The Redemptive Power of Beauty
What beauty can teach us about how to live a meaningful and ethical life
The aesthetic and the beautiful are often sidelined in today’s world. Of course, most of us appreciate the beauty of art and nature, but it is often thought that the rational method of the sciences and philosophy, or for some the teachings of religion, are what we should look to learn about the innermost nature of ourselves, the world, and the good life - and that it has nothing to do with the aesthetic and the beautiful. Beauty, it is often said, is in the “eye of the beholder;” it is only a subjective pleasure. As I see it, this subjective attitude toward beauty does us a great disservice. Although we all find different objects beautiful based on our personal and cultural conditioning, I want to suggest that the essence of beauty is not “subjective.” On the contrary, I hope to show that even everyday, seemingly mundane experiences of the harmonious and the beautiful contain within them keys to bringing clarity to our deepest existential questions and concerns.
We experience moments of beauty everyday; a sunset, a view from a mountain top, reading a poem, or any work of art that we resonate with. It is common to soak up these everyday experiences and simply move on, regarding them as a pleasant escape from the true and ‘real’ concerns of our lives. I think we move much too fast when we do this. For the most part of our day, we interpret our experiences through our memories, conceptual schemes, and life goals. This process may be so habituated and automatic that we do not even notice it, but we are often judging and evaluating experiences through these conditioned notions of what is useful, productive, or meaningful. Even a fleeting experience of beauty has the power to soften these lenses which usually filter our experiences and bring us into a more intimate and profound relationship with the simplicity of our immediate sensory experience.
When we experience beauty, we are, at least to some extent, consumed by the sensory qualities of the experience itself. Of course, there may be thoughts and conceptual interpretations, but as the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant pointed out, these thoughts tend to synchronize with the immediate sensory experience rather than standing apart from and judging that experience. Kant referred to this tendency toward synchronization as a “free play of the faculties” in which our rational and sensory faculties come together into an integrated flow of creativity, flow, and harmony. As the experience of beauty becomes more and more consuming and the movement of our rational and sensory faculties become more and more centered around the immediate present, we approach what Kant refers to as the experience of the sublime. In the experience of the sublime, we are so fully enveloped by the immediacy of the moment that there is no possibility of standing apart from that moment and judging it within our familiar conceptual schemes. The sublime engenders a sense of “unboundedness” in Kant’s own words, a deep knowing that life itself will always overflow our conceptual frames, that it is quite literally ungraspable. In these experiences, which Kant thinks are most likely to be inspired by the wonder and power of nature (such as the Grand Canyon or a great storm at sea), the world may appear alive and luminous in a way that no intellectual or conceptual model can communicate.
Kant points out that as we move from simple, everyday experiences of beauty towards encounters with the vastness of the sublime, the pleasure of the experience transitions from a “charming” pleasantness to an overwhelming feeling of admiration, respect, and awe. In fact, with a legitimately sublime experience, this awe is so all encompassing that Kant suggests we will necessarily encounter the sublime object as fearful. Although Kant himself does not see great value in the experience of the sublime because it cannot contribute to our conceptual understanding of the world, I would suggest that it is precisely because the sublime threatens the sense of safety, control, and certainty that our conceptual models of the world provide us that it can encourage a receptivity to an inexhaustible well of meaning. Feelings of existential meaninglessness often stem from the experience of looking for meaning and not finding it. We lament that reality refuses to disclose its nature or purpose to our faculties of discursive understanding. As we approach the experience of the sublime, innocent wonder becomes so all encompassing that any attempt to demand the world answer to our conceptual notions of meaning is silenced. The abundance of the sublime is meaningful precisely because it continuously overflows any attempt to contain and constrain it conceptually. Einstein was likely speaking of the same kind of experience when he said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.”
Although the sublime may be most potent for pointing us towards the inexhaustibility of meaning at the heart of life, more simple experiences of beauty also contain a unique lesson. I would suggest that these experiences contain lessons for incorporating the abundance of the sublime into our everyday lives in a grounded and sustainable way. One of the most reliable ways I have found for dropping into an experience of the beautiful that is more on the gentle end of the scale is to simply go on a walk in the woods. If I am attentive, I notice how each sound, the bird chirping, or the leaves rustling, effortlessly takes part in an overall harmony. If I just allow my attention to drift over the soundscape, I find a sense of harmony and unity to the whole soundscape of the forest; a harmony that is continually created anew as each new sound is effortlessly and naturally constituting and being constituted by the whole. Another place where this sense of a moving, dynamic unity is obvious is in musical pieces, in which each new sound adds something new in its own right, but also contributes to a sense of the overall unity of the piece.
Just as this dynamic harmony between part and whole in an experience of beauty allows the fundamental creativity of life to come forth, a harmony between part and whole in our own lives is necessary if we want to embody the creative force revealed in the sublime in a sustainable way. If we focus only on gravitating towards the sublime feeling of openness and freedom without remaining cognizant of whether or not we are moving harmoniously with the various communities and contexts in which we live, there is the danger of disrupting the harmony that engenders the creative flow of beauty. One area of life where we see this happen is with the use of mind-altering substances. Although some mind-altering substances, at least for a time, may open the user to experiences that make life feel fresh and novel once again, the addiction or confusion that can follow these beautiful experiences may produce conflict both within the user’s community and within the mind and body of the user themselves. Reflecting on the form of beauty shows us that meaning and harmony have to go hand and hand if that sense of wonder and meaning is to be sustainable; if we are to move as part of a living whole moment by moment, we must act in a way that generates harmony and coexistence between all parts of ourselves and parts of the whole. One could say that beauty comes from and resides in such harmony.
Although we experience beauty and the sublime by attuning to harmony and abundance, a momentary recognition of these undercurrents of our experience is usually not sufficient to bring lasting meaning and harmony in our lives. There may be much more inner work we need to do to realign automated and conditioned ways of thinking and acting with the flow of these forces we have momentarily attuned to. That being said, I think it is a great risk to belittle this gift. Our ability to experience and to create beauty, even when we feel confused and alienated, is an obvious testimonial to our ability to touch into the deepest mysteries of life quite easily and effortlessly.
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Please feel free to leave a comment if you have clarification questions, feedback, critiques, or anything to add. Philosophy is all about dialogue! I will do my best to respond to all questions and concerns.
How brilliant!
It’s astonishing how one can shed the constraints of ego on the hiking trail.