Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968.
Roger Scruton: Beauty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Edmund Burke stands at the beginning of modern ‘conservativism’ in England, the late Roger Scruton having been his most distinguished recent heir. Among the things they want to conserve is beauty, and our sense of it. They thus owe us, and themselves, an account of what beauty is, why we should conserve it, why we should continue to think about it and esteem it. ‘Conservatism’ notwithstanding, they offer very different accounts of beauty.
Burke undertakes a psychological inquiry into the passions. To better understand “the sublime” and “the beautiful”—two ideas often confused—we need “an exact theory of our passions,” including “a knowledge of their genuine sources.” “Could this [confusion] admit of any remedy, I imagined it could only be from a diligent examination of our passions in our own breasts; from a careful survey of the properties of things which we find by experience to influence those passions; and from a sober and attentive investigation of the laws of nature, by which those properties are capable of affecting the body, and thus of exciting our passions.” Burke evidently maintains that these ideas originate in the interaction with perceived things (the Greek word, aisthē, means ‘perceptible things’) with the human body, and therewith the passions). Only after these physiological and psychological effects are understood might we deduce rules that “might be applied to the imitative arts, and to whatever else they concern,” as “whatever turns the soul inward on itself, tends to concenter its forces, and to fit it for greater and stronger flights of science.”
Regarding the sublime and the beautiful, this stronger flight of science (that is, knowledge) brings out standards “of reason and taste.” These standards are likely universal, “the same in all human creatures,” as they are necessary “for the ordinary correspondence of life.” That is reason enables judgment, the passions enable sentiment, and human beings need both to judge and to feel rightly in order to prosper. Taste is “that faculty, or those faculties of the mind which are affected with, or which form a judgment of the works of the imagination and the elegant arts.” Imagination is one of man’s three “natural powers,” the others being the senses and judgment.
Of these, sense is most obviously universal; everyone distinguishes between sweet and sour, light and dark. Pleasures of sense are seldom disputed, since no one says a goose is more beautiful than a swan. Such natural taste can be overridden by an acquired taste, but even if one comes to prefer the taste of tobacco to the taste of sugar, he still knows that sugar is sweet. If you say, quoting the Latin tag, de gustibus non est disputandum, you are right insofar as “no one can strictly answer what pleasure or pain some particular man may find from the Taste of some particular thing,” but that man’s natural taste might have been altered by habits, prejudice, disease. “There is in all men a sufficient remembrance of the original natural causes of pleasure to enable them to bring all things offered to their senses to that standard, and to regulate their feelings and opinions by it.” A drug addict, for example, ruled by his unnatural passion for opium, which is ruining his life, can still perceive that something is wrong with him, remembering himself as he was, before his addiction took hold. In this, Burke disputes the claim of Protagoras, discussed and criticized in two Platonic dialogues, that knowledge is nothing more than perception and that ‘man is the measure of all things,’ i.e., that truth is purely ‘subjective,’ no one’s opinion being more truthful than another’s.
Burke looks not to Protagoras or to Plato but to Locke for his account of the human mind. That is, the ‘conservatism’ of Burke, his esteem traditional standards over the natural-rights standards of the French revolutionaries, nonetheless has its foundation in one of the preeminent natural-rights philosophers. The “ideas, with their annexed pains and pleasures,” are “presented” to the mind by sense. These are what Locke calls “simple ideas” or sense impressions, stamped on the mind, which begins as a tabula rasa. (Locke’s tabula rasa, in its turn, recalls the image of the mind as a block of wax, proposed by Socrates in the Theaetetus.) Still, as in Locke, “the mind of man possesses a sort of creative power of its own; either in representing at pleasure the images of things in the order and manner in which they were received by the senses, or in combining those images in a new manner, and according to a different order,” a power called imagination. “This power of the imagination is incapable of producing any thing absolutely new”; it isn’t creative in the sense of divine ex nihilo creation. “It can only vary the disposition of those ideas which it has received from the senses.”
Despite this limitation, the imagination “is the most extensive province of pleasure and pain, as it is the region of our fears and our hopes, and of all our passions that are connected with them; and whatever is calculated to affect the imagination with these commanding ideas, by force of any original natural impression, must have the same power pretty equally over all men.” Locke calls these commanding ideas the complex ideas. When it comes to the operations of the mind, “wit,” which compares sense impressions or simple ideas, discovering and inventing combinations of them, makes men “naturally inclined to belief than to incredulity.” Judgment, which differentiates, requires experience and observation. All nations abound in metaphors and allegories, as Homeric poetry shows us, for the Greeks. Not all nations exercise acute judgment. Further, “the perfect union of with and judgment is one of the rarest things in the world.”
Where does this leave taste? Taste is natural insofar as it is “the satisfaction in seeing an agreeable figure”—in art, one that accurately imitates what it represents. Differences in taste arise from differences in judgment; you may have attended to the subject more acutely than I have done. I might alter my own taste, rationally, when I initially admire a painting or a song before having experienced some other. My taste didn’t change but my knowledge, and therefore my judgment, did. “So far then as Taste belongs to the imagination, its principle is the same in all men; there is no difference in the manner of their being affected, nor in the causes of the affection”; it is indisputable, ‘perceptions’ in the Latin, Protagorean-sophistic, and indeed Lockean sense. “But in the degree there is a difference, which arises from two causes principally,” “either from a greater degree of natural sensibility”—Plato’s Socrates observes that some wax blocks are made of better stuff than others— or “from a closer and longer attention to the object”—from thinking about it, as Socrates says. Burke concludes that Taste “is not a simple idea,” in Locke’s sense, but “partly made upon of a perception of the primary pleasures of sense, of the secondary pleasures of the imagination and of the conclusions of the reasoning faculty, concerning the various relations of these, and concerning the human passions, manners and action.” As Locke argues, “the senses are the great originals of all our ideas, and consequently of all our pleasures if they are not uncertain and arbitrary.” This makes “the whole ground-work of Taste…common to all,” a “sufficient foundation for a conclusive reasoning on these matters,” even though “sensibility and judgment” vary among people. This universal, natural grounding of taste in the senses can be altered, brought to a condition of insensibility, when judgment falters. There can be “a wrong Taste,” caused by “a defect of judgment.” This is not uncommon. What is exceedingly rare is judgment without sensibility, “naked reason.” It is easier to appreciate Virgil, Burke remarks, than it is to appreciate Aristotle. More typically, taste comes from a blend of sense and judgment; it is not a separate faculty of the mind. “Where disposition, where decorum, where congruity are concerned, in short wherever the best Taste differs from the worst, I am convinced that the understanding operates and nothing else,” that taste “is improved exactly as we improve our judgment, by extending our knowledge, by a steady attention to our object, and by frequent exercise.”
