Wanderings for the Aesthetically Inclined

Well, thank-you Jacob Marshall for giving one of my passions a single word description: aesthetics. Friday night I had one of the most amazing conversations of my life talking to/mostly listening to Jacob talk about his band, MAE (MAE stands for multisensory aesthetic experience), and his graduate studies in aesthetics at Old Dominion. Now, i've talked with Jacob before, but never at such a length where I was able to grasp the fulness of what his words suggested. Moving forward from this conversation, I stand in wonder at the depth of understanding that comes when one contemplates the aesthetic realm.

Here’s an excerpt from a Wikipedia entry that defines and discusses aesthetics:
“Aesthetics or esthetics (also spelled æsthetics) is commonly known as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste. More broadly, scholars in the field define aesthetics as "critical reflection on art, culture and nature." Aesthetics is a subdiscipline of axiology, a branch of philosophy, and is closely associated with the philosophy of art. Aesthetics studies new ways of seeing and of perceiving the world.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetic)

What do aesthetics point us towards? Meaning. When we define something as beautiful, we are assigning it with meaning. This is not something to be taken lightly. By assigning objects, places, people with meaning we are alluding to the fact that everything is not chaos, and further that there is a reason behind the order-a painter behind the painting. Calling a sunset, with exuberant nectarine or violet colored hues, beautiful is an extension of the power of meaning. And such meaning is not always relative; one man’s trash is not always another man’s treasure. Take, for instance, the polluted lake with oil spills from a nearby plant and trash floating around on top. Most would find anyone who called such a thing “beautiful,” or even took the courage to swim around in the murky waters, crazy. In a world where many claim, in the midst of postmodern glory, that up can be down and right can be wrong what do we do with beauty? As aesthetics author Dabney Townsend has put it, “if 'beauty' is only an expression of preference, it is hard to see why we should continue to speak about beauty at all."

What would you rather look at for 24 hours straight: a skeleton encased with decaying human flesh or a colorful portrait of children playing in a field full of dandelions? I think most would choose the latter. The fact that we would more likely choose the latter than the former suggests that beauty is more than an opinion; it also speaks of truth. While we all see the world a little differently, with sometimes opposing sets of lenses and life stories, and thus have different preferences, experiences of beauty are unexplainable apart from the existence of truth. Where does this word beauty come from apart from meaning, apart from saying that life is more than chance and human existence more than accident or even mere evolution?

When we think about the word beauty what comes to mind? For me, I think about extending and invigorating the human imagination, naming and being named, weaving golden threads into the tapestry of life. Bringing beauty into dark places by speaking truth into the void through image, text, and sound, is a great and glorious thing. It points people towards the fact that there is meaning, that there is truth, that there is justice. Meanwhile, seeing something beautiful and naming it as such, reminds us too that brokenness, pain, and suffering are all realities, not mere illusions. Where there is beautiful, there must also be ugly. We know beautiful because we've seen the ugly, ironic though it may be.

So what do we do with all of this? How do we live in a world where beauty and pain coexist? First, we must acknowledge that beauty and pain are not synonymous and can’t come from the same source. If we don’t acknowledge this much, then we might as well despair and “eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.” As someone who deeply appreciates beauty, I simply can’t draw this conclusion. The more beauty and pain I experience as life goes on, I know more and more within my being that this simply is not true. Defining rape as love, or dark as light just doesn’t make sense. We must acknowledge that truth exists and so what is its source? We must also acknowledge that brokenness exists and what is its source?

Further, let’s go ahead and say that beauty is a good thing, and thus that creativity matters. I think most would feel comfortable with this supposition as a frame of reference. So, given that beauty is real, beauty matters. How, then, do we bring rays of light and beacons of hope into the shattered empty corners of human existence? Supposing there is more to life than living in the cave of darkness (to think back on philosopher Plato’s allegory of the cave), that such a thing as sunlight exists outside and real images cast the shadows we see on the wall-that a broader fuller world of meaning and existence awaits our encounter-how then should we live?

More, certainly, to come...