I read Roger Scruton's Beauty, A Very Short Introduction and also listened to the audio book. Rarely has an author rubbed me the wrong way. Here are four of the many reasons:
1) In all the many dozens of works of art, music and literature he references, ALL ARE CREATED BY MEN! Hey, Roger, this is the 21st century. Wake up, pal;
2) Roger's language is 100% sexist - man, he, his throughout; not a she or hers in the entire book;
3) Continually speaking of humans as "rational beings." I can appreciate we humans have reason and logic but I can't remember the last time I had interactions with a "rational being." How about the emotions? the passions? the intuition? that part of the mind that goes beyond reason? (and, one could argue, where beauty in this world truly resides);
4) The more I read, the more it became clear to me Roger isn't a big fan of the human body, probably why there is not one reference to the beauty of dance - groups like Pilobolus Dance Company or Cirque du Soleil. For me, some of the most beautiful experiences I've had have been watching such performances or myself participating in ecstatic dance workshops (Gabrielle Roth Dance, Philadelphia Group Motion, to name two). Oh, the body in motion can be so, so beautiful!
Anyway, I truly appreciate Sebastian Smee's review of Roger's book:
John Updike thought that, for most men, a naked woman is the most beautiful thing they will ever see. He didn't say it was so for all men, nor did he venture an opinion on whether the reverse held for women. But the proposition, so bluntly delivered – as if centuries of hair-splitting philosophy and frenetic sublimation could be swept aside with one cheerfully ingenuous sentence – has always struck me as hard to refute.
Its implications – that our idea of beauty is linked to sexual selection and Darwinian evolution and that, as such, it is possibly quite banal – are firmly rejected by Roger Scruton in his new book Beauty. This is not an attempt to define beauty. Rather, it asks whether there are correct judgments to be made about it – reasons why we should prefer Titian's Venus of Urbino to Boucher's Blonde Odalisque or, indeed, to photographs of porn stars having sex. Framing the question in this way implies a search for standards. It also implies an attempt to link beauty with morality, which is no easy task.
Scruton is hardly the first philosopher to attempt it. His approach is to take up Kant's idea that the search for beauty is really a search for consensus. Lovers of beauty, wrote Kant, are "suitors for agreement". Thus, judgments of beauty imply the search for a community of likeminded souls.
But the appreciation of beauty also requires – and here we might sniff a contradiction – what Scruton calls "disinterested interest", an ability to maintain a certain distance between the self and the beautiful object. "Beauty comes," he writes, "from setting human life, sex included, at the distance from which it can be viewed without disgust or prurience. When distance is lost, and imagination swallowed up in fantasy, then beauty may remain, but it is a spoiled beauty, one that has been prised from the individuality of the person who possesses it. It has lost its value and gained a price."
This is stern stuff. Why the emphasis on maintaining distance, as if beauty were forever to be framed and set apart? Doesn't beauty often overwhelm us? Can't it be connected to mucking in, to forgetting oneself, to an animal immersion in the world? Scruton's answer is no. Not because he would suppress sexuality, but because he believes beauty is, above all, a function of the rational mind. It has "an irreducibly contemplative component".
Indeed, he is swayed by Plato's idea that beauty is not just an invitation to desire, but a call to renounce it. The idea sounds counterintuitive, but it chimes with the feeling we often have that the most beautiful things are somehow inviolate. Scruton argues that our inability to maintain the necessary distance and our failure to respect the sovereignty of the objects we consider beautiful have helped to bring about what he calls a "flight from beauty." The phrase is resonant. Few who have registered developments in art, architecture and other aspects of life over the past 50 to 100 years could have failed to notice that beauty has suffered a demotion. From its position as a fundamental value in art, it has been reduced to a frivolous side issue or, worse, a carrier of tainted ideologies and clichés.
In the past 10 years, however, this has started to change. "The flight from beauty" has become a rush to atone, as artists, critics and philosophers scramble to figure out how something so fundamental could have come to be regarded as an embarrassment. New books and anthologies on the subject abound and curators of contemporary art are once more employing the word without shame.
All this certainly makes Scruton's book timely. His own purpose is to convince us that some kinds of aesthetic enjoyment are better than others. Pleasures that become addictive, desires that stimulate an urge to desecrate (out of jealousy, for instance), are inferior to the experience of beauty that tells us that "we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perceptions as a place fit for the lives of beings like us".
This is lovely, and hard to argue with, but it doesn't tell us how our judgments of beauty might be affected by an apprehension that we are not, in fact, "at home in the world". We all succumb to this sense at least some of the time, not just because the world can be hostile, but because we are mortal and destined to leave it.
That is why the greatest artists augment the kind of beauty Scruton is talking about with something deeper. Velázquez, for instance, painted the beautiful court of Phillip IV, but with the shadow of death passing over it. Rembrandt painted beautiful women who were naked (that is, real and mortal) rather than nude (idealised, eternal).
The work of both artists is beautiful, but not, I think, in the rational sense Scruton champions, which depends too heavily on the more easily communicable concept of taste. In the end the most important question about beauty, to return to Updike's salvo, is whether it is special and profound or ubiquitous and really rather unremarkable. The art critic Peter Schjeldahl expressed a synthesis of these two possibilities when he wrote: "Beauty is, or ought to be, no big deal, though the lack of it is. Beauty presents a stone wall to the thinking mind. But to the incarnate mind – deferential to the buzzing and gurgling body – beauty is as fluid, clear, and shining as an Indian summer afternoon."
Roger Scruton has moments of great insight and clarity in this attractively slim volume, but he is less than deferential to the buzzing and gurgling body. He seems to find it distasteful. For him, beauty is not connected to animal joy, but to human reason. I'm not at all sure he has it right.
Comments
Post a Comment