Arnold Berleant

 

BEAUTY AND THE WAY OF MODERN LIFE ^[1]

ABSTRACT

As art has changed over the course of its history and societies have changed, so has our understanding of beauty.  This is further complicated by the fact that we live in a determinedly unbeautiful world.  What is meant by this -- the unbeautiful -- is yet another intriguing question.  This paper develops the idea that beauty is best understood to mean positive aesthetic value, and that it can be found in modern life far more widely than when it was traditionally located in the arts.  What has to be made clear is how beauty is not a property of objects but a quality of situations, which makes beauty contextual.  The paper explores further how beauty may reside in natural, historical, artistic, sensory, and social situations, and how an awareness of negative aesthetic value recognizes both the importance of beauty and betrays its absence.

Beauty in modern life

            "Beauty and the Way of Modern Life" is a challenging topic, for never has the idea of beauty been more diverse and difficult to agree on.  After a long period in the twentieth century in which beauty was ignored, it has returned as a focus of theoretical interest in Western aesthetics.  Beginning some twenty years ago and with increasing frequency, one book after another resurrected the idea of beauty.  An abundance of new work has appeared in the past few years and more is expected. ^[2]  

            As might be expected, each author gives beauty a meaning that distinguishes it from others and is intended to reveal its central character.  And this character turns out to be remarkably varied.  Cultural commentaries display the varied concepts by which comparable aesthetic value is identified: the Indian rasa, the Greek to kalon, the Japanese wabi-sabi, the Navajo hozho.  Sociological studies show how beauty is a culturally-constructed concept ^[3] and feminist criticism demonstrates how standards of female beauty are used by the male-dominated power structure to control and suppress women. ^[4]   Biologically-based analyses relate standards of beauty to their function in promoting group identity and species survival. ^[5]

            Philosophical views are equally varied.  As the arts have changed over the course of history, the early emphasis on beauty as perfection of form has been largely abandoned.  Some still search for an attribute of objects that makes them beautiful.  Others locate beauty in the pleasure or satisfaction we feel on contemplating an object. Today, moreover, a wide range of qualities and features in perceptual experience may be called in some sense 'beautiful.'  These include the ugly, the grotesque, the comic or playful, the tragic, as well as the pleasing.  The concept of beauty needs to be enlarged from its original focus to accommodate the value of such diverse forms of aesthetic satisfaction.

            Yet there is an obverse side to this issue.  We live in a determinedly unbeautiful world, a world people have made that often deliberately turns its back on what the idea of beauty values.  There is the ruthless obsession with economic interests at the expense of aesthetic values.  The marketplace often dominates art news, from colossal prices that are bid for masterworks that come on the market, to the success of price in judging new work.  Attention often goes to the design of the many new art museums and cultural centers, which is some of the outstanding architecture of our time, while support for individual artists languishes. 

            Then there is the co-optation of aesthetic values by exploiting the easy satisfactions offered by the arts of mass culture and their vulgarization in kitsch.  Popular entertainers are called 'artists,' and popular musical extravaganzas 'concerts.'  Commercial success and "world class" seem to be the selling points for art and artists, while local theater companies struggle to survive and local performers go begging. 

            And there is the failure to recognize negative aesthetics in the disregard or outright denial of beauty or any aesthetic value.  This takes two forms:  One is the absence of positive aesthetic values as in blandly anonymous suburban housing tracts and sterile blocks of low income housing, in sitcoms that pander to the emptiness and crassness of ordinary life, and in pulp novels that breed on people's dissatisfactions by offering escape in fictional romance or adventure. 

            Another, perhaps more virulent form of negative aesthetics, is the actual presence of negative aesthetic value.  This may be seen in the appropriation by advertising of people's clothes, cars, and food, turning people into the purveyors as well as consumers of advertising.  It is found in the commercialized landscapes of industrialism, from the shopping mall to the commercial strip, the trailer park, and the slag heap.  And it is endured in omnipresence of the sound of music systems and television sets in virtually every public place (at least in the U.S.), from supermarkets to doctors' waiting rooms, airport lobbies, restaurants and bars, and even public streets. When once cigarette smoke was unavoidable, now it is canned music and the television voice.   Is this a commercial aesthetic based on fear, fear of silence, with the resultant effect of overstimulation?

            These are not only environmental offenses; they are aesthetic offenses.  So insidious is the negative that as generations of people become inured to it, they cease to be aware of the presence of a negative aesthetic at the same time as we live in the embrace of urban trash, telephone poles and power lines, omnipresent noise, and bad air and water.  Evens the countryside has been commercialized in being co-opted as the setting for enormous billboards.  Moreover, there is a further complication in the intersection of beauty and morality or shall I say 'immorality,' where beauty is fused with the morally repugnant, from polluted sunsets to abuse and unrestrained violence in film and television.  Examples of both forms of the negative aesthetic can unfortunately be multiplied endlessly.