In this, one sees how the Lockean foundation of Burke’s psychology might issue in a political judgment, as for example in his famous sharp critique of the French revolutionaries. The revolutionaries made much of their rationalism, of their “naked reason.” But Robespierre was no Aristotle. What Robespierre took for naked reason, and for natural rights, utterly ignored reason as judgment, reason as knowledge gleaned from experience (in his case, experience in politic or the “frequent exercise” of political responsibility before undertaking the revolution). Burke’s denunciation of the French revolutionaries’ ‘abstract’ reason issues from seeing their utter lack of the practical or prudential reason, the reasoning that attends to the particular measures needed to secure the natural rights discovered by abstract or theoretical reasoning. They lacked the political equivalent of taste, and that led them to the impassioned grotesqueries of the Terror.
Burke divides the main body of his inquiry into five parts consisting of nineteen, twenty-two, twenty-seven, twenty-five, and seven sections, respectively—one hundred in all. The first part concerns the passions—what we need “an exact theory of” in order to understand the sublime and the beautiful. Part Two concern the sublime, Part Three the beautiful, Part Four the physical causes and effects of the sublime and the beautiful, Part Five the rational basis for judging the sublime and the beautiful.
Burke begins Part One rather as Aristotle famously begins the Metaphysics, citing curiosity as the first of the emotions in “the human mind.” But for Burke the desire to know is “the most superficial of all the affections,” “running from one thing to another, seeking novelty.” “Curiosity blends itself more or less with all our passions”; it is perhaps not too much to suggest that for Burke curiosity is the passions’ slave. At any rate, “the influence of reason in producing our passions is nothing near so extensive as it is commonly believed.” Deeper but still “simple ideas” (i.e., sense impressions, per Locke), pain and pleasure are “incapable of definition”; unlike Locke, however, he distinguishes pleasure from the mere removal of pain, which he calls delight. More enduring are joy—when we recover our health or escape from some danger—and grief—the emotion we feel when a pleasure ceases and we know it can never be enjoyed again. If ingrained, grief becomes melancholy, which can sometimes become a sort of pleasure, as Robert Burton’s book may have taught him. “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime,” “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling,” since “the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure.” Pain and danger are the passions which belong to the desire for self-preservation and, sure enough, Burke joins with Hobbes in calling death as the “king of terrors.”
Pain and pleasure are passions of individuals. There are two kinds of passions which belong to society: sexual passion, aiming at generation or the perpetuation of the species, and feelings of sociability, which extend not only to other human beings but to animals and even the inanimate world, as when we feel ‘at home’ in a landscape, a country, even the cosmos. Pain associated with the society of the sexes is often grief, occasioned by loss, whereas the pains associated with society in general are more often less lasting—the snub, the insult, the annoyance. The pleasures and pains of sexuality are sharper than the others, as “the generation of mankind is a great purpose, and it is requisite that men should be animated to the pursuit of it by some great incentive,” “a very high pleasure,” even if “it is by no means designed to be our constant business.” Being rational, human beings have no one ‘mating season,’ unlike “brutes.”
Brutes have no sense of beauty; they merely mate. Erotic love is a “mixed passion,” compounded of nature and social qualities; beauty is its object. “I call beauty a social quality” because it inspires not only or even always lust but tenderness and affection. Burke places his section on beauty at the center of his account of Section One. Made possible by reason, in pursuing it reason ceases simply to be the slave of a passion but provides a passion with a pervading definition. More generally, human beings are naturally social; indeed, “total and perpetual exclusion from all society” is painful, even if temporary solitude may be pleasurable. “An entire life of solitude contradicts the purpose of our being.” Burke does not immediately say what that purpose is.
The passions binding human society generally, as distinct from sexual passion, “the three principal links” in the chain of society, are sympathy, imitation, and ambition. Sympathy means putting ourselves “into the place of another man,” experiencing either pleasure or pain in so doing. We can take delight in the distresses of others in the sense we are glad we do not suffer those distresses “Terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close,” even when “blended with no small uneasiness”—exemplified by the experience of witnessing a disaster from a distance. A tragic drama consists of “imitated distresses,” giving us delight and even pleasure because we know the calamities portrayed aren’t really happening. “It is absolutely necessary my life should be out of any imminent hazard before I can take delight in the suffering of others real or imaginary.”
Imitation gives us pleasure not in what others feel but in what they do. “It is by imitation far more than precept that we learn every thing.” Not reason but imitation “forms our manners, our opinions, our lives,” serving as “one of the strongest links of society” and “bringing our nature to perfection.” This suggests that the perfection of human nature is the purpose of human being, and it is indeed in this section that Burke cites Aristotle, not Locke or Hobbes. Ambition is the desire not merely to imitate but to excel. It animates social improvement. Even miserable men take delight in thinking that they are “supreme in misery,” preeminent in sublimity. “The passions which belong to self-preservation,” the passions which “turn on pain and danger” and are “the strongest of all the passions,” especially excite that delight Burke calls the sublime.
Before turning to a more extensive discussion of the sublime, Burke concludes Part One by explaining why a book on the sublime and the beautiful is needed. First, “the elevation of the mind ought to be the principal end of all our studies”—this may be the contribution of scholarship to our efforts to perfect our nature—but it is “not uncommon to be wrong in theory and right in practice.” “Men often act right from their feelings, who afterwards reason but ill on them from practice.” This notwithstanding, “it is impossible to avoid an attempt at such reasoning, and equally impossible to prevent it having some influence on our practice.” But neither artists nor philosophers nor “those called critics” have adequately explained human feelings. Artists “have been too much occupied in the practice” of art, in the imitation of feelings, fully to understand them; philosophers “have done little, and what they have done”—Locke? Adam Smith?—was “mostly with a view to their own schemes and systems.” Critics “have generally sought [the rule of the arts] among poems, pictures, engravings, statues and buildings,” but “art can never give the rules that make an art.” To reason rightly about the arts and the feelings which animate them, one must inquire into the causes of the sublime and the beautiful.
Scruton diverges from Burke in granting much more importance to human reason. Between Burke and Scruton, as it were, stands the by turns beautiful and sublime figure of Immanuel Kant.
