Dr. Roger Scruton: Beauty and Desecration

I'm going to speak for about I think 45 minutes and around the general topic of beauty and the questions that worry us today just what is the role of beauty in the life that is growing around us how do we distinguish it from its its fake imitations and how do we defend it against the surrounding culture so just to say a few general philosophical things to begin with about why Beauty matters we live in a world in which utilitarian values not just triumphant but for many people the only values that there are that there seems to be no no sense that things can have a value which is not a form of use and this means that all of us are engaged all the time in what some philosophers called instrumental reasoning whenever we're asked to justify something we try and find a purpose for it we say that you know justify for instance the shape of this room you know you're justified in terms of its purpose and which is to gather people together to listen to a lecture and if it's not very efficient at that then the room has not actually achieved what it set out to achieve and in all our activities we were familiar with with this kind of reasoning but the question is yeah what other kinds of reasoning are there or is it or is that the only kind well you are we know perfectly well that it can't be the only kind because if things if something as a means to an end there has to be an end that it's a means to and that too needs a justification so we do reason with each other probably rather insecurely but nevertheless we do reason about the ends of activity what our goals are and whether we should be pursuing the goals that we pursue and this is especially true in these activities like building building a room like this or setting out on a career and so on in which there is a long term project involved and an end point that you can't very clearly envisage you know the one you set out to build something you can't clearly envisage the end point just buy from it from a ground plan or whatever you need some conception of not just how what it will look like but what it would be like to live with it and only if you know what it's like to live with it will you be justified in building it there is a simple example of an activity in which aesthetic reasoning is fundamental one reason why modern architecture is such a failure is that people don't do this they don't try and envisage what it's like to live with the product of their building only what what it what its capacity is for the number of people assigned to it and so on and so but reasoning about what it's like to live with something means bringing the end of your activity forward into the present so that you sense its being as it were with you in the moment where you are and that is one of the one of the roles of beauty in our life and an aesthetic judgment to do that now in another area of course we we argue about about our ends from a religious point of view with we know that you know that people have this conception of the of the meaning of life as lying in some way beyond life either in the transcendental or in the afterlife or whatever and that this meaning is sometimes revealed in the present moment moments which people are happy to describe as sacred the moment of liturgy and worship at the moment of Revelation reading a sacred text and so on perhaps being blessed with that experience with the prayer-book and said Paul described as the peace that passeth understanding well that's a very powerful emotion and powerful experience if you can obtain it but of course we live in a world where not everybody does obtain it or even seek for it and increasingly the surrounding culture either ignores that sort of thing or denigrates it so it's very difficult to explain to people who are immersed in the secular culture today exactly how you would think about justifying the ends of existence and not just the means we need some other some other notion of the real presence the real presence in our life of the meaning of things if we are able to if we're going to be able to justify to others who are skeptical exactly what it is that we want them to do and I think this is our situation today here is a picture a landscape by Renoir though there's no particular reason for me to have chosen this landscape and all landscapes are presented on PowerPoint are hopeless anyway because I don't know how big that is up there but anyways as you as you know it's backlit and and it doesn't contain the texture of the paint and certainly not that of the canvas still you see in that particular artists attempt not just to present a little bit of of LED rousseff house which everybody loves but also to make you love it too and so you know whatever whatever goes on in that landscape it's imbued with a sense of peace and order and takes from the surrounding colors the vitality that makes life meaningful but Renoir like other Impressionists painted a world to which we belong and belonging is that all important aspect of human experience not everybody has it and of course our jails are full of the people who don't but most people in this room I imagine got here without criminal offenses and feel that they do instinctively belong in the world and are in the business of trying to make that belonging more rooted more more permanent and more whelmed together with coexistence with their fellows and that of course is part of what education is about and that's what you see of course in that beautiful landscape by Renoir I paint a painting of ordinary trees and fruit trees and to ordinary an ordinary mountain in the distance and so on but painting it all as part of a world to which we belong and for him for Renoir and for his