Roger Scruton: Beauty in a World of Ugliness

our assembly this evening is co-sponsored by the school of philosophy the Catholic University of America it thus befall z-- me as Dean of that school - welcome to this campus and to this building anyone here who counts himself a visitor we're very glad to have you with us it also falls to me to give credit where it is due since I cannot realistically hope to claim at all for myself although the school of philosophy is the co-sponsor for this event the institution that is really responsible for its coming to be is the Hildebrand project the Hildebrand project has its origin in turn in one John Henry Crosby the project's president and founder John Henry is described on the website of the Hildebrand project a place I commend to you as cultural entrepreneur among other things and this seems to me entirely out had he not developed an interest some 15 years ago in the writings of the German philosopher and Catholic theologian Dietrich von Hildebrand John Henry would doubtless now be the head of some billion dollar startup manufacturing digital widgets and some offshore cloud instead he has spent himself tirelessly in the dissemination of Hildebrand's writings as editor translator and publisher but also as lecturer writer and conference organizer even if you've not read a word yet of von Hildebrand may you soon make amends you can be grateful to him for sparing us still more Silicon Valley flim-flam be that as it may we are certainly all indebted to John Henry Cosby for having served as prime mover of our gathering here under the intriguing yet also maybe vaguely disturbing title beauty in the world of ugliness I mean speaking truthfully I don't see much ugliness looking out upon you and if I did I wouldn't say so since John Henry is also the moderator of our proceedings I now gladly entrust your care to him thank you [Applause] well given the Hildebrand projects fundraising needs I feel like I've missed my milk my vocation in Silicon Valley and maybe I'll have to reevaluate the next chapter also the credit is is by no means by the way can I be heard okay the credit by no means goes all to me there are many many other prime movers in the Hildebrand project there is above all Allyson Hildebrand the widow of dietrich von Hildebrand who at the age of 95 remains sharp and very active in our work in our vision there is my father dr. John Crosby who was himself a student dietrich von Hildebrand there are my colleagues in the Hildebrand project there are benefactors so maybe I can take the responsibility for a very small first step but it's been accompanied all along by many others I also want to thank you John for for agreeing to co-host this event this is our first formal collaboration with Catholic University's School of philosophy and I hope that I'd like to say that I turned out like this bodes well for further collaborations in the future and we have many good things to come so before turning to our main event I know why you're all really here and it's because of our our esteemed friend Sir Roger Scruton I just want to say a little bit about dietrich von Hildebrand and the hildebrand project so that you all understand why we are hosting this event in the first place so the occasion for this afternoon's event is the arrival long-awaited of a major work of philosophical aesthetics in this work known simply as aesthetics is a two-volume work by the philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand written quite amazingly at the age of 80 in a period of eleven months he said to his wife it's time I write my aesthetics and he delivered eleven months 30 pages a day apparently he could write sometimes and this was a this was a lifetime of reflection on beauty on aesthetic considerations that came pouring out of him and it is the occasion of this event because this work is finally seeing the light of day the first volume is recently out volume two is forthcoming in November and it were very honored to have a wonderful forward to that volume by by Sir Roger a word--just on Van Hildebrand he was born and raised in he was born 1889 raised in Florence in his father's home his father was a renowned German architect in sculpture when Hildebrand was born really under the aegis of music the day he was born the composer reak art Strauss was knocking at the door looking for a recommendation from a dolphin Hildebrand when Hildebrand discovered philosophy as a teenager reading Platonic dialogues and went on to study with many of the leading minds in Germany he studied under edmund husserl the father of phenomenology he studied under max Scheler who was a great friend of his who is the source of his personal ISM he studied under Otto Farina who was also the great teacher of st. a th9 he converted to Catholicism as a young man primarily through the way of beauty which gives you a sense already of his destiny to write about it in beauty beauty and art beauty in nature but in a special way the beauty of the saints it was the beauty of sanctity as he experienced it that finally opened the door into the church in the early 1920s he emerged as one of the first Catholics of stature to oppose the Nazis those of you who know your history and in a room like this I know many of you do he was already blacklisted for assassination in 1923 the first time Hitler sought to seize power he went then to Vienna where he established the the home base of the early Nazi resistance of Catholics and other like-minded people founded a journal of intellectual resistance when Hitler invaded Austria in 1938 when Hildebrand was a refugee for many years had an extraordinary escape and a very moving escape thanks to all those who helped him and he arrived on our shores in 1940 he went on to teach at Fordham University for 20 years and during his both his period in the States and in Europe he was a prolific writer in the 1920s he inaugurated the whole personalist approach to marriage in books like in defense of purity and then in his time in the States he developed many of his ethical works I'm sure all of you in this room have at least heard of a work such as transformation in Christ which is perhaps his most famous work he was of course a prolific writer in the post conciliar period and many of those works now have a new resonance today when he died in 1977 he left an extraordinary impact on the life of the church in that impact that that tremendous legacy that he left behind remains to be unpacked the the fact that many of his works were written in German is what originally called the Hildebrand project into existence we