‘On Beauty’: In the Eye of the Beholder?
A review of ‘On Beauty’, by Sir Roger Scruton; OUP Oxford, 2009.
It has been suggested that we can predict quite accurately it someone is politically conservative. These people tend to score highly for conscientiousness — ie, orderliness and/or industriousness — on the OCEAN personality test, which sprang from robustly empirical psychological research in the 1980s. And since beauty is an impression of order or ‘fittingness’ — an impression that everything is just as it ought to be — it follows that conservatives, being more orderly, will be more aesthetically minded than their liberal or progressive counterparts.
Consider a beard: not inherently unattractive, but far from beautiful when there is food in it. This is because food does not belong in a beard, and so it registers acutely to those sensitive to disgust (an expression of orderliness) as incongruent. It is not irrelevant to note that the first major works of Burke, Hegel and Schelling, all major conservative thinkers, were on aesthetics, not politics. And given this, it should not surprise you that Sir Roger Scruton, an arch-conservative, was at one point the world’s foremost authority on aesthetics, as well as someone who said conservatism could be boiled down to ‘love of beauty and love of home’ (emphasis mine).
It is not irrelevant to note that the first major works of Burke, Hegel and Schelling, all major conservative thinkers, were on aesthetics, not politics.
But for Scruton, these two nouns are not so neatly separated. In his primer on the subject, Sir Roger Scruton argues they the main purpose of beauty is to elicit a sense of being at home in the world: of being safe and comfortable, of belonging. Beauty, for Scruton, lifts our experience above and beyond the ordinary, dignifying it and imbuing the mundane with meaning and purpose — transforming the prosaic, if you like, into the poetic. True beauty cannot be faked, for it elicits what Michael Oakeshott called the ‘contemplative mode’: a sense of wonder, admiration, and a desire to stay right where we are. We have all had this experience. The first time I saw, in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, Thomas Couture’s The Decadence of the Romans at the Height of the Empire, I did not move for over an hour. But we do try to fake beauty, and fake and superficial beauty is what we call ‘kitsch’. It appeals to the lowest common denominator of taste, offering an easy, shallow emotional response. Consider Christmas songs.
Beauty is linked to those other, elusive classical virtues, goodness and truth; but unlike them, it can be deceiving and even do us harm. Beauty can hide or glorify wrongdoing (and in fact Wilde suggests in his Picture of Dorian Gray that an excessive concern for beauty inevitably leads to moral decay). The role of art, for Scruton, is to bind the beautiful and the moral, ennobling what is good by clothing it in lovely colours. The artist, in doing so, inspires reflection and empathy and a more profound understanding of the human condition. It is not for nothing that religious traditions have always paid great attention to (and, in the West, patronised) art and architecture. (I have a gorgeous coffee-table book called Catholica, which concerns the visual culture of Catholicism, from the 17th century Guido Reni’s ‘Archangel Michael tramples Satan’, which is on display in the Capuchin church of Santa Maria della Concezione in Rome, to Valentino’s stunning ‘Adam and Eve in Paradise’ evening dress from the Spring/Summer 2014 collection. What I would give to own that dress.)
The role of art, for Scruton, is to bind the beautiful and the moral, ennobling what is good by clothing it in lovely colours.
One thread that runs implicitly through all of this — it would not be a work of Scruton if it didn’t — is that modern culture denies, dismisses and mocks beauty. It does this first, by the exalting functionality, utility and transient trends over enduring aesthetic values. (Iain McGilchrist would say this is typical of a left-hemispheric way of thinking.) It is in part on account of this cultural movement away from beauty, Scruton says, that life feels so empty and shallow for people who, in absolute terms, are healthier, richer and freer (in the negative sense of liberty) than ever. For Scruton, modern culture also denies the soundness of tradition, which transmits aesthetic standards, values and practices. Through tradition, a society not only holds on to what is hard to justify in purely rationalistic terms, but maintains a common ideal of beauty that supports common understanding and critical engagement. In its absence, art appreciation risks becoming an elite activity, since most of us will find ourselves lacking a framework within which to comprehend whatever falls outside our artistic inheritance.
Beauty, like truth and goodness, is difficult to write about. Wittgenstein believed there were aspects of human experience that lay beyond language, writing, at the end of his Logico-Tractatus, that ‘whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’. Scruton does a very impressive job, therefore, of finding a way to exploring something that, ultimately, we cannot discuss. And he does it in a clear and elegant prose style that serves as proof of one of his own arguments: that by binding beauty to content — moral or otherwise — we make that content more meaningful, more wondrous, more engaging, more calming, and, at the last, more conducive to understanding.
