Image generated by Gemini.
Just outside my office window, the tulip poplar has shed most of its blooms, and the first green buds mark the tree’s next transition in springtime. It is glorious to behold.
Up to this point, I have drawn from the work of Praxis Circle Contributor Sir Roger Scruton to explore beauty in its artistic, natural, and poetic forms. In these musings, I have wondered how we recognize and comprehend capital “B” Beauty. In this post, I turn my attention to the logic behind judging it. Can there be such an approach to something so seemingly arbitrary?
Discerning Beauty
As I have written before, Scruton explains that our reactions to beauty should not be merely whimsical impulses—they require intentional discernment. Over time, although individuals will differ in matters of preference, by learning about aesthetic qualities we can develop a refined judgement. For Scruton, this sense for aesthetics was fundamental to his life, to becoming human, to building his worldview.
This education and foundation for learning, he writes in Beauty, eventually led him to see “there is a kind of reasoning that has aesthetic judgement as its goal and that this judgement is bound up with the experience of the one who makes it” (page 140). That last part about experience sounds a lot like worldview to me.
More importantly, this goal accounts for differences, sometimes individual and sometimes cultural, in what Scruton calls matters of “taste.” Because human judgment is layered into artistic endeavors, artists may violate or bend rules or standards because “originality and the challenging of orthodoxies are fundamental to the aesthetic enterprise [where] freedom is built into the pursuit of beauty” (page 141). Freedom and beauty tightly interwoven sounds a lot like the divine to me.
According to Scruton, these judgments are not the same for science and art. In science, we have hard, objective truth (e.g., the stone falls to the ground because of gravity), and in art, we may prefer one form, play, poem, or painting over another. However, judging that play, poem, or painting does not require knowing definitively the obdurate truth of, say, gravity; rather, it requires a measure of distance between the work and the viewer and, at the same time, admiration for what can be achieved in works such as the Sistine Chapel or Hamlet.
Pondering Hamlet
It is this last example where I must turn my attention. I have studied, read, and taught Hamlet at different points in my life for almost 30 years, where the prince utters perhaps the most recognizable line of all of Shakespeare: “To be, or not to be, that is the question.”
The play’s famous soliloquy pertains to the consequences of grief as the bereft son Prince Hamlet contemplates suicide to end the pain of losing his father the King. But, the soliloquy also offers several philosophical reflections extending past the immediate emotional condition of a young prince. Shakespeare invites us into this question of existence—perhaps the question—we can apply to almost anything.
Is something “be” (positive) or “not be” (negative)? Is God “be” or “not be”? Is something true or not true? Are our two choices living or annihilation?
When I consider the philosophical implications of this most famous line, Scruton’s explanation cracks open new, hard nuts of understanding. I’ll not devolve into explication of the passage here, but by considering this existential question, perhaps you can see Scruton’s point that to truly judge beauty properly we must go beyond merely reaction to words on a page and instead cultivate a knowledge through disciplined study. (High school students are notorious for immediate reactions, if you get any at all, to Shakespeare. Trust me on that one.)
The Beauty of Philosophy and Logic
There is yet another component of this question, and Scruton goes right after it in our interview:
Here, we land back on logic and philosophy conveyed in art through the Law of Non-Contradiction. Whether we are a bored high school student or Netflix-addled adult, we may not love or even care to read Shakespeare, we can, with just a little bit of thought, see that Shakespeare is asking a fundamental question about life. One where, whether we like it or not, we will confront. Are we “be” or “not be”?
In one way, as Scruton explains, we cannot be both. We cannot be both alive and dead simultaneously. In the same way, a quantity of pencils cannot be two and three or a car cannot be a Ferrari and a Porsche at the same time. However, do we not know people who are both alive and dead at once: believing and following false messages, working in jobs with no fulfillment, living in lifeless relationships?
Behold the magnificence of art beyond the impulse of preference. In one short line of Shakespeare’s longest play, he asks us a question fundamental to our human existence, and with it, we can examine our own worldview to try to answer it.
