place and think about our destination. We can seek beauty, which we’ve easily already experienced but perhaps left behind or stopped pursuing. Meaning is usually more of a return than an odyssey, but if we must start a new journey and seek new experiences, we can know to look for beauty instead of overly-focus on meaning. We’ll have a compelling and attractive guide.
V
We’re lost on a college campus, having grown up on a farm, trying to find our class, nervous. We pass the music center, one of the windows is open, and we hear Beethoven’s 9th — Poppa’s favorite. We stop. We look up. “Everything will be alright.” We hear.
Beauty hopes. How much depends, but beauty creates hope and inspiration. In addition, to whatever else beauty signifies, it seems to mean “there is hope.” Personally, I cannot imagine a genuine experience of beauty that doesn’t make the observer feel that life isn’t totally a waste (though that’s not to say the observer can’t forget his or her experiences of beauty amidst “the slings and arrows” of life moments later). Yet if when I say, “that is beautiful” I mean “that is hopeful,” “beauty” and “hope” lack distinct meaning. Still, what is beautiful is that which is “visible” in a world of mostly “invisible” things, and in this way it at least creates the hope that things can be “visible” (including ourselves). Additionally, to find something beautiful is to find proof that there is the possibility of something that makes life more like living than surviving. Yes, cynicism can immediately creep in, and I can “think away” the experience of beauty instantly, but at least in the moment of the experience of beauty itself, there is a suspension of cynicism. Of sorrow. Of loss. Hope.
Where there is hope, inspiration proves possible, and inspiration can lead into creativity, which can lead into beauty, which can lead into hope — a feedback loop. Have you ever met someone who thinks they aren’t creative? A lot of people, right? Very few people are willing to say “I’m creative,” and the people who are creative just seem lucky. And indeed, there probably is luck involved, but what if part of the problem is that we need to stop “trying to be creative” and instead “try to experience beauty?” What if like meaning, creativity is something we find indirectly more so than directly? What if it’s by directly seeking beauty and art that we can indirectly cultivate our creativity (and sense of meaning)?
I think beauty inspires us to create. Just think of all the kids who play Final Fantasy and then want to make a videogame; think of all the movies we’ve seen that have made us want to try film ourselves. No, not all art is beautiful, but there’s something about experiencing great art that makes us want to produce great art. Perhaps it’s the realization that our experiences can be captured, that something so wonderful can exist — it’s hard to say.
I think this also happens when we see a beautiful sunset: we want to take a picture of it, to create an image and art. And there’s even a sense in which we want to create by becoming the beauty and art we experience: when we take a walk on the beach, we can feel a desire to be part of the wonder around us, to preserve it in our lives forever. Beauty stirs becoming and new life.
Elaine Scarry notes that beauty inspires creation, and in addition to her arguments, my experiences, and what I have seen in others, I believe there’s “reason to believe” this is true. But does creativity require beauty? If not, then we cannot say that an increase in aesthetic sensibilities will correspond with an increase in creativity. However, I think there is “reason to believe” beauty inspires creativity, as there is “reason to believe” a beautiful and artistic society is a society where there will be more creativity. Even if not, I personally want to live in a more beautiful world.
If we want to be more creative, we should surround ourselves with whatever it is we find beautiful. If that’s weightlifting, my bet is that the more we lift weights, the more ideas we’ll have for starting a weightlifting business. If we find beauty in family, then we should spend more time with them. Unfortunately, I think a lot of people get the impression that the way they get more creative is by sitting down at a desk with a blank piece of paper and waiting. And wait, they do.
Creativity comes from living more than thinking but not from just trudging through life. There is a particular way to live that generates creativity, and I think that way of life is one that seeks and dives into meaning and virtue (as Thomas Jockin stresses). And if I am correct that meaning and beauty go together, then creativity is found in living a life that we find beautiful, for that is a life we will find meaningful. So if we want to be more creative, we should go out and seek beauty. The more we do, the more we’ll create.
VI
To one person, an earlobe could be the stained-glass window in reality through which beauty shines over them; to another, it is the eyes of their wife.5 Perhaps a dead rat can be the “crack in reality through which beauty shines” over someone, but this only seems realistically possible if the person can project onto it a meaning that exists within the observer (perhaps the last thing the person’s mother did before she died was heroically remove a dead rat from the person’s bedroom). Considering this, beauty entails meaning, and it seems possible because humans are capable of “seeing a thing as it is not” — of understanding symbols and signifiers. And yet terms like “symbol” and “signifier” suggest a separation between the thing and what it “points to” that might not be the case: it could be more like a beautiful thing “points to” a fuller version of itself and its world. It could be that beautiful things are “symbols of themselves.”