Scruton begins by folding the sublime into the beautiful. “Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling.” “Judgements of beauty”—and we do indeed judge it, not only experience it—concern “matters of taste.” “Maybe taste has no rational foundation,” and unquestionably “it is in the nature of tastes to differ,” so perhaps we have no universal standards of taste to reason about. Scruton demurs. “Beauty, I argue, is a real and universal value, one anchored in our rational nature, and the sense of beauty has an indispensable part to play in shaping the human world.” By making the sublime a part of the beautiful, Scruton makes it easier to ‘Kantify’ or ‘rationalize’ (in the non-pejorative sense of the word) as he considers beauty. Insofar as Burke inquires rationally into beauty and sublimity, he enquires into the nature of the passions. Scruton, following Kant in this regard, treats beauty as distinct from psychology; beauty has an integrity of its own, and therefore he engages in ‘aesthetics.’
Beauty, he argues, can and must be judged. The associations often made between truth and beauty, or goodness and beauty derive from the assumption that the divine possesses all three of these qualities. Thomas Aquinas inclined to this view, but if he is right, “how can there be dangerous beauties, corrupting beauties, and immoral beauties” or, “if such things are impossible, why are they impossible, and what is it that misleads us into thinking the opposite?” Is it that beauty is “a matter appearance, not of being, and perhaps also that in exploring beauty we are investigating the sentiments of people, rather than the deep structure of the world,” as indeed Burke evidently contends?
Retreating to more readily confirmable ground, Scruton lists six “platitudes” about beauty; that is, rather in the manner of Socrates, he begins with opinions. Beauty pleases us; one thing can be more beautiful than another; beauty is always a reason for attending to the thing that possesses it; beauty is the subject-matter of a judgment, namely, the judgment of taste; the judgment of taste is about the beautiful object, not about the subject’s state of mind; and there are “no second-hand judgments of beauty,” “no way you can argue me into a judgment that I have not made for myself.” “My own judgment waits upon experience,” not ratiocination.
With respect to the first platitude, while it’s true that beauty pleases us, “the judgment focuses on the object judged, not the subject who judges.” The fact that the sixth platitude, which rules out judgments of beauty based on anyone’s judgment other than one’s own, does not vitiate this point. “The judgment of taste is a genuine judgment, one that is supported by reasons,” non-rational only in the sense that it does not derive from a deductive argument. This leads to a paradox: the judgment of taste is reasonable but the reasons one adduces “do not compel the judgment, and can be rejected without contradiction”; though reasonable, taste is not apodictic. This can be so, thanks to the second platitude, that judgments of aesthetic value “tend to be comparative,” as one looks at or listens to first one thing, then another. In so doing, we cultivate a sense of the beautiful, not a physical sense, a sense or more accurately a sensibility owing not to a Burkean inquiry into underlying emotional causes but nonetheless to a blending of sensual and intellectual perception not unlike Burke’s suggestions on the rational element in our appreciation of the sublime and the beautiful.
Aisthēsis means sensation. Scruton does not derive the term’s meaning from its etymology, however, proposing that “we consider instead the way in which an object comes before us, in the experience of beauty.” Provisionally, he writes, he will “call something beautiful when we gain pleasure from contemplating it as an individual object, for its own sake”—not so much in terms of its function— and “in its presented form.” Here is where Kant comes in. Esteem for functionality implies an “interest.” I like desire or need the object for what it gets me. Judgment in Kant’s sense implies disinterested esteem. “There is a certain kind of disinterested interest, he argued, which is an interest of reason: not an interest of mine, but an interest of reason in me,” an impartial interest. “In the case of the judgment of beauty…I am purely disinterested, abstracting form practical considerations and attending to the object before me with all desires, interests and goals suspended.” While it is true that beauty gives us pleasure, it is a “disinterested pleasure”—pleasure in the object I judge beautiful, regardless of whether it serves my ‘interests.’ As such, it is a rational or “intentional” pleasure, not a mere physical reaction, pleasure in the taste of wine. Such “intentional pleasures” are “fully integrated into the life of the mind,” capable of “being neutralized by argument and amplified by attention” to “the presented form of the object, and constantly renewing itself from that source.” One cannot be argued into an aesthetic judgment, but once you have been presented with an object you consider beautiful, your judgment can be qualified by reasons brought to your attention by another viewer or listener. What Kant means by a judgment of taste is not intended by the judge as “a private opinion” but as “a binding verdict that would be agreed to by all rational beings just so long as they did what I am doing, and put their own interests aside.” This doesn’t mean that the judgment actually is binding, but rather that “I am making a claim,” implying that “seems to imply that others, if they see things aright, would agree with me,” a judgment moreover “for which I can reasonably be asked for a justification.” Scruton concurs with Kant’s view insofar as it finds the experience of beauty to be “the prerogative of rational beings.” “Only creatures like us—with language, self-consciousness, practical reason, and moral judgment—can look on the world in this alert and disinterested way, so as to seize on the presented object and take pleasure in it.”
“The question we now have to consider,” after considering Kant’s theory, first, “whether this state of mind” of intentional pleasure really does have “any rational ground,” second, “whether it tells us anything about the world in which we live,” and third, “whether its exercise is a part of human fulfillment,” as both Kant and Burke maintain. Important arguments have been raised against each of these possibilities. Evolutionary psychologists point not to presented objects but to the “evolutionary origins” of ‘aesthetic’ states of mind, trying to show that such states give groups or individuals that possess them a better chance to pass on their “genetic inheritance.” Regarding group advantage, art or aesthetics “belong with ritual and festivals,” which promote group cohesion and therefore improved chances of survival. But a ritual or festival might have little or no aesthetic value, as for example the sacrifice of a virgin to the Sun God. As for the individualist theory, that a sense of beauty emerges from sexual selection, this explanation, “even if true, will not enable us to identify what is specific to the sentiment of beauty.” When Platonists argue that this sentiment is “a central component in sexual desire” they mean erōs, a “cosmic force” that manifests itself not only in sexual love but in the movements of the sun and the stars. Thus, “beauty, in a person, prompts desire,” but what we attracted to is only proximately the person in which it inheres. “By contemplating beauty the soul rises from its immersion in merely sensuous and concrete things, and ascends to a higher sphere, where it is not the beautiful boy who is studied, but the form of the beautiful itself, which enters the soul as a true possession in the way that ideas generally reproduce themselves in the souls of those who understand them.” Scruton judges that this takes the rational content of the appreciation of beauty too far, that sexual love for a person can morph “(after a bit of self-discipline) [into] delighted contemplation of an abstract idea.” “That is like saying that the desire for a steak could be satisfied (after a bit of mental exertion) by staring at the picture of a cow.” Scruton’s analogy is imprecise, since the picture of a cow is still a physical object, and the cow itself doesn’t look like a steak, but it is nonetheless a point well taken; it is likely that Plato’s Socrates intends to distinguish physical from intellectual erōs, and to elevate the minds of his interlocutors toward philosophy or love of wisdom, instead of pederasty. The thinking is wishful only if one assumes that Socrates expects most of his interlocutors to go along with him. That is, for Plato’s Socrates, rational contemplation of beauty is not disinterested in Kant’s sense; it is indeed erotic, with noēsis replacing orgasm as the pleasure achieved. Whether this is wishful thinking, or whether Kantian disinterestedness is rather more wishful, is a question one may well consider.