contemporaries it is a post religious world but they were very much people of their time who were skeptical about religion and in any case regarded it as their duty as painters to show that at least this world not the next that matters is quite hard to pep to paint the next world as you can imagine it has been done in words by by Dante and a few painters have tried to follow him but for the most part it has been a failure but nevertheless our world is not that bad it is imbued with its own tranquility and that tranquility can reside in the person perception itself that's what when I was telling us he said look you say it stop stand still look and in that perception you will see that this thing in front of you has a meaning all of its own a meaning which justifies you being in it and reminds you that you belong to it so there's a moment of lack of standing still that we all can achieve and of letting the the other nurse of the world dawn on us its sense of being something other than me not just imagined by me but there in front of me and including me nevertheless when painters do this the paint painters of modern life as Baudelaire called them they don't behave as photographers behave and this is something which is very difficult to explain to people these days because everybody goes around with this criminal object in their pockets immortalizing the ephemera of their existence and as a result desecrating it with their own trivial perceptions no no I wasn't doing anything like that at all he wasn't pointing a camera at this landscape maybe the landscape didn't entirely look like that he was trying to extract from it what it means and what it means not just from the perceptual point of view but also spiritually now we have a liver at a time where as we know there is much ugliness around us a much desecration in many ways a deliberate making ugly of things or a carelessness as to whether things should be ugly or beautiful and many things that we regard as beautiful we discover to be desecrated not just by the way we treat them but but also by the works of art which are supposed to celebrate them and we know this obviously from our experience of the human form the human form is all important to us because it's the primary locus of meaning it's the thing that means most to us in the world the human face and the human body come before us imbued with the life of the Spirit but we can also as we know desecrate them as they are desecrated by pornography and thing and such things which turn to put the in attacker away it turns the subject into an object and being turned into an object is essentially to lose one's spiritual value now part of what lies behind this is I think a growing obsession with power power is the the great commodity that is as it were transferred from person to person in the world that we're creating and many people would say look here here is old Scruton up in front of an audience enjoying his power you are transferring to me that power the power to hold your attention and to infect you with my reactionary attitudes and this this power is something which I have not yet justified to you and many people are many scholars influenced by people like Foucault will say that I couldn't justify it the institution is structured by domination and I'm enjoying that domination and triumphing over you the victims who are sitting before me now you don't actually believe that because you know that you're sitting there willingly but nevertheless you can read ascribe the whole of the world in that way you could take the most innocent thing you know the love of a mother for a child or a child for the mother you know there's power in that - if they weren't that mother couldn't protect the child and yet that's it's not the power aspect of it that is important it's the love aspect but all all our loves create powers and in all the things that matter to us most there is that element of power the tranquility that that Renoir is trying to put across to us in that painting you know the many of the literary and and artistic critics today would ask the question what does this tranquility conceal who is using it who is gaining who is losing and you can imagine the text in modern language review which will analyze that painting and persuade you or try to persuade to you that it is there as part of the of the hegemony of the bourgeois class representing nature as a place for that endorses it's comfortable and relaxing attitudes excluding the truth about that about labor which went into creating those fruit trees in the first place in other words legitimizing the power of the of the French bourgeoisie over the French proletariat you know and in that way but Renoir becomes part of the ideology which is being imposed upon us by our Western culture and we need to liberate the the oppressed - the victim from beneath this ideology and the victim of course will turn out to be whoever where the current obsession is probably working-class women in this particular case so you know when you start thinking like that nothing seems to be not as it seems everything that is as though there's a reality behind everything and that reality is the power that people exercised over each other and that's why beauty is a kind of deception because it's always concealing those real relations between people within which one or one person or one group and has dominion over another but of course for the impressionist painters that's all their nonsense for them seeming is everything that of what when I was trying to do in that painting is to remind you of something which you would otherwise not notice namely that the world does seem in a certain way to you and that's what it really really is the in