An interesting question arises: is it the case that the more beautiful something is, the more everyone agrees that it is beautiful, as the truer a thing becomes, the more all agree it is true (consider 2 + 2 = 4); the more good, the more all agree it is good (consider helping the oppressed)? If this is the case, it doesn’t mean that everything that is beautiful, good, and true is universally agreed on as such, but it does mean that the beauty, goodness, and validity of a thing increases as does its universal acknowledgment. The more beautiful a thing is, the more the thing speaks to everyone in their particularity universally (for reasons of “high order complexity” that may transcend intelligibility): everyone internally meets the conditions necessary for grasping the thing as “beautiful.” Who disagrees that the Grand Canyon is beautiful? A blind man? But this isn’t necessarily because the Grand Canyon isn’t beautiful, but because the blind man cannot see it: the beauty isn’t lacking, just the capacity to behold it (a condition isn’t met). Hence, the right question is “Who doesn’t think the Grand Canyon is beautiful of whom can see it?” I doubt few would answer “me.”
If beauty increases as does universality, it would follow that the Grand Canyon is more beautiful than Ulysses, for I think less people find Ulysses beautiful. Perhaps this is the case, but I would argue that we can’t say either is more or less beautiful than the other; we can only say that the beauty of the Grand Canyon is “more apparent” than the beauty of Ulysses, that it is easier for a given person to meet the conditions necessary for experiencing the beauty of the Grand Canyon than for Ulysses. This may mean in some ways that the Grand Canyon is less beautiful than Ulysses, because appreciating Ulysses requires more work and hence is more meaningful to those who love it. On the other hand, the fact the Grand Canyon is easier to experience as beautiful might be evidence that it is more beautiful than Ulysses.
Personally, I don’t believe we can say either way, for we can’t say for sure if the beauty of a thing increases as does its universal “apparentness” or if it increases relative to “the bar of cultivation” that must be passed to experience it. What can be said for sure though is that the more we cultivate our internal life and aesthetic sensibilities, the more beauty we will be able to experience. Beauty will appear more often to us, though it cannot be said for sure that “better” beauty will be experienced. Fortunately, it isn’t the case that the more beauty we experience, the less meaningful it becomes: beauty always means in its surprise, and because it is always unique and surprising, it is not redundant and boring. Unlike food, exercise, and some other goods, we cannot have too much beauty. Infinite beauty is beauty-yet-enough.
VII
If when I said, “that is beautiful,” I meant “that makes me happy,” there would be little meaningful difference between “beautiful” and “enjoyable.” Certainly, beauty is something to be enjoyed, but it isn’t merely pleasurable, and not everything that is enjoyable is necessarily beautiful (such as a game of tag or laughing at a joke). Why is beauty pleasurable What is beautiful to a person is something that “means” to that individual, and why it does so is relative to who that person is in his or her particularity. Considering this, beauty is “reflective,” and what is beautiful to a person is that which somehow shares in that person’s image and likeness (in ways that perhaps not even the observer can put into words). This isn’t to say that beauty is egotistical, but to say that beauty is individual, and as every human is universally an individual, so every experience of beauty is likewise universally individual.
Yet as beauty can cause pleasure, it can also cause anxiety, and it is perhaps because of this risk that beauty can in fact incubate joy. As already pointed out, to claim “beauty is individual” isn’t to say “beauty is an illusion” or “irrational”: as human emotions aren’t fundamentally irrational but rather often too complex for human rationality to grasp, so it is the case that beauty isn’t beneath human intellect but above it and complex in ways that transcend what the mind can fully comprehend. Yes, the mind can sometimes grasp it “in part,” but often the full reason a thing is beautiful to a person (“calling up” that individual) is beyond what that person can readily understand. This isn’t because beauty is “nonsense,” but because beauty entails “sense” beyond what enables humans to only survive. Yet “high order complexity” is that which can cause existential uncertainty, for we experience it as “incomprehensible,” the same way we experience a complete lack of complexity. Great genius and great foolishness are both “beyond understanding,” and so when we experience one or the other, we can wonder if we are experiencing genius or idiocy, substance or only an appearance of substance, reality or only a scene.