            Let me proceed through this superabundance of usages and misuses of beauty by suggesting that what beauty means is essentially stipulative.  What beauty means is what a society or an individual commentator decide on.  This is also true of what we, in the tradition of Western aesthetics, take as traditional meaning of beauty as the highest level of aesthetic value found in the perfection of form.  Even in this case, such ideal form is ultimately unattainable because it is non-empirical and, in the emphatically empirical world we live in today, we need to give the notion of beauty an naturalistic grounding.  People are no longer willing to accept myths of an ultimate reward, in this case, of heaven as a "life" of beauty.  In its aesthetic sense, moreover, beauty appears in a multitude of ways besides perfection of form:  sensuous beauty, social beauty, institutional beauty (Plato), erotic beauty, functional beauty (in machines, in institutional processes), exquisite beauty (of details, small scale).  Can these have anything in common?

The locus of beauty

            It is important, I think, to try and identify the locus of beauty.  For our philosophical purposes here, we must put aside questions of how beauty functions socially, politically, and economically.  These are important questions but they have to do with the uses and functions of beauty rather than with what its value consists in.  There is nothing wrong, moreover, in stipulating what beauty means.  It allows one to call attention to important or neglected aspects of beauty.  More significantly, it recognizes that there is no ontology of beauty but rather only an epistemology of beauty.  And it leads us to think that such an epistemology is unavoidably empirical.

            Where, then, is beauty to be found?  Is it a property of objects?   Is it in the feeling of pleasure?  Is it some combination of these?  Let me begin by listing some of the multitude of regions where beauty may be located. 

            Beauty in nature is perhaps the most widely recognized:  on a large scale in landscapes, cloud formations, and waterfalls, and in miniature in a flower, a bird, the glint of a fish.  Commonly, beauty is associated with the arts: the fine arts, such as painting, sculpture, music, and dance; architecture, both of structures and of landscapes; and crafts, such as quilting, ceramics, fabric design, and haute cuisine.  To these well-known loci of beauty we might add the pure delight in sensory qualities, as in the delicate details of a flower, the feel of the well-worn bowl of a briar pipe, the sensation of the spring sun on the skin.  There are also the different forms of  human beauty, not only in the cast of a face or figure but the beauty inherent in friendship, love, and the generally erotic.  And we should not fail to add  moral beauty to this list:  the beauty of character, of a noble action, of a life, the beauty of real virtue, as Plato put it. ^[6]

            These, except perhaps for the last, seem to refer to beauty of objects.  But does beauty reside in things?  Surely the flower that blooms unseen is not beautiful but simply is what it is.  It is a thing that possesses whatever features it has, but it takes an appreciative observer for its "thingness" to become beautiful.  Likewise with the painting, the novel, and the landscape.  Human involvement is some fashion is necessary. 

            But what is that involvement?  Does this mean that beauty is entirely a matter of personal taste, de gustibus non disputandum est?  Is it the pleasure we take in such objects, a matter purely of feeling?  Is it wholly subjective, to use that common but misleading word, as if there were a self-sufficient interior self?  If this were the case, how then to explain the generality of aesthetic judgment, the fact that we tend mostly to agree in our valuing of art works?  And even if common agreement could be accounted for by our common biology or common sociology, other explanations of general agreement can be given that are less indebted to such external factors.

            Are object and perceiver somehow conjoined, as Santayana proposed, by regarding the pleasure we feel as a quality of the object? ^[7]   Or is there some other way in which they come together?  This is not the place to engage in a full reconsideration of this important and long-debated question.  One direction is promising, and pursuing a phenomenology of beauty can help us understand this better and, at the same time, explore beauty, in the spirit of this conference, as a way of modern life.

A phenomenology of beauty

            What is involved in the experience of beauty?  How can perceiver and object come together to create aesthetic value?  What would an epistemology of beauty be? 

            It would involve three conditions that are really one: a perceiver, a focus of perception, and a situation in which perception takes place.  The situation is all, for it encompasses both perceiver and object or event that is the experience of beauty.  When I look at a sculpture, say one of Henry Moore's enclosed forms, I not only use my eyes but I enter its aura, moving around it at different distances and from various directions.  I am aware of my body in relation to its mass, its height, its surfaces, responding somatically and kinesthetically to the deep amber wood from which the sculpture was fashioned, its verticality, the hollowed outer form embracing the more slender inner one, the human associations to which it gives rise, associations of protection and comfort and, even though the piece is wholly abstract, of mother and child.  This act of body consciousness, this process of aesthetic engagement, can be strangely moving and I may stand in wonder at the sculpture's force and feel a strange, inarticulable exhilaration.  These forms are not perfect.  One may detect chisel marks across its rough surface and the checks that have developed in the wood, but perfection is not in question here.  It is entirely irrelevant, for such is beauty, not perfect, not ultimate, but rich and irreplaceable. 