other words how it comes across to you in your immediate perception when you stop all the instrumental reasoning forget all the powers and the and the projects and just look and but because of this obsession with power people do wipe away the face of the world so that the way things seem is no longer available to us and that means that beauty is no longer available to us either here's an example of some of the work of art if you can call it that which is created by two brothers it's quite normal now in products that the British art schools for people to do joint works of art like this you know because that way you get a get rid of the romantic idea of the artistic genius who's got something special to say you know you've got you're doing it together with someone else and of course the purpose in this case is to whatever the purpose is I mean the purpose is to make the human body repulsive into a kind of liquid standing and in in these childish Mary Jane shoes and with all the parts deformed penis instead of nose and things like that you know what it's point is is of course can only be understood if you realize that that these boys were brought up in a an art school which tells them that the purpose of art is not to beautify life in no way to replace the sacred moments that religion might have given us in no way to give you a sense of the meaningfulness of things but on the country to deconstruct those things to show that life is essentially meaningless and you can the best do this by taking the human body and making it repulsive and of course we all know of Tracy Emmons famous bed last changed hands at two million pounds in which she presented well her bed after she had got out of it of course and with all the debris of her night's dissipation lying on the carpet around it and there it is and it's in Tate Modern gallery now it's permanent resting place although of course those feats are going to rot away quicker than most sheets do I want to just contrast it with with another bed which I I mentioned this in the film that I made about this this is Dilek was bed don't acquire as you know is a great French painter from the Romantic period who was also a highly learned and interested cultural figure perhaps one of the you know one of the greatest of the 19th century cultural figures in France say hey here is his bed this isn't an actual bed of course this is a painting of a bed in painting it he has tried to who were transfer into the bed some of his sense of the value of lying in it and being the thing that was in it and also what it meant to wrestle with the sheets in that way and if you comparison a comparison of these two does help you I think to understand a little bit about what's gone wrong with with the arch de Tracy a means bed it presents itself but obviously nothing beyond itself it just is there Delacroix's bird presents something other than itself it's it's a life that's been translated into those fabrics a perpetuation in another form of a spiritual wrestling which we know from Delacroix's life and his other paintings that wrestling with fabric and with the with the reality of the flexibility of this world and the attempt so impose upon it a meaningful human form if you like a testimony to the spiritual life with which we invest all the objects that were in touch with or at least was he did so he was looking for a kind of harmony order even a kind of redemption in the shape of those those sheets as he's searching for the trace left in them by the spirit which will be a meaning beyond the present moment so here we're talking about her difference between the attempt to represent life which which is also a Transfiguration of life into something into a permanent record of the spirit and the mere debris of a life and I think this is something that the once you see it you realize that that the only the first of those is a genuine artistic activity however we've entered this period in our history where where our dienes has become a kind of cult but not ugliness as such but more transgressive ugliness like those melted together human figures of the Chapman brothers it's an ugliness that pollutes or man negates some familiar ideal or value now a transgression is something which also has a certain appeal you know especially to obviously to younger people it's an act of self affirmation that frees itself from judgment it says you know the transgressive gesture is one that says I don't actually care whether you judge me or not I'm gonna do it and I'm gonna affirm myself against your judgement and that is in itself of liberation so people and I think we've seen this in every sphere of human endeavor since the 1960's the the assumption of a freedom to offend a freedom to annihilate other people's vision of what matters and to show that the values by which other people live don't count for you and that's something staged which obviously all of us have to go through at certain points in our lives we have to fight against our parents fight against institutions fight against the people who seem to be preventing us from being what we truly are and going out into the world and claiming it as our own and in the normal run of things that's not a particularly bad thing to do because after all once you're out there in there in the big world feeling the winds of change around you you realize that you are actually on your own and it was a terrible mistake to be so offensive to the people people you need and and gradually you work your way back to them you reassume possession of them and their view and you're reconciled and forgiving like as in the famous parable of the prodigal son so there's a paradox in this position of assuming a freedom to offend it's only because