When we experience beauty, we can wonder if what we are experiencing is “truly beautiful” or only “seemingly beautiful,” as we can wonder if a modernist painting is “truly art” or only “seemingly art.” This can be existentially challenging, but we can calm ourselves if we recognize that an experience of beauty is an experience of a (“meaningful”) reflection, and that regardless if a given thing is “actually beautiful” (an odd question), the very fact that it “draws out of us” a reflection means the thing is valuable (to us at least), and furthermore means “the thing itself” is capable of “making us project onto it” something that we otherwise wouldn’t project out into the world before our eyes. The very fact it does this, for whatever reason, is evidence that it is in fact “beautiful,” and since everything in the world could potentially be such a “caller” (at least to someone), generating such a “strike,” everything in the world is potentially “beautiful.” If it is the case that a jagged rock is a “caller” to just one person in the world, it doesn’t mean the beauty of the rock is all in that person’s head, but rather that only one person in the world is “conditioned” to experience the “(actual) beauty” of the rock itself. As it isn’t the case that if I paint an old chair teal its beauty is an illusion, so it isn’t the case that if I project over a jagged rock a memory that the rock’s beauty is fake. Furthermore, it is perhaps by painting the chair that others will actually stop and look at it versus walk by and ignore it. Because of the paint, there is the possibility of people actually being “open to” (a thing) in the world that people would otherwise miss, as because of memory, there is the possibility of people actually being open to the jagged rock itself. Considering this, it isn’t the case that because things “call us” that we cannot experience them; in fact, it is only “callers” that have any chance of being truly experienced “visibly” at all. If there is a sense in which beautiful things “point away” from themselves, it’s paradoxically by doing so that we “look toward” them (and that they perhaps suggest something “within” and/or “deeper”).
Lastly, another reason beauty may cause anxiety is because it can make a person wonder questions like “What am I doing with my life?” or “Why can’t I experience beauty constantly?” Beauty can lead a person to reflecting on the whole of life, the beautiful standing in contrast with everything else in the world that doesn’t shine as bright. Because a thing “stands out” “visibly,” it can make us realize that we live in a world of mostly “invisible” things, causing despair. Beauty can be like a religious experience that results in a person longing for the next life, disengaged from the world. Does this mean beauty should be avoided? No, no more that I should avoid things that bring me hope because I might encounter that which tomorrow makes me wonder if that hope was an illusion. As humans need hope to live, so humans need beauty, and as the possibility of going without food doesn’t make me need it any less or mean I shouldn’t eat so that I never miss food, so the possibility of beauty leading to anxiety doesn’t mean I can live without it or should try. Rather, we should simply accept that we live in an imperfect world and recognize beauty as glimmers of the truth that not all is lost and that we all have within us the potential for something more.
This all in mind, we should note how beauty leads to care, which is to say that separating the fields of Aesthetics and Ethics as unrelated is consequential. If I find something beautiful, I treat it with care. If there is a vase in the kitchen that is notably elegant, I make a point not to bump into it, but if there is a vase made of plastic that I bought for cheap, though I won’t intentionally break it, I won’t be nearly as careful, and if I have to make a hard choice between catching the plastic vase from falling off a ledge and catching a glass, I could easily choose the glass. Beauty corresponds with value, and if I find something beautiful, relative to the degree I do, I naturally and willing take care of it. This isn’t to say that beauty is necessary for me to care, but it is to say that beauty naturally inspires consideration and concern without anyone coming along and threatening to put me in jail if I don’t act better.
When I behold a beautiful sunset, it suspends me: I enter a state of awe. Similarly, when I see a beautiful painting, I am similarly suspended. If I am running by someone and the person turns and I see beauty, I can be halted or find myself slowing down. This isn’t to say I cannot choose to fight against the beauty and run on (or even commit a horrid act), but it is to say that beauty stops me and makes me think twice.
If we find something beautiful, we value it. No law or threat is required: if we find a person, artwork, tree, or the like beautiful, by our own volition, we will treat the thing well and with care. This isn’t to say it’s impossible to destroy a beautiful painting, but it is to say that the beauty will make it incredibly hard to carry out the act. Beauty forces us to think twice, and if we hold a flame up to something beautiful, our hand will tremble.
