And while the essence of Scruton’s message is effectively communicated, the result is a documentary that is as much about Beauty- as it is about ugliness. At its best, it can arouse interest in investigating the “matter” of beauty a little further, but at its worst, it can leave the viewer with only a tragic sense of what is lost and irrecoverable. But how did we end up here? If Scruton, one of the best intellectuals of the conservative right, cannot lead us back to an original sense of Beauty, how are we ever expected to find this way on our own? Could there be some hidden resource that we could pull straight out of modernity itself, one that could offer us a glimpse of what is lost? This article claims to provide an original idea to the affirmative. But to begin by trying to answer the first of these questions, we need to think seriously about what the modern world really is. What are its hidden premises? Is it unspoken metaphysics? According to the dominant view of modern-day academia, all values, including beauty, are relative, as they are but a function of a particular time and place in history. This “historicism,” as this view is now called, will likely present the advent of modernity as inevitable: the end product of mostly random series of historical events. But that is not necessarily so. Because historicism itself has a history, and its ideas must, therefore, also be the product of a particular historical time, which is no other, of course, than the modern world they are trying to explain. To get out of this mental loop, therefore, and get a more unobstructed view of what is going on with modernity, we must step outside its historical horizon and look at our unique moment in history from a vantage point beyond it, namely, the ancient world, where Beauty had the original power that Scruton tried to communicate.

Seen through this prism, the modern world is premised on a refutation of the ancient worldview. This definition can be narrowed to a simple yet curious fact: the denial of eternity. Religion, so dominant among the ancients, was nothing but an expression, a personification even, of a more foundational concept, that of eternity. Man, according to the Greeks, was a being that was unique among others because it strived for its own perfection and could only be rightly understood in relation to that perfection. What Aristotle called “telos,” the natural end of Man, was seen as the only reference point that could explain man’s current and imperfect state. Man, therefore, was to be understood by what made him unique among the animals, his natural orientation towards perfection. Following this point, Beauty was identified by Plato as the natural instinct of the human soul that sought this perfection in the forms of time. The ancient world then was nothing if not a reference to eternity. And it’s precisely this reference that the modern world refuted, while the sciences that developed in its wake can be understood as an effort to find a new one.

And find it they did! But this “discovery” was premised on a total inversion of the ancient worldview. From this moment forward, Man was not to be explained as being “pulled” towards his ultimate goal but “pushed” by his lowest and most basic needs: his instincts and fears, his sex drive and hunger for power. In the realm of biology, this view was incarnated most visibly by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, where, for the first time in history, Man was explained not by what is different but by what is common between him and other animals. After Man’s outer form was explained successfully through Darwin’s evolution, Freud’s psychoanalysis continued with Man’s inner nature, and by following the same rules of thumb: explain the higher in terms of the lower, the drive for sex. This project of modernity came hand-in-hand with the radical egalitarianism of classical liberalism. If Man’s true nature is identified with those parts that all individuals share in common with each other, then Man’s true nature is one of absolute equality. Darwin and Freud later became the two ends of a pinch that squeezed out the ancient notion of Man as the transient being that strives towards eternity, explaining us… by explaining us away.  We can keep insisting that a white canvas exhibited as a work of art is absurd, but this is the result of ideas set in motion centuries ago. We are the children of a revolution that we were never taught at school, which barely touched our universities. And so, we never really understood the hidden assumptions of that revolution. Because if all truth is historical, subject to the material conditions that create it, following this premise to its natural conclusion, there must be at least one truth that escaped from this condition: the truth that states that “all truth is historical.” This truth, then, must be some “final” reality that will inevitably bring about a “final” culture… which is the much-prophesied “end of history.”