other people whose values count for you that you can be exhilarated by defying them or disavowing their ideals and so on and but nevertheless this is certainly what artists as a certain stage did de Kooning was a I guess a paradigm at this he's an artist who I think has largely been seen through now but in accepting America and the reason why he has not been seen through in America is a lot of money has been spent on his pictures so that museums art critics and private owners conspire together to make sure that they're not going to lose that two million dollars that they spend on this you know if you can keep the values up your museum is still worth what what the what you've invested in it but this is this is just called woman and it's his representation of the of what a woman fundamentally is you know all those ideals of womanhood which you might have entertained in your self-deceiving moments are of not as nothing compared with this representation here is another instance of this kind of way of approaching our ideals rusalka some of you may know this great opera by von Schaack which tells the the famous story of Ondine the the water nymph roussel carryin in check who who falls in love with a with a immortal and it's a beautiful romantic story but not only about the mystery of woman but also about the importance of chastity and purity in create in preparing a woman for love and the danger in which she is put by that and of course this is symbolized by the fact that there she is living in the water if she comes out of it you know is that the end of her and if she attempts the the mortal into the water is at the end of him etc and this story has been told many many times but never as well as by Dvorak and this is the production that Covent Garden London's offered made of the of that opera in which rusalka the water nymph the pure water nymph who who dreams of a of an erotic relation which no water nymph is allowed turns into its turn into a prostitute and the water is in the bath in which he is lying expecting the stream of lovers of which to whom for reasons that can't be explained she sings an aria to the to the moon so now that's that's a very ordinary occurrence in in opera productions today and that's simply one example the idea in so many opera producers mind when you have a romantic fairytale like that is of course to desecrate it as if you can and also bring in sex violence all the usual stuff in order that that audience which you've got trapped there more resilience of ordinary decent middle-class people who spend a couple hundred dollars for the ticket you know that you can really give them a hard time you're never going to get them there in any other way because they came for this beautiful romantic legend and they won't come again but you've got them anyway for a couple of hours so and this is the way in which our productions tend to go now right so why did they all this come about and I think we can't understand it this this great movement to desecrate works of art like that if we don't attend a little bit to the phenomenon of kish and the distrust of beauty that arose because of kitsch now in the Romantic movement which arose in the as you know in the end of the 18th century and dominated all of art through the 19th century the in the Romantic movement there was a kind of movement away from beauty anyway that that the home the homely sort of beauties that appeal to to ordinary people which don't seem to threaten them and so on there was a movement towards the sublime presenting great tragedies rather than than sweet fairy tales emphasizing the difficulties of human life the difficulty of emerging from a life of oppression and so on and we have many great works of romantic art which focus on these fairly negative aspects of the human condition but trying to find beauty in them nevertheless all this epitomized in Baudelaires famous poem to beauty which I recommend used to read in Fleur du mal so that there was a movement away from the beautiful and at the same time a fear of the sweetness of Beauty can bring into our lives isn't there a kind of deception involved in that if life really is as as bad as we all know it to be isn't art deceiving us by trying to make us accept it and find sweetness and consolation in it maybe there is no sweetness and consolation maybe art should have another role that of showing the truth to people who wouldn't otherwise be able to to perceive it and that if if our concentrates on beauty isn't it just going to degenerate into a form of lying or form of faking things and I'll give you a contrast here between two Venus's well everybody knows Botticelli's Venus who so detached from the world and I would contrast him with Venus by Brujo Brujo being a famous salon painter of the of the 19th century in France who was a wonderfully accomplished painter in the style of ank but a quite a question mark inevitably is placed over him because of this sweetness and and gentleness and also the perfection of everything he did which seemed to many people to be a kind of lying and Baudelaire expressed he defended many against Bouguereau because many was telling us showing us life as it is without any of this cloying sweetness so now you all know and Botticelli's Venus not an easy way to show it but in that face you see a particular conception of what the erotic is Botticelli was a platanus who believed as Plato did that beauty is an object of desire but it's also a gateway to the transcendental that that you you understand what beauty really is if you follow through that gateway leave behind your earthly desires and unite with the spiritual condition from which they originally spring and this face for him was not an object