Scriptorium Daily
The educated man who understands beauty and the different manifestations of it can develop appropriate desires. He can learn that this jewelry is beautiful, but beautiful in a way that should provoke an appropriate response. His thinking it is beautiful is not wrong; he is just misapprehending it as the sort of beauty that he should own.
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If an inappropriate desire is caused by subjective beauty, then people’s opinions about what is beautiful are part of the “problem.” Society tries to control certain unacceptable manifestations of desire, but the desire will keep coming back because the beauty that provokes it is really there. Ignorance of the nature of beauty and how to handle it will undercut any attempt to deal with it well.
Instead of learning about beauty, we learn about avoiding personal behaviors that can give offense. Beauty, if it is objective, never changes from culture to culture, but what gives offense (even gross offense) can change from day to day or person to person! This ends in terrifying legalism not liberty since there is no “real standard” to impose.
Aesthetic discussions regarding clothing are an example of where things have gone wrong. Instead of beauty, the focus weirdly becomes modesty . . . keeping people from “stumbling” as a result of attire.
In my own life, I realized that I was hostile to considering objective beauty because I feared it would lead to the forced wearing of Mormon prom dresses by my date, would mandate listening to ugly but wholesome Christian music, and uplifting but hideous art. After discussing it, I realized that the eye-rolling college students thought that “objective beauty” was just a philosopher’s way of getting ready to talk about modesty or bad ideas in their music! (more)
