The Importance of Everyday Aesthetics
“The perception of beauty is a moral test.”
Write & Lift is an ethos of personal and spiritual development through conscious physical exertion and practice of the writing craft. Through this effort to strengthen our bodies and minds, we become anti-fragile and self-respecting sovereign individuals. Through this effort, we may stand against untruth and evil and create a new culture of vitality, strength, and virtue.
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The Importance of Everyday Aesthetics
The most important function of beauty is to remind us that who we are, what we’ve come from, and what we aspire to be, matters.
This is the elevation of “mere life” into something transcendent. Something truer than true. The striving for beauty is comparable in this way to the pursuit of truth, meaning, and goodness. It is part of our pantheon of highest virtues.
When we trivialize beauty we’re committing a spiritual sin against our past and future self. As Gustav Mahler said:
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
What beautiful things will future generations preserve? What are the value we communicate through bland, utilitarian, and cheap buildings and products?
The utilitarian mindset disdains beauty for three primary reasons:
Beauty is subjective: The utilitarian defends their dislike of real beauty by saying that beauty is subjective; that one can find the same comparable beauty in a concrete slab as they can in the ornamentation on a Gothic Cathedral.
Beauty is wasteful: The utilitarian objects to beauty because it lacks “usefulness”. This is a philosophy guided by a desire to prioritize cheap, fast, replicable, and safe designs that lack any specific identifiable characteristics or feeling.
Beauty is a [insert “privileged identity”] dog-whistle: The utilitarian rightfully understands that beauty makes a statement against something. But because the utilitarian has both a subjective view of human nature, and a lack of respect or admiration for history, transcendent values, or their culture, they are repulsed by the sight of beauty because it stands against their fence-sitting subjectivism.
Like most mental pathologies of the 20th and 21st centuries, those who hate beauty aren’t always conscious of why or how. They have been programmed—for lack of a better metaphor—to find human achievement disgusting. This is not a hard thing to sell.
It’s far easier—in the short term—to distance oneself from personal shortcomings and failures through resentment and hate. If you’re not trying to live a beautiful life, why would you respect beauty? It’s the same attitude of the unsocialized child: “If I can’t have it then nobody else should!”
What’s worse is that this type of person—upon stepping through the doors of a cathedral—might feel an initial sense of awe, but it’s quickly transformed into scathing cynicism:
“It’s crazy that they chose to build this while people were literally dying of hunger...”
We’ve all met someone like this.
At their core, this tendency to reduce beauty to a reductionist and ill-informed “power display” is a sign of severe psychological distress.
The atheist, agnostic, and devoutly religious all share a general consciousness of their spirit. They may differ in the interpretation or recognition of this sense; though none are in doubt it exists when the nameless, spine-chilling awe envelopes them in the presence of beauty.
Like many things, this subconscious feeling provides an intuitive sense of direction. You can listen to it or you can drown it.
We’re all governed by two types of mental software; the conscious and subconscious.
The conscious mind exists in a hurried present state: writing emails, cooking dinner, changing lanes on the freeway.
The subconscious mind is mercurial, inventive, and symbolic. When we close our eyes and breathe we can hear it. It throws fragmented images and ideas into our conscious awareness. It is the map, not the territory. It helps us to form a general image of the world; the first shadow layer of a painting. It is then our conscious mind that fills in the detail, that adds form and structure, that moves us in the direction of action.
In our present observation, we may not consciously understand the value of beauty. It is an abstract concept; born from a symbolic and ancient part of our brain.
At face value, there is no “logic” to beauty. It doesn’t provide us shelter or food.
The desire to create beautiful things is a compulsion to understand the mystery of existence; to represent our values, history, and tradition in the physical form. Our ancestors who painted on cave walls, did so out of an impulse to transcend the struggles of “mere life”. To leave a legacy in stone. To show that they were here and that they saw themselves as caretakers of a specific tradition and culture.
When you see someone who has developed their physique, you see the external manifestation of a value system. This is no different than seeing a beautiful car, building, or product.
A well-behaved child who becomes a minority in a classroom of undisciplined feral troublemakers is prone to mirror bad behavior. If the teacher refuses to set ground rules, establish a code of conduct, or uphold a sense of dignity and responsibility, the subconscious mind becomes a memetic agent.
When our society lacks beauty, we unknowingly filter ourselves into a new code of rules and norms. The craftsman who prides himself on preserving architectural tradition is passed over by potential clients who desire cheap, austere, and “modern” buildings.
The industrial designer who dreams of creating the next iconic car has their ambition throttled by an ever-growing bureaucracy of managers who would rather “appeal to everyone” than take risks.
Our ancestors held beauty in such high regard because it is eternal, it tells a story about who we are, what we value, and what we strive toward.
What legacy will we leave?
Perhaps they will say we were neurotic and anti-human; electing to build cheap concrete and glass boxes of identically designed apartments to protect from the boogeyman of “climate change”.
Perhaps they will say we were conventional and boring; designing products without color or personality, turning time-honored brands into cheap copy-and-paste “modern” lookalikes without a distinctive edge or voice.
Perhaps they will say we were naive and egotistical; attempting in vain to create an aesthetic of the future without respect or regard for those who enabled our exponential technological progress.
As always, thanks for reading.
-Joe
As a painter I resonated so much with your explanation of the conscious and subconscious mind.
This reflection itself is a representation of beauty, as it makes one reflect on the divine. I hope this gets meaningful attention and can change some hearts and minds so that next time someone steps into a majestic cathedral or inspiring art gallery they're a little less cynical and a little more moved to live their life more aesthetically.