And Scruton himself maintains that “beauty undoubtedly stimulates desire in the moment of arousal.” He argues, however, that “the satisfied lover is as little able to possess the beauty of his beloved as the one who hopelessly observes it from afar.” In contradistinction from both Plato’s Socrates and Kant, he suggests that erotic love is neither capable of abstraction nor of disinterestedness, but rather “a desire for that person” who is beautiful. “This focusing on the individual fills the mind and perceptions of the lover” in a way quite different from an animal’s sexual appetite or the ideas of the two philosophers. Scruton is a ‘personalist,’ not a Platonist or a Kantian. He wants to register “a distinction, familiar to all of us, between an interest in a person’s body and an interest in a person as embodied.” The lover’s kiss “touches the other person in his very self,” the movement “from one self towards another, and a summoning of the other into the surface of his being.” That is why we can speak intelligibly of a “beautiful soul,” not only of a beautiful body, the soul of “one whose moral nature is perceivable, who is not just a moral agent but a moral presence, with the kind of virtue that shows itself to the contemplating gaze.” This is why one can think of the Virgin Mary as beautiful without desiring her sexually. “This thought reaches back to Plato’s original idea: that beauty is not just an invitation to desire, but also a call to renounce it.” In contradistinction to Burke, then, Scruton finds “the connection between sex, beauty and the sacred by reflecting on the distinctively human nature of our interest in those things, and by situating them firmly in the realm of freedom and rational choice,” not in the passions.
Yet there remain Burke’s remarks about the perfection of human nature and of the blending of reason with the passions. We return to his elaboration of the passions caused by the sublime and the beautiful.
The passion caused by the sublime is horrified astonishment, in which the soul’s notions are suspended. These are indeed passions, but although they are not produced by our reasonings they “anticipate” them by ‘getting our attention.’ The less intense effects of the sublime—admiration, reverence, and respect—allow more ‘room’ for such reasonings. One recalls the Bible’s teaching, that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.
“Either more openly or latently,” terror causes the sublime. “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” Obscurity, the condition of not knowing, adds to terror; one recalls that God manifests Himself through a cloud, and that bogus authoritarians, whether genuinely dangerous (the Grand Inquisitor, with his “majesty, mystery, and authority”) or comical (the Wizard of Oz, manipulating his ‘special effects’ behind a flimsy curtain), imitate Him. “Those despotic governments, which are founded on the passions of men, and principally upon the passion of ear, keep their chief as much as may be from the public eye,” as do some religions. Conversely, clarity “is in some sort an enemy to all enthusiasms whatsoever.” As a rule, paintings and drawings are clearer than words, which is why words move us more. “Poetry, with all its obscurity has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the persons than any other art,” a contention that obviously predates Beethoven and what followed in music. Be that as it may, “knowledge and acquaintance make the most striking causes affect but little,” whereas “all men are as the vulgar in what they do not understand,” such as infinity and eternity.
“Besides these things which directly suggest the idea of danger, and those which produce a similar effect from a mechanical cause, I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power.” Because “the idea of pain” sways us more than even “the highest degree of pleasure,” even if power promises “equal degrees of suffering or enjoyment,” our fear of suffering will prevail when confronted by it. Things less powerful than ourselves bring us pleasure because we can use them for that purpose. Things more powerful than ourselves threaten us because they need not follow our will; we are at their mercy. Power under our control is like a dog; power not under our control is like a wolf. The supreme power of God inspires joy insofar as we trust Him, but always fear and trembling. On the atheist side of the ledger, Lucretius’ cosmos, too, is sublime. Indeed, “before the christian religion had, as it were, humanized the idea of the divinity, and brought it somewhat nearer to us very little was said of the love of God.”
Privation (“Vacuity, Darkness, Solitude and Silence”) can be sublime, if wedded to any extreme; a brief period of solitude or silence, a small degree of emptiness of darkness, won’t worry us. Vastness is “a powerful cause of the sublime,” and infinity “fill[s] the mind with that sort of delightful terror, which is the most genuine effect and truest test of the sublime.” But there is the exception of “the artificial infinite,” such as a rotunda. A circle is infinite in one sense but limited in another; the “great heathen temples” do not evoke the sublime, and classical architecture generally, with its rectangular shapes, does so even less. “There is nothing more prejudicial to the grandeur of buildings, than to abound in angles.” Accordingly, a cross is not sublime; the Cross of Christ is not sublime (perhaps symbolic of the humanizing character of Christianity), although His Passion surely is. Indeed, “no work of art can be great” except insofar “as it deceives,” presenting us with an optical illusion. Only nature can be truly great. The greatness of Stonehenge inheres not in the stones but in “the immense force necessary for such a work.” “When any work seems to have required immense force and labor to effect it, the idea is grand,” which might be why Jesus’ work on the Cross is sublime, the Cross itself not.
In general, extremes evoke sublimity: magnificence (“a great profusion of things which are splendid and valuable in themselves,” whether natural, as the starry sky, or artificial, as the “richness and profusion” of poetry); overpowering light or profound darkness; very bright or very dark colors; the “excessive loudness” of a waterfall or a crowd will “overpower the soul,” suspend its action, and fill it with terror”). “In all things” the sublime “abhors mediocrity.” The classical virtue of moderation removes it. Moderation in souls and in things usually keeps them out of danger; the sublime endangers self-preservation. Raging Achilles died young, wily Odysseus lived long.
Beauty is “that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it,” as distinct from desire and lust, which seeks possession. Love need not excite desire. This seems to anticipate Scruton, but on the contrary, “beauty demands no assistance from our reasoning.” Reasoning, especially mathematical reasoning, registers proportion, “the measure of relative quantity,” it “surely beauty i no idea belonging to mensuration, nor has it any thing to do with calculation and geometry.” Roses, for example, are beautiful, but they are out of proportion to their thin stems, and as to the flower itself, the English rose features no geometric proportions, despite its symmetries. “It is not by the force of long attention and inquiry that we find any object to be beautiful.” The swan’s neck, the peacock’s tail: it isn’t proportion or measure “that creates all beauty which belongs to shape.” We tend to think so because “there is an unfortunate propensity in mankind to make themselves, their views, and their works, the measure of excellence in every thing whatsoever.” But man is most assuredly not the measure of all things. And if we look at the figure of man himself, he “may have legs of equal length, and resembling each other in all respects, and his neck of a just size, and his back quite straight, without having at the same time the least perceivable beauty.”
