On Beauty and Being Just
Elaine Scarry goes a long way to explaining why we should get back to aesthetics in education. She gives a fairly accurate account of how we have killed the search for beauty. I would personally blame the movementeers for this kind of treason.
We can fight all day long about beauty and subjectivity but if you want to have that discussion with me just bugger off. I have no time for boring nihilism. My argument would be that each person's subjective view is capable of finding Beauty, that is because the idea of the beautiful is universally present.
We walk along. Something grabs our attention. It puts us in a different state. We are enraptured. We are at this moment connected to something eternal. Something greater than ourselves. We cannot place it. But I call it beauty.
That is my understanding of 'the beautiful' in as concise an explanation as possible. With beauty we have connected other ambiguous terms: truth, justice, the sublime. We can find a place beautiful, a face beautiful, a poem beautiful, a song, the sun, a scenery... We never run out of places to find the beautiful. Why, then, have we stopped appreciating it?
The movementeers arrived and robbed us of aesthetics. They wanted instead to focus on gender, race, class distinction. What about the beautiful? That's my question. What about the eternal appeal of great works of art? Can't we appreciate the beautiful while acknowledging the validity of movements? I certainly choose to study beauty over movements but that is in direct reaction to passing through the education system's movementeer-guided digestive tract. I would pursue beauty with less hostility but our training institutes (read: Universities) have jaded me.
Scarry reminds us that the beautiful still matters. I would argue that through 'the beauty' we matter.
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