of sexual desire but an object of a sexual desire that had been transcended she was Simonetta Vespucci who is mistress of his of his Prince Lorenzo de Medici and therefore unobtainable anyway but if the thought is in this Venus is the symbol of the erotic as Plato conceived it something to be transcended into the spiritual bukoza Birth of Venus as you see it's all perfection of form everything but it doesn't mean anything that you know that there she is you're sniffing her freshly shaven armpit waiting waiting for the lover who's going to come through the bathroom door and obviously help to get rid of the company meanwhile but she's so you know so perfectly monaster of color and form and everything but somehow the sentiment is fake it isn't a real Venus this is this is sexuality in its ordinary vulgar form without any of that attempt to show the meaning of it and its reflection in the transcendental this is something just so you realize that desecration takes many forms but if we worry about Kitsch which which all painters and all artists today do and what what do we do about it there's two ways of dealing with it roughly first is to try and find a way of producing real art that's not Kitsch and that's that really hard thing to do something that producing art that doesn't have this fake character isn't just a childish and and Christmas like you know it isn't a Christmas decoration or you can do what Jeff Koons does which is produced something which is so obviously kitsch that nobody could ever accuse you of it we said you know of course like you know he's saying cause this is this is case where it's such obvious kitchen that I must be making another and deeper point by putting it there nobody's ever discovered what that deeper point is but there it is desecrating a beautiful classical facade and you know probably for her many years to come I said the causes of all this go this situation which we find ourselves go deep we we have acquired this distrust of beauty or many people have many artists have acquired the distrust of beauty because it is an invitation into realms that have been mined you know that there are traps here you might fall into the trap of Booga hole however beautiful your human figures they turn out in the end just to be the standard Christmas Card porn but or something like that that the the reality slips away from you and and you're left with just with this this fake so people artists have come to distrust beauty and I think you all know this from modern cinema and much modern music as well that there is an attempt often to show that you're a genuine artist by producing something that nobody could possibly like because then you must you must be serious and there are consolations also of ugliness as we see in the consolations of showing that that in some way life doesn't matter anyway and that's what that's the meaning of chat that Chapman brothers sculpture life is simply a nothingness we happen to have been born we will die and and decay and disappear and so what and there's a charm in that kind of view a charm which I I call the charm of disenchantment that being disenchanted with things gives you a kind of glamour you know if you go around the room of people who are who are going oh and are in with this kind of fake enchantment about kids then you're being disenchanted gives you a kind of distinction and I think many artists as it were aspire to that distinction of not being taken in by anything so to speak and not not being Dubes to the surrounding culture and the surrounding values and this this added to this there is a desire perhaps to desecrate those those values as well putting graffiti on things or a mustache on the Mona Lisa etc and I think when when that moustache was first put on the Mona Lisa by Marcel Duchamp you know you could see what he was doing he was saying yes yes yes but I've we've gone beyond that s all nonsense you you might be taken in by that but I'm not but essentially since ever since that gesture which was made a hundred years ago the majority of art that we've come across at least from the art schools has been a matter of putting another mustache on the Mona Lisa I know and of course their question automatically arises as to whether whether it's any point in doing it twice let alone a thousand times so but the the thought behind all this is that we've asked too much of art we've asked it to to be a religion substitutes to be the light from and the window onto the transcendental and if it disappoints us in that then we beget we start becoming in certain way angry with it disappointment turns to repudiation puts so what is the mission of art then is there a mission that we can still maintain now I I believe that we all do have a need for redemption I don't mean that necessarily in the religious sense I mean that we need action gestures our plans and projects to have a fulfillment of some kind to lift us out of the day-to-day appetites that otherwise swallow us and all our actions aim towards us they aim beyond themselves to a point of rest in which we can look back and endorse what we have done and this is so obviously the case with human relations especially love relations but it's there in all our lives and a life without this and without ideals gets tired of itself and people when people set out on the path of transgression it's partly because they've become disappointed with the possibility of actually achieving this sort of redemption but where then what where then does beauty fit into it into this and what can it actually do by way of satisfying this desire I have argued and I would just want to sketch the argument again that the search for beauty is the search for home for a place where you can be