Although “the Platonic theory of fitness and aptitude” is mistaken respecting beauty, “I did not by any means intend to say that they were of no value or that they ought to be disregarded in works of art.” They are indeed fit for human use and appreciation. But “whenever the wisdom of our Creator intended that we should be affected with any thing, he did not confide the execution of his design to the languid and precarious operation of our reason,” instead endowing it “with powers and properties that prevent the understanding, and even the will, which seizing upon the senses and imagination, captivate the soul before the understanding is ready either to join with them or to oppose them.” It is the anatomist who discovers the intricate proportions of the human body, “the affection which possesses an ordinary man at the sight of a delicate smooth skin” requires “no investigation” to perceive such beauty. Indeed, “we have need of a strong effort of our reason to disentangle our minds from the allurements of the object to a consideration of that wisdom,” divine wisdom, “which invented so powerful a machine” as the cosmos, or, for that matter, the allurements of a beautiful human body. We appreciate beauty rationally only insofar as it happens to coincide with proportionality, the object’s fitness to the purpose for which it was designed. When coincident, beauty and proportion “operate on the understanding considering them, which approves the work and acquiesces in it.” Such judgment is not a matter of the passions. Burke rather associates the mind not with beauty but with sublimity. Reason, being ‘judgmental,’ tends to invoke fear more than love. “The authority of a father, so useful to our well-being, and so justly venerable upon all accounts, hinders us from having that entire love for him that we have for our mothers, where parental authority is almost melted down into the mother’s fondness and indulgence.” And “we have great love for our grandfathers, in whom this authority is removed a degree from us, and where the weakness of age mellows it into something of a feminine partiality.” The same goes for virtue, whose sternness Burke associates with reason and facing necessities, not beauty.
Neither rational (measurable/proportional) nor useful, beauty is “some quality in bodies, acting mechanically upon the human mind by the intervention of the senses,” “excit[ing] in us the passion of love, or some correspondent affections.” Unlike sublime things, beautiful things are often small: “I am told that in most languages, the objects of love are spoken of under diminutive epithets,” “terms of affection and tenderness.” As mentioned, great size is for the sublime, for what is admired, feared. “There is a wide difference between admiration and love.” Beauty is smooth, ruggedness sublime; beauty is seen in parts “melted into one another, not in angularity. (Poor angularity—neither sublime nor beautiful.) Beauty is delicate, as “an air of robustness and strength is very prejudicial to beauty; myrtles and greyhounds are beautiful, oaks and mastiffs sublime. The allure of women consists partly in their delicacy. Beauty dresses in clean, fair colors, unlike the dark or glaring extremes of sublimity. In movement, beauty avoids contortion and suddenness; in sounds, it has nor shrillness harshness, or depth; in taste, it is sweet not sour or cloying.
Can beauty and sublimit be found together? Yes, but only in the sense that black and white, when mingled, make grey. They may soften one another without becoming the same, perhaps as one sometimes sees in married couples.
Scruton notices that even in Burke’s time nature was becoming less sublime, more beautiful. “The mastery over nature, its conversion into a safe and common home for our species, and the desire to protect the dwindling wilderness, all fed into the impulse to see the natural world as an object of contemplation, rather than as a means to our goals.” The grandeur of landscapes came to seem less threatening than open, freeing. And Kant, for one, noticed that persons who otherwise “seem to live in an aesthetic vacuum, filling their days with utilitarian calculations,” still appreciate nature, if unthreatened by it. Natural beauty thus has more philosophic interest than artful beauty; its appreciation being “common to all human beings,” it enables the philosopher to see human nature more clearly. The term “aesthetic” was intended “to denote a human universal.” In one sense a product of a certain place and time, in another sense aesthetics “is by no means unique to that place and time,” the need “to find solace in the contemplation of beauty” being noticeable in China and Japan, as well. “The experience of natural beauty…contains a reassurance that this world is a right and fitting place to be—a home in which our human powers and prospects find confirmation”; “a world that makes room for such things makes room for you.” The European landscape paintings of Constable “portray a home, a place bent to human uses and bearing in every particular the imprint of human hopes and goals”; they consist of “the free elaboration of nature, in which human beings appear because they too are natural.”
Where does this leave the Burkean sublime? It shares with beauty the power to “lift us out of the ordinary utilitarian thoughts that dominate our practical lives.” The sublime and the beautiful also “involve the kind of disinterested contemplation that Kant was later to identify as the core of the aesthetic experience.” Kant saw in our ability to think about the sublime and to “affirm ourselves against it,” the dignity of human beings, who thereby “affirm our obedience to the moral law, which no natural force could ever vanquish or set aside.” Whether we follow Kant into the moral law as the nature-free categorical imperative, or instead (with Scruton) restrict oneself to appreciating the dignity of human thought, beauty—whether in nature, in persons, in artifacts—cannot easily be separated from human purposes and interests, from “practical reason.” Since natural beauty in its splendor raises imponderable questions (“What purpose does this beauty serve. And if we say that it serves no purpose but itself, then whose purpose is that?”), Scruton draws back, rather in the manner of Socrates in the Theaetetus, to consider a smaller matter, “the place of beauty in ordinary practical reasoning, where purpose is at the forefront of our thinking.” “I will try to show just why aesthetic judgment is a necessary part of doing anything well.” Before following him, his eventual silence regarding natural beauty does suggest that Burke was on to something when he classified nature as a whole as sublime.
English to the core, Scruton judges the best place to begin the contemplation of “everyday beauty” is in the garden, “where leisure, learning and beauty come together, in a liberating experience at home.” Not the utilitarian vegetable garden but the pleasure garden, where “nature is taken up, tamed and made obedient to human visual norms,” provides a suitably limitable, as it were surveyable glimpse at beauty, even as the small polis affords Aristotle a better look at political life than the sprawling empires of his time. A tree in a garden “enters into relation with the people who walk in the garden, belongs with them in a kind of conversation,” taking its place “as an extension of the human world, mediating between the built environment and the world of nature.” “This attempt to match our surroundings to ourselves and ourselves to our surroundings is arguably a human universal,” suggesting “that the judgment of beauty is not just an optional addition to the repertoire of human judgments, but the unavoidable consequence of taking life seriously, and becoming truly conscious of our affairs.” And as people and their gardens and their buildings come together, “a kind of rational discourse emerges, the goal of which is to build a shared environment in which we can all be at home, and which satisfies our need that things look right to everyone.” As Aristotle finds the origins of the political community in the family, its forms of rule anticipating the forms of rule in the city, Scruton finds at least a contributing source of politics in aesthetics, which includes the shared meaning, the shared purposes, that arise from gardening and architecture. In this new, political, home, human begin to “discover through a kind of reasoned dialogue, the goal of which is to secure some measure of agreement in judgments among those who have an interest in the choice”; they establish “a genuine realm of rational life that corresponds to the philosophical idea of the aesthetic.”