            Now what does this tell us about the experience of beauty?  Like other such valuable occasions, it involves a multitude of factors, central to which are a receptive appreciator, an object capable of evoking perceptual and associative responses, and conditions that encourage such a strong encounter.  These constitute a total situation and one can characterize such a situational field as the experience of beauty, as beautiful.  Since the same account holds for all occasions when we recognize aesthetic value, we are led to understand beauty inclusively as synonymous with aesthetic value.  That is why we freely call aesthetically pleasing experiences of the grotesque, the distorted, the comic "beautiful."

            Now the question is:  Does this account describe the conditions that are present in all or most of our experiences of beauty?  If beauty, or aesthetic value, is an attribute of a situation, then it would seem that any situation that involves an interplay between a perceiver and an object or focus of perception can be beautiful.  The situation may center on nature, art, purely sensory qualities, or human relationships, including love, as Plato told us in the Symposium. ^[8]

Beauty in the way of modern life

            This great enlargement of beauty in the modern world is the result, I think, of two developments in aesthetics that are having a major influence on the presence of beauty in the modern world by promoting broader criteria for inclusion.  While these developments are certainly not universally accepted, they are becoming increasingly influential both theoretically and experientially. 

            One consists in recognizing the aesthetics of function, that is, the aesthetic attraction of functional success.  This leads to the display of machines in art museums, from the internal combustion engine to Tinguely's mechnical contrivances, from the Bugati to the functional beauty of hand tools.  During the past century the design arts have especially flourished by incorporating an industrial aesthetic of flawless precision, simplicity, and clarity.  And we must not forget the classic examples of the functional beauty of the sailing ship and the skyscraper. ^[9] Paul ValŽry, "Eupalinos, or the Architect,"  in Dialogues  (New York:  Pantheon, 1956), Vol.4 of Collected Works of Paul ValŽry, Bollingen Series XLV, pp. 129‑130.  Functional beauty takes a bizarre turn in the aesthetic celebration of war. ^[10]  

            A second change in aesthetic thinking is the greater readiness to include the perception of all the senses, not just the traditional ones of sight and hearing.  By including touch, smell, taste, and the kinesthetic sense of body movement through muscle and tendon awareness, full bodily engagement enters the aesthetic realm.  This leads to a further expansion of our modern awareness of beauty, incorporating the complete range of somatic receptivity.  A flowering of the dance arts has taken place in the West, and sensual and erotic experience has found artistic expression and produced aesthetic delight.  Non-aesthetic constraints have thus been cast aside, which does not mean that they are necessarily irrelevant but that they are now recognized as external barriers.

            These developments in aesthetic thinking have vastly enlarged the range of beauty in the modern way of life.  To these we must add the growing awareness of the aesthetic ideas of different cultures.  And the range of cultures has enlarged to include not only the developed aesthetic values of Western and Eastern cultures but the aesthetic of other regions and of indigenous peoples in all parts of the world.  The range here is enormous and it is rightly inclusive.

            To this enlargement of beauty comes another question:  If beauty is a property of a situation or field and any situation can be beautiful, and if external moral, religious, or cultural standards no longer hold, how can we find or create the conditions of beauty?  That is the great human challenge of modern life.  I suggest that applying the aesthetic brush so broadly makes all the more apparent how and where the ways of modern life fail.  For if the stock of possible beautiful occasions increases with the openness of the arts, the expansion of aesthetic perception, and our increasing sensitivity to natural and built environments, we are at the same time blinded by the betrayal of beauty in the exclusive worship of economic values.  The pervasiveness of a negative aesthetic in most building and home design, in urban surroundings, and in the commercially-inspired vulgarization of the countryside makes us seek harder for the beauties that we may enjoy. 

            We have, then, particular occasions rather than overall conditions, small-scale beauties rather than Beauty writ large:  a color-suffused sky at sunset, the rise of a full moon, an early spring flower, the first song of a warbler during spring migration, the smile of a child, the touch of a friend, the rush of sound in a musical performance.  In place of the substantive 'Beauty,' we have the adjectival 'beautiful.'  To see the world as new is to see it as beautiful, and it gives us an incentive to encourage beauty as much as possible in daily life.  This may induce us to cultivate such beautiful occasions, even though they be modest, for monumental beauty has largely disappeared from our prosaic world.  For this reason, the beautiful may become a source of ideals.  For many it is the only way that is left.

            Beauty and the way of modern life is a challenging topic.  I look forward to learning more about this from what other contributors have to say.                                                                                                                         25 IV 04

NOTES

“Beauty and the Way of Modern Life,” in Beauty and Modern Life (Wuhan, China: Wuhan University Press, 2005).