Beauty emergently creates ethics. When I am surrounded by beauty, I naturally and willingly treat my surroundings with care and love. Law forces ethics: when I am surrounded by laws, I may willingly follow them, but it will not likely be natural, and furthermore I will know I am under threat (though that’s not to say I’ll constantly and consciously consider this threat). Ethical action that results from threat are much more fragile and/or existentially unsettling then ethical action that results from will (for we cannot “say for sure” the ethical act under law isn’t merely legalistic). Beauty naturally directs the will in its favor, and if this is true, then a key to ethical life is cultivation of what helps us experience beauty (“virtue,” as Thomas Jockin discusses). If we fail to train people to be able to see beauty in the world around them, then emergent ethical behavior will likely wane, and we will likely try to fill the gap with law, guilt, and the like.
When my sensibilities for beauty have been trained and I can see the stranger as beautiful, the stranger suddenly becomes “visible,” and so it becomes possible for me to treat the stranger ethically in a meaningful way. In fact, to the degree I find the stranger beautiful, I will feel “moved” to meet the stranger and make him or her even more “visible,” turning the stranger more into a person, then more into an individual, and maybe into a friend. Beauty compels me to go deeper, and at the same time, it suspends my selfishness: it says, “This is not about you.” In the aesthetic, it is precisely as a sense of the individual and corresponding particularity increases that my selfishness decreases: it is the exact opposite of what is generally supposed. This is a key point: the more I focus on the individual aesthetically and thus ethically, the more the self practically “vanishes.” I fear it is in an aesthetically illiterate society like ours that “the individual” and “the self” have been so terribly inflated and difficult to divide: virtue has little room or space.
VIII
Because beauty is individual, there’s something mysterious to beauty, for it is a mystery why something is beautiful to one person and not to another. Furthermore, the experience of beauty can be something that cannot be put into words, and why it is ineffable is in itself a mystery. However, if when I said, “that is beautiful” I meant “that is mysterious,” “beautiful” and “mysterious” would be similes. Though beauty entails mystery, it is not the case that all mysteries are beautiful.
Flannery O’Connor noted that mystery is not that which we cannot know, but that which the more we know, the more there is still to know. Mystery is ever-deepening versus inaccessible, and this understanding applies to beauty. What is beautiful is not that which we cannot know, but that which the more we understand, the more that we see that there is more to know, like a landscape covered in fog that is unveiled a little at a time. Why is beauty an ever-deepening mystery? Because beauty is an individual projection/reflection unified with an external phenomenon that, in being aesthetically magnificent and “awe-full,” attracts the observer into diving into it/self, and since humans are infinitely deep (we have met countless people, seen countless things, entertained countless conscious and subconscious thoughts, etc. — all mixed together into a unity within), what we experience as beautiful is also infinitely deep, being an extension of ourselves and yet not a simple reflection. Understanding why we experience as beautiful what we do may take deep reflection and might ultimately be incomprehensible, not because there isn’t an answer, but because the answer lies beyond our capacities to grasp within a finite timespan. Because humans are infinite, so is beauty, but this doesn’t mean we cannot understand anything about beauty; rather, it means that the more we understand, the more there is left still to understand: to access beauty is to always have something to access.
In its mysterious, “awe-full,” hopeful, and attractive nature, beauty inspires, but if by “that is beautiful” one meant “that is inspiring,” “beauty” and “inspiration” would be similes, robing “beauty” of distinct meaning. Beauty stops us from moving along and at the same time moves us: it suspends and inspires; it catches us and then we catch it. In being an inspiring mystery, the experience of beauty is the same experience that makes us want to dive deeper into it, if not in that exact moment “toward” the phenomenon that is striking us, “toward” life itself. If the experience of a sunset doesn’t inspire us to grasp its fullness, it will inspire us to grasp the fullness of life or something else. To experience beauty is to carry it into the world like a man carrying a bucket of water who fills the empty wells he encounters. Influential, beauty changes us to change.
In draw things to a close (for now, at least), if “beauty” is to have distinct meaning, when I say, “That is beautiful,” I must mean something like, “That is unique, surprising, aesthetically magnificent, and ‘calls’ something out of me that I in my particularity can or can’t hear because of who I am and who I’ve made myself. It means something, even if I don’t understand what it means, and whispers ‘I am.’ It stops me from moving yet moves me, stands out as ‘visible’ in the midst of a world of ‘invisible’ things, and begets hope as I live amongst countless things that are hopeless. It brings me joy, though like hope, this is a joy I can only experience through vulnerability. It is an inspiring mystery, ever-summoning me to take a risk and dive deeper into it/self to understand what I cannot grasp without finding that there is more to grasp, increasing my desire for life, to create my being and my world. Beauty, I will be the art of who I am.”
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