And this can go beyond practical reasoning. The practical-aesthetic choices we make with respect to our gardens, our buildings, and the artifacts we place in them “promot[e] self-knowledge,” bringing you “to understand how you yourself fit in to the world of human meanings,” the “self-certainty that comes through building a presence in the world of others.” “Even those who dress so as to stand out and draw attention to themselves do so in order that others should recognize their intention” as they “send recognizable messages to the society of strangers,” whom we move amongst as “the subject-matter of a reasoned judgment,” a judgment of our fittingness, a judgment of beauty.
With Hegel, artistic beauty came to replace natural beauty as “the core subject-matter of aesthetics.” Hegel’s historicist philosophy looks not to natural beauty but to the sublime conquest of nature by human beings, a new instantiation of the Absolute Spirit which constitutes both nature and man. Scruton associates this with modern individualism, inasmuch as it is individuals who, through his artworks, “announces himself to the world and calls on the gods”—more accurately, the ‘god’ that is ‘History’—for “vindication.” “Art picked up the torch of beauty, ran with it for a while, and then dropped it in the pissoirs of Paris,” where the artistic modernists left it—the sublimity of ‘History’ overcoming the beautiful.
Aesthetics nonetheless survived, despite the anti-aesthetics of ‘modern art.’ This became clear when those still devoted to beauty and the ‘modernists’ confronted a common enemy: the leveling predilections of mass taste, the preference for the production of “fantasy objects” which offer “surrogate fulfilment to our forbidden desires, thereby permitting them”—what André Malraux called “the arts of satiation.” “The ideal fantasy is perfectly realized, and perfectly unreal—an imaginary object that leaves nothing to the imagination,” as seen preeminently in advertisements “tempting us constantly to realize our dreams, rather than to pursue realities.”
Scruton distinguishes fantasy from imagination. “Imaginary things are pondered, fantasies are acted out.” Imagined scenes “come to us soaked in thought, and in no sense are they surrogates, standing in place of the unobtainable” but rather “deliberately placed at a distance, in a world of their own.” [1] It is the distinction between a film by Ingmar Bergman and a porno flick, a Greek tragedy (where “the murders take place off stage”) and an ‘action’ movie. ” True artists control their subject-matter, in order that our response to it should be their doing, not ours.” The meaning represents itself “as presented,” that is, “as inseparable from form and style.” This is why we can talk about poetry, with greater or lesser intelligence and accuracy, but never convey its full meaning as the poem presents itself to us. And a poem also sounds, untranslatably. “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” doesn’t quite mean the same when translated into “Demain et demain et demain.” The tone has shifted.
And obviously so much more for music. “It seems therefore that our best attempts at explaining the beauty of works of abstract art like music and architecture involve linking them by chains of metaphor to human action, life and emotion,” as “figurative uses of language aim not to describe things but to connect them, and the connection is forged in the feeling of the perceivers,” changing “the way things are perceived.” “We understand expressive music by fitting it to other elements in our experience, drawing connections with human life, ‘matching’ the music to other things that have meaning for us.” In this way, music does indeed resonate in souls, connecting “with the moral life,” a connection “which explains why we feel at home with the piece, and elevated by it.” Plato was right to turn his moral and indeed political attention to music, just as parents are right to concern themselves with the kind of music their children are listening to. “In art as in life fittingness is at the heart of aesthetic success. We want things to fit together, in ways that fit to us.”
Since “the impetus to impose order and meaning on human life, through the experience of something delightful, is the underlying motive of art in all its forms,” and since “our favorite works of art seem to guide us to the truth of the human condition,” “show[ing] us the worthiness of being human,” one must judge art with considerable care, asking if that imposition and that seeming are true to human life, not veering away into fantasy or kitsch. At the same time, artists should never moralize, as “moralizing destroys [the] true moral value” of works of art, “which lies in the ability to open our eyes to others, and to discipline our sympathies towards life as it is.”
Continuing his search for the causes of the sublime and the beautiful in the passions, Burke concedes that the “great chain of causes, which linking one to another, even to the throne of God himself, can never be unraveled by any industry of ours.” He can identify the efficient cause, the ‘trigger’ that prompts them, “the immediately sensible qualities of things”: “certain affections of the mind, that cause certain changes in the body; or certain powers and properties in bodies, that work a change in the mind.” The “governing motions” of our passions are often “communicated at a time when we have not capacity to reflect on them”—childhood, for example. This means that many things affect us not by their natural powers but by association with some pleasure or pain. Pain and fear “consist in an unnatural tension of the nerves”—the one physical but affecting the mind, the other mental but affecting the body. This interaction of body and mind, which Burke emphasizes, can lead to complex reactions, as when labor, the surmounting of difficulties, painful in itself, can counteract the melancholy one may feel after prolonged rest. Both the “coarser” and the “finer elements of body and mind need work to keep them fit. The mind, too, needs exercise, and mental exercise sometimes requires pain and fear, “so modified as not to be actually noxious,” as generations of teachers and their students know.
The senses convey impressions that bring us to the sense of the sublime. Burke pays particular attention to vision. Objects of great size are sublime because “if but one point is observed at once, the eye must traverse the vast space of such bodies with great quickness, and consequently the fine nerves and muscles destined to the motion of that part must be very much strained; and their great sensibility must make them highly affected by this straining.” This is especially so if the large object is more or less featureless, with no details to cause the eye to pause. “The eye or the mind (for in this case there is no difference) in great uniform objects does not readily arrive at their bounds; it has no rest, whilst it contemplates them; the image is much the same every where.” Even a colonnade, with its procession of individual objects, will prove sublime if the pillars themselves are uniform because the repetition of similar impressions (as Burke calls them, following Locke, “ideas”) exhausts eye and mind, even more than one huge block will do.
We experience the sublime not only by seeing but by not-seeing, by being plunged into darkness. Burke disagrees with Locke’s contention that darkness terrifies us only because it’s associated with tales of ghosts and goblins. It is more that in darkness we cannot see objects that might injure us if we collided with them. He explains the fear of a white boy for a black woman this way not because the boy had any racial prejudice but because in perceiving darkness the iris of the eye is forced to expand, straining the nerves. “Darkness is terrible in its own nature,” having such “mechanical effects.” Nature “restores itself” to equilibrium in such circumstances by looking away from blackness and gazing at colors, allowing the eye to “recover by a compulsive spring.” One can also moderate the naturally terrifying effect of darkness by ‘getting used to it.’ Although “black will always have something melancholy in it, because the sensory will always find the change from it from other colors too violent,” “custom reconciles us to every thing.” The boy can overcome his fear of the harmless black woman by accustoming himself to her.