at home with yourself and with others but in particular where you belong you know it's going back to that to run while painting of which is a painting of a landscape as a thing that we belong to and being at home means being at home with yourself and that means seeing yourself in some way as another as another person seeing yourself from outside not just this selfish self-involved thing that you familiar with when you wake up in the morning but that other thing that you were when you went to bed you know and had been spent a day with other people and you you want to be at home with what you find and I think this search for being at home does not start with high art nor does it end there one of the reasons why people have become so confused about beauty is because they have constantly taken their examples from the realm of high art those those great and difficult things like Botticelli's Venus you know which which you have to think about for for a long time before you know what it really means you know high art challenges us in deepest parts of our being and maybe we get turned off but we think we feel we can't live up to it so let's let's live in another way but that's not where the search for beauty begins nor is it where it ends I think it begins and in the end ends with in everyday life and people misconceive aesthetics when they see it merely as the realm of beauty as though that's all we were ever thinking about when we go around the world you know going around our world making aesthetic judgments it's all yes that's beautiful no that's ugly etc that's not the way we behave at all we actually make completely different kinds of judgments we talk about you know whether something fits in whether it's graceful whether that would be the right way to go forward is this cut does this color you know fit with that color and so on and I think people take revenge on beauty because they don't see that there's something more important without which there can be no revenge and that more important thing is just the instinct to get things right to make things fit in and harmonize and this is where this aesthetic judgment is a fundamental part of our everyday lives we're making it all the time now I'm not a natty dresser but even I had the question whether this tie goes with that jacket probably doesn't but nevertheless he occupied me for a certain amount of time and it was part of my attempt to fit in and harmonize and also to fit in to the this occasion this occasion when I'm giving you a public lecture and so on you could put this however a much more pretentious philosophical way by saying that when we do this we're trying to realize ourselves as subjects in the realm of objects that's the language that Hegel and his followers would use it's okay so slightly tough language but you see what it what it means that we are free beings we are subjects who have an inner life but that inner life is not meaningful to us if we cannot in some way make it into an outward reality among among other outward realities and we're always and all our gestures we're trying to achieve that to become something real and part of things to belong in other words so this realization is something goes on all the time and all rational beings are engaged in it and children know about this already in these two little girls you see what we can determine called the natural expression of aesthetic judgment there they are trying to fit things in the right place on the table they're not thinking it's saying to themselves is this beautiful is this ugly or anything like that sublime whatever those those words are not part of their vocabulary probably but they are asking themselves the question is this right I'm not getting it right or should it be a little bit more to the left etc and you can see in the intent in expression here is something that only human beings manifest their animals manifest this sense of the rightness and wrongness of things because they're not reasoning instrumentally you see they've got completely beyond the whole idea of the function of these things they're trying to fit things together so they look right and so that the guests will find that they look right - and that's the beginnings of the ascetic attitude but so we know this as well we know first of all that our world we don't accept it simply as a as a thing out there an assembly of objects we try and adorn it and fit it to ourselves and us to it and we're we're always aware of the distinction between things standing out and fitting in sometimes it's right for them to stand out sometimes it's wrong and fitting in is one of the most important aspects of our life in every sphere of human endeavor and we all have this need to be part of something greater than ourselves and this is something that happens to us all day long that that we know that we're part of something greater and we know that we are either fitting in or not fitting in and there's obviously as a distinction between looking right and being right but one of the important features of the aesthetic is that that distinction gets collapsed if we look back at the two children there isn't a distinction there between the plate being in the right place and looking in the right place being and seeming have come together and that's perhaps something that it's really important for us to live in a world where every now and then being and seeming coincide so that nothing as it were deceives us anymore and I think this is part of the greater social significance of the aesthetic and we live in a world which has been in many ways are defied and it's a world that we want to redeem so that so that we are part of it once again and our fulfillment is as it were reflected back