So now, let’s accept modernity at face value and repeat its basic premises. If modernity is built on a refutation of the ancient world, a denial of eternity, of which Beauty was the royal road, and if modernity has arrived at last at some “final truth,” the truth that all values are subjective. Then, at the end of its history, modernity must resemble a “perfect negative” of the ancient world. The shape that the modern world will take at the end of history will be a perfect “cast” of the statue that was the ancient world, and through it, we will get a proper reference to what has been lost: the sublime experience of Beauty. And so, maybe Scruton was right all along. Having traveled so far into modernity, maybe the key to restoring a sense of Beauty has to pass through its opposite. In the years following the documentary’s release, things have been moving fast towards an “end of history” that seems to follow the modernist agenda on every conceivable level: cultural, aesthetic, moral, and spiritual. Many of us feel that a cultural battle has already been lost. A campaign we were never summoned to. Some believe that what is truly needed is a complete return to a moment when the values and beliefs we hold dear become the norm. But as impossible as it is, even if that were to happen, would it not recreate the conditions that brought these values down in the first place? Yet, we cannot remain passive. Whatever is approaching us (and things are now moving at increasing speed), we cannot reverse it, and we cannot avoid it somehow; we have to go through it. And just like in Dante’s Inferno, at the lowest point of Hell, we will begin to get a glimpse of Heaven and once again see the stars.

The post Will Beauty Save the World? the most unlikely of solutions appeared first on The Miskatonian.

Perhaps constant accessibility to things makes them less deep and less impactful, but an artist´s eye cannot be so easily accessed, given, of course, that he is honest about his work. But what does artistic honesty mean? It could simply mean taking the time to express something from within, making the process private and non-dependant on the clichés of the time.

Beauty, therefore, can only be expressed from the depths of one´s internal workshop. In contrast, external mundane reality simply expresses a certain aesthetic form susceptible to change according to different cultural transformations. Without the inspired words of a poet, a flower remains a piece of botanical study, which may appear pretty to the commoner´s eye but is unable to hold transcendence beyond its very existence. A poet shall look within himself to convey the words necessary to exalt a particular aspect of his reality. This process is in itself private and therefore self-affirming.  A form of I am that which I am that soothes the artist from the alienations of mundane life, at least for a short while.

Beauty is developed through an internal workshop that may be influenced by the mundane, but that chooses to transform the mundane and shape it by its own divine right. Artistic beauty is, therefore, born from the privacy of the subject´s mind, something stemming from existential loneliness and quietude. Even if it’s a scenic performance, such a performance which may appear noisy and outwardly in nature, such as a rock concert, for instance, was initially thought of as brewed within the depths of a musician´s creativity, from the songwriting of a lyricist, and in some more sophisticated cases, from the scenic direction of a choreographer.

Just like the photographer had to deliberately focus his attention on a certain image and later on edit it, crop it, and shape it according to his sensitivity, so does the scenic artist need to develop a personal, intimate relationship with sound, script, music, and space itself. It is, above all, an internal action which later on exteriorizes itself. The process of exteriorization of the private sphere can very well corrupt the initial internal image, which is probably one of the artist’s biggest fears, hence leading to the so typical artistic neurosis.

However, the quality of the final delivery has more to do with craftmanship in each discipline, and that is a whole different subject. Much has been written and commented on about the quality and influence of each artistic discipline, but not that much about the spiritual and psychological processes the individual must undergo in order to deliver. As mentioned before, loneliness and isolation are necessary for beauty to be internalized within the artist´s soul. This explains the typical tortured souls found in the art world.

The essence of beauty is the notion that what is typically found is not enough; homogeneity needs to be broken; even if the center of attention is something about mundane life, the interiorization of such stimulus must be done in a fashion similar to a prolonged trance that allows the subject to dwell deep into the many possible variables. If creation ex nihilo, this is, the notion of creating out of nowhere is possible; that is a question for another debate.

But what seems certain is that the exploration that leads to the expression of beauty happens in uncharted, unknown, and intimate dimensions. With the prevalence of social media, the focus has been placed much more heavily on the final, ready-for-delivery product than on the importance of the process itself. The need to keep up with the insatiable demands of digital marketing transforms the artistic endeavor into a sweatshop type of work rather than an actual exploration of the unknown.

It is, however, still possible for contemporary artists to harness the speed of the world wide web and use it as a channelling tool to make the beauty exteriorization process smoother. But in order to attain this the focus must be placed upon the process above all: privacy must be held holy so beauty shall reign supreme.

The post Why Privacy Needs to be Held Holy so Beauty can Reign Supreme appeared first on The Miskatonian.