This may well be another link between Burke’s (mostly) Lockean doctrines and his later critique of the French revolutionaries in the name of “the decent drapery of life,” of custom, prescription, tradition. To base political life on complex ideas derived from the “simple ideas” presented to us by the senses gives a people over to its passions, with murderous and tyrannical results. To, in fact, ‘The Terror.’ Sublimity in politics is a thing to be avoided, at least under most circumstances, except insofar as it can be moderated into sentiments of respect and reverence. Foreign and civil wars are sublime and sometimes just, but always a profound misfortune for any people, including the victors.
If pain and fear animate the sense of the sublime by producing an unnatural tension of the nerves, beauty “acts by relaxing the solids of the whole system”; “the passion called love is produced by this relaxation.” Burke suggests that things sweet to the smell and taste are “probably round” on the microscopic level, their smoothness causing us pleasure. So too with things touched. But even a sweet smell long continued and chocolates consumed steadily will cloy, and a prolonged contact with uniformly smooth things will tire. Sustained pleasure requires gentle variation; “rocking sets children to sleep better than absolute rest.”
Homer understands this. He gives the Trojans, “whose fate he has designed to excite our compassion, infinitely more of the amiable social virtues than he has distributed among his Greeks.” He makes the Greeks “far their superiors in the political and military virtues.” And so “we love Priam more than Agamemnon, and Hector more than his conqueror Achilles,” although Priam lacks Agamemnon’s prudence and Hector lacks Achilles courage. “Admiration is the passion which Homer would excite in favor of the Greeks, and he has done it by bestowing on them the virtues which have but little to do with love,”, much to do with fearsomeness and respect. Troy itself—besieged, limited not vast—can only be pitied.
It is only in the final part of his book that Burke considers words, and not in their capacity for framing rational thoughts but strictly in their capacity to excite the passions associated with the sublime and the beautiful, as seen in their use in poetry and in oratory. In those genres, words “affect the mind by raising in it ideas of those things for which custom has approved [the words] to stand.” Words can be “aggregate”—representing those simple “ideas” or sense impressions of things seen in nature (tree, man, castle)—or “simple abstract”—representing one simple idea (red, round, square)—or “compounded abstract”—the arbitrary union of the other two (virtue, honor), words denoting phenomena that are “not real essences.” “Such words are in reality but mere sounds; but they are sounds, which being used on particular occasions, wherein we receive some good, or suffer some evil, or see others affected with good or evil; or which we hear applied to other interesting things or events; and being applied in such a variety of cases that we know readily by habit to what things they belong, they produce in the mind, whenever they are afterwards mentioned, effects similar to those of their occasions.” Burke cites Locke, who cautions that when words are taught before “the particular modes of action to which [words] belong are presented to the mind,” the person attaches them to the pleasure or pain of the one using the words, not to the things themselves. This yields contradiction between principles and practice, interfering with sound deductions drawn from sense impressions. This makes for bombast in speech and in writing, and “it requires in several cases much good sense and experience to be guarded against the force of such language.” Although all spoken words produce sounds and provoke affections in the soul, the compounded abstract words never produce a clear picture in the mind. They should be used and heard with caution. “In reality poetry and rhetoric do not succeed in exact description so well as painting does; their business is to affect rather by sympathy than by imitation; to display rather the effect of things on the mind of the speaker, or of others, than to present a clear idea of the things themselves.” Although poetry imitates nature “so far as it describes the manners and passions of men which their words can express,” descriptive poetry (for example, James Thompson’s “The Seasons”) substitute sounds for realities, with which the sounds are associated only by custom.
Words are “much more capable of making deep and lively impressions than any other arts, and even than nature itself in very many cases.” There are three causes of this effect: being social animals, “we take an extraordinary part in the passions of others,” and “no tokens…can express all the circumstances of most passions so fully as words,” especially if the speaker himself is impassioned; second, “many things of a very affecting nature” seldom occur, while “the words which represent them often do” (war, death, famine), and by repetition these words “have an opportunity of making a deep impression and taking root in the mind,” even when their referents “have never been at all presented to the senses of any men but by words” (God, angels, devils, heaven and hell); finally, words can be combined in novel ways, thereby “givi[ing] life and force to the simple object.” Certain languages lend themselves to the evocations of passions more than others. French, and other “very polished languages, such as are praised for their superior clearness and perspicuity, are generally deficient in strength”; by contrast, “the oriental tongues, and in general the languages of most unpolished people, have a great force and energy of expression.” It should be noticed that by the oriental languages Burke likely means Hebrew and Arabic, languages of the sublime religions. If Christianity comes to us in Greek, it is the less polished koine.
Scruton’s account points to the rational dimension of taste without venturing into rationalism. Taste does not change under the pressure of a rational argument, that is, by a deduction drawn from self-evident premises. Taste changes, one hopes for the better, by adducing reasons; I am unlikely appreciate much of English poetry if I don’t know anything about Christian iconography. I may well change my opinion of a given poem once I learn how that iconography ‘works’ in it. The difference between this and logical deduction is that in mathematics, science, and morality, where deductions often rule our judgment (as, for example, in that well-known logical syllogism, the Declaration of Independence), “the search for objectivity,” for understanding the thing before us, “is he search for universally valid results—results that must be accepted by every rational being.” In the judgment of beauty, however, “the search for objectivity is for valid and heightened forms of human experience.” “Criticism is not aiming to show that you must like Hamlet.” Criticism aims at showing “the vision of human life which the play contains, and the forms of belonging which it endorses, and to persuade you of their value.” Criticism does not claim “that this vision of human life is universally available,” but neither does it allow that “no cross-cultural comparisons can be made” between, say, Hamlet and a Japanese Noh play.