to us from all the things that we encounter and that's really part of what I mean by Redemption and that is the function of the aesthetic and you can work this search for getting things right it's a very it's an all pervasive thing you can no matter what circumstances you're in even if you're living in a trailer park you see you can do things right you go to your local timber merchant and by the georgian windows to replace the rubbish that you would otherwise be there you have a little cornice and so on and you can even if there's a lot of money involved you can get things totally wrong and this this is a part of London too and as you can see there's someone's made a mistake here there's another example of a few miss London mistakes Minh here is getting it right this is a just an ordinary Victorian Street in London somebody's built a bridge across it to commit sucide two buildings communicate but this is a totally different thing although there's lots of different buildings there they all harmonize they harmonized because they're standing along a street they're all built of vertical components which match each other classical's details cornice and stringcourse and pilasters and so on and here's an example of a modern tap town sent to the center of reading build built unlike this which is built entirely out of horrid out of verticals this is built entirely out of horizontals and one of the most important differences between them is that everybody wants to live here and nobody wants to live here and nobody does live there the center of Redding was destroyed completely by this development and it's standing empty and vandalized and as you see covered in graffiti this emphasis on the horizontal was originally of course a very aesthetic thing the modernist aesthetic exemplified in this interior it's entirely designed in that way and you can see that yes that is a kind of aesthetic ideal nobody I'm sure has ever sat in this room but nevertheless you can see that you know that it has aesthetic thoughts behind it and unlike this oh it's a but but the modernists of course that were were in reaction against this all this Victorian clutter which again is something that most people would find extremely difficult to live with now but here is an example of a rather perfected modernist interior and which is linking Stein's house in Vienna which he designed for his sister and if it can shine like me had the sense that that architecture ultimately must get the vertical emphasis right and must make verticals stand in parallel to each other and it's the sense of detail that matters this is not my preferred form of architecture but you can see the aesthetic instinct at work in everything in this building he designed it for his sister who never lived in it and it ended up as the embassy of a communist country which it is wonderfully suited here is this is an example of what architects really can do of course when they when it comes to making corners this is the corner of a church in Rome by Pietro da Cortona where you see when you have the sense of detail and the classical idiom and this desire to fit things together how a building comes alive and captures the light of the Sun and it incorporates that light into itself makes it part of its own spirit so to speak so even in architecture the human spirit finds its embodiment interesting in conclusion then those examples are really just sort of taken from from the air really but they're meant to to emphasize that that that the place of aesthetic judgment of how desire to get things right that the place of that in in our ordinary everyday life and in our enterprises builders and and dwellers of people who've settled down we know that we are free beings but we also know that free freedom demands recognition this is something that Hegel emphasized and it it has to be reexpress from ever for every generation we're not truly free until others recognize that we are free and grant us the space to be free in and then that means we're in in a relations of mutuality with each other our freedom is my freedom as always as it were rubbing up against the edge of your freedom and that that boundary between us is the public world where we both belong and it's in shaping that boundary between us that the aesthetic the aesthetic sense the sense of aesthetic judgment is so important that's where in our search for recognition we from each other we attempt to to be graceful towards each other and to bring each other to to our side I bring you to my side you bring me to your side so that the boundary where we carry inside is mutually acceptable and this is this is with the issue my reasonably cool grace is a matter of harmony and fitting in and of course it can't be achieved without the habit of giving and receiving I give way to you you give way to me I'm offer you things and you receive them and so on this is what the public world ideally should be and that kind of giving and receiving of things is what should be embodied in our ideal forms of architecture as it is it embodied in this and on that note I think I'm going to stop and leave it to you to ask questions

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Keywords: Franciscan University, Steubenville, Ohio, Catholic, college, Franciscan University of Steubenville, Franciscan University of Steubenville (College / University), FaithAndReason.com, Faith And Reason, Roger Scruton (Author), Beauty (Quotation Subject), Philosophy (Field Of Study), Aesthetics (Field Of Study), Power of Beauty Conference, Hildebrand Project, Ethics and Public Policy Center, Distinguished Speakers Series

Id: uIKoPCouhHc

Length: 51min 20sec (3080 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 12 2016