If judgments of taste concerning beauty can be made, by what standards should we make them? Beauty “speaks to us, as virtue speaks to us, of human fulfilment: not of things that we want, but of things that we ought to want, because human nature requires them.” Here, Scruton aligns himself with Burke, and both align with Aristotle. To show this, Scruton compares and contrasts Botticelli’s Venus with Titian’s several Venuses. Botticelli paints “the face of an idealized woman,” a goddess, “outside the reach of human longings,” a woman “beyond the reach of desire as we have known it.” Titian’s Venuses recline before us “very much on earth.” Botticelli’s Venus commends her viewer to the Platonic “ascent of the soul through love”; “she is not erotic” but rather “a vision of heavenly beauty” and “a call to transcendence.” And even Titian’s earthbound Venuses are persons, each an individual “who has taken possession of her surroundings, and is decidedly at home in them.” Botticelli and Titan interest us “in the embodied person” more than in the body of that person. Pornography does something quite different, making the body the object of our attention, denying “the human subject” pervading the body, thereby “negating the moral demand that free beings must treat each other as ends in themselves,” as Kant insists. Again alluding to the Eleatic Stranger’s distinction in Plato’s Sophist, genuinely erotic art speaks to the imagination, pornography to fantasy. “My body is not my property but—to use the theological term—my incarnation”; “I am inextricably mingled with it, and what is done to my body is done to me.” By prostituting your body (and ‘pornography’ means ‘prostitute-writing’), you “harden the soul.” “Art that ‘objectifies’ the body, removing it from the realm of moral relations, can never capture the true beauty of the human form,” and “the case against pornography is the case against the interest that it serves—the interest in seeing people reduced to their bodies, objectified as animals, made thing-like and obscene.” [2] This in no way prevents ‘realism’ in art, including the presentation of things and persons debased. True, The Waste Land “describes the modern city as a soul-less desert: but it does so with images and allusions that affirms what the city denies.” The city may be debased, but T.S. Eliot did not make it so. Pornography makes it so. So does much recent art, which “cultivates a posture of transgression, matching the ugliness of the things it portrays with an ugliness of its own,” repudiating beauty in the name of prodding us toward social reform of some sort. But what can that reform amount to, if art abandons the standard of beauty? The deployment of ugliness for the sake of social reform imitates non-violently the false promise of state-sponsored terror by the tyrants of the last century: just let us break the eggs and we will surely get an omelet out of them. In the event, the omelet never arrived from the kitchen.
“Our need for beauty is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people.” Reform, yes, but radical reform, probably not. “The experience of beauty…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.” Artful desecration of “the few scant beauties” we find in the world is as much a flight from reality as ‘bourgeois sentimentality’ or complacency. The ‘postmodern’ culture “is a loveless culture, which is afraid of beauty” because such a culture “is disturbed by love.” At this point, Scruton’s argument takes a Tocquevillian turn, as he remarks that egalitarian moral sentiments, seen in the claim that aesthetic standards themselves are wrong because ‘my opinion is just as good as yours’ meets with the impossibility of living “as though there are no aesthetic values,” which is what aesthetic ‘values pluralism’ or relativism effectively imposes. “The desire to desecrate is a desire to turn aesthetic judgment against itself, so that it no longer seems like a judgment of us.” What Tocqueville notices, the clamorousness of an egalitarian culture, whereby each person vies for attention in the sea of equals, leads to “stimulus addiction—the hunger to be shocked, gripped, stirred in whatever way might take us straight to the goal of excitement—which arises from the decoupling of sensory interest from rational thought.” In our pursuit of happiness, we come to misidentify happiness, having habituated ourselves to sensations, instead. “My argument implies that the addiction to effect is the enemy not only of art but also of happiness, and that anybody who cares for the future of humanity should study how to revive the ‘aesthetic education’ as Schiller described it, which has the love of beauty as its goal.” It is (to appropriate an old Marxist phrase) no accident that the word kitsch was coined in the last century by an Austrian troubled by the advance of egalitarianism in European life.
“Kitsch is a mold which settles over the entire works of a living culture, when people prefer the sensuous trappings of belief to the thing truly believed in.” Kitsch embodies the preference for the low to the high. The “kitschification of religion” is idolatry. “Why should God be profaned by idolatry, and why are people tempted by it? Why does God decree the terrible genocidal punishment of the Israelites for what (by modern standards) is the casual peccadillo of dancing before the Golden Calf?” It is because the Israelites attempted to put “a substitute in place of that for which there are no substitutes—the ‘I am that I am’ that is uniquely itself and which must be worshipped for the thing that it is and not as a means to an end that could be achieved in some other way or though some rival deity,” admitting “into the realm of worship the idea of a currency,” whereby one idol can be discarded for another if you’re dissatisfied with the results you’re getting from bowing down before the first one. Idolatry assumes that the ‘god’ works for you. As an American college freshman once complained to his English teacher, “The problem with God in Paradise Lost is that He’s got this holier-than-thou attitude.” As Scruton puts it, “Kitsch is not, in the first instance, an artistic phenomenon, but a disease of faith.”
To flee from kitsch, ‘modern’ art, the anti-representational, anti-mimetic ‘abstract’ art of the twentieth century, turned against beauty itself, the beauty previous artists sought to ‘imitate.’ They instead chose to stride with the ‘cutting edge of History.’ “The paradox, however, is that the relentless pursuit of artistic innovation leads to a cult of nihilism,” as we find ourselves “caught between two forms of sacrilege, the one dealing in sugary dreams”—the “Disneyfication of art,” whereby a cartoon cricket croons us into wishing upon a star instead of praying to God—the “other in savage fantasies.” “Kitsch deprives feeling of its cost and therefore of its reality; desecration augment the cost of feeling and so frightens us away from it.” Both evade “the core of virtue, the origin of meaning and the true theme of high art,” which is self-sacrifice, which occurs wherever real love is. That “the path out of desecration towards the sacred and the sacrificial” is “what beauty teaches us.”
“Everything I have said about beauty implies that it is rationally founded.” Beauty “challenges us to find meaning in its object to make critical comparisons, and to examine our own lives and emotions in the light of what we find.” Beauty takes us beyond “subjective preference” and “transient pleasure.” “For a free being,” a rational being, one who can make choices, “there is right feeling, right experience and right enjoyment just as much as right action” because the judgment of beauty orders he emotions and desires who make it.” The judgment of beauty conduces to what Plato’s Socrates calls a rightly ordered soul. Socrates, in his ironically-intended just regime, banished poets, only to let them back in if they reformed their poetry. Scruton would have us reform ourselves, which may have been what Socrates really wanted.
There may be hope, still. The dust jacket of Beauty features a detail from Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Woman in Profile. I was sitting in an airport, taking a look through the book (given the circumstance, I cannot claim actually to have been reading it), when a three-year-old girl walked over. She gazed at the picture, transfixed, for about thirty seconds—a long time, for her. A smiling mother came to collect her, but not before I had the chance to consider the naturalness of human attraction to beauty.
Note
- On the distinction between images and phantasms, also see Plato: Sophist 236b and following.
- See Harry M. Clor: Obscenity and Public Morality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.
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