were founded to translate and publish all of these works that he wrote in his late years in German but the project is not just a vehicle for von Hildebrand's work that's a primary object of our work but we seek also to advance the whole tradition of personalism and Christian philosophy that he represents and even beyond that to bring his thought to bear on the immediate problems of culture so this is not just an ivory tower project it's also an in the trenches project as well so it's in this framework of today's event that Hildebrand's it's in this framework that we are having this gathering it is the the promotion of dietrich von Hildebrand's legacy it's the arrival of the aesthetics and during this period to come in the years to come we will devote considerable time and energy to fostering discussion around the aesthetics of an Hildebrand but perhaps even more fundamentally around the renewal of the idea of beauty both as a credible concept because I can tell you in many graduate programs it's a non-starter even to speak of beauty as a meaningful idea but also as an ideal for creative work for artists today who many still will not identify themselves in terms of the creation of beautiful things so Roger Scruton is one of today's most eminent champions of beauty and I think that's one of the reasons so many of you are attracted to his work and so we're delighted to be collaborating with him to continue our collaboration with him his thought on beauty has many rich points of contact without if an Hildebrand so we're very eager to foster that that conversation so just a word on format it's very simple we'll hear first from Sir Roger then we'll have a response from David Schindler and we'll have a response from dr. Crosby and from there we'll go straight to your questions and we'll have as many questions as we can accommodate there will be a wireless mic I'd ask you all to use it and I will moderate that discussion and so without further ado sir Roger thank you very much John for that introduction and of course the the work of von Hildebrand as you rightly say is of particular relevance not only to the philosophy of beauty but also to the Catholic tradition and the revival of Catholic intellectual life that took place has taken place recently largely thanks to pope john paul ii who was himself a member of this personalist tradition in philosophy that you referred to which grew in central europe in the first half of the 20th century and the influence of which has not yet been sufficiently felt I think in this part of the world or in general in the english-speaking world and I suppose I would count myself as a kind of personalist in that I think that the concept of the human person is fundamental to our understanding of the world as a whole and indeed that the idea of beauty has its roots in that of personality today I'm just going to introduce the discussion with a few remarks about what ugliness is and and the way in which ugliness has come into our world as a kind of inevitable force a force that seems to squeeze itself into every opening that is available to it it's not this is an unusual thing it's not natural for human beings to pursue ugliness to cultivate it or to praise it when it occurs as you know from your own lives when given a little territory of your own whether a room to live in or an event to dress for or a speech to make or a ceremony to attend your first thought is to look for the beautiful everybody has an instinct to decorate the room in which he lives according to his own taste and also to compare that taste with others to stand back from the painting that he's applied to the wall and asking himself ask himself whether it's right or wrong whether it would look good in such-and-such circumstances how the furniture should be put put in place and what would others think and in particular it's that question what would others think which makes people behave correctly in the aesthetic sphere nobody wants ostentatiously to give offense or they didn't want ostentatiously to give offense until that became part of what it is to be a creative artist which is what of course is taught in the art schools today oh so in defiance of that natural instinct that we all have to beautify our lives which is an instinct as I say but belongs to our natural politeness our ability to and desire to respect each other in defiance of that there has been what the novelist Milan Kundera calls the uglification of modern life that well wherever we turn we find a deliberate desecration of beautiful things the employment of shapes forms and gestures which are calculated to either to repel us or or simply to annihilate the surrounding experience of beauty I've just been speaking about their destiny of Washington under the impact of the postmodern architecture which now is accumulating on the edge of the of the old center these great big blocks boxes of glass often of mirror glass which have which are not just characterless in themselves but obliterate the whole sense of the city as a settlement a shared settlement a place where you would want to make your home turning it from a settlement into a kind of transit camp where you appear in an office for a few hours of the day before escaping from the center and this kind of architecture which everybody now knows is it's growing everywhere is a obliterating our cities but by turning them into places where we don't really want to be we have to come there to work but we don't want to remain there when the hours of worker over and that's part of what uglification is turning everything into an instrument of some purpose of the individual in defiance of any sense of community or belonging and I think people are beginning to rebel against the kind of architecture that's been imposed on our cities since the war but it's rather late in the day to do so you of course are lucky here in the Catholic University in that the efforts of many people have been devoted to making this into a beautiful environment a place where you want to be which you will regard as home and the memory of which you will cherish in your lives lives Hereafter and if you look round to this room you can see just how easy it is to do it would didn't require a great deal of thought or a great deal of discussion to recognize that you have to build a room with certain proportions that you have to have details that people will like and and moldings around the edges and so on and the result is okay not a great work of art but everybody's going to be happy here for as long as it exists but the ugly fication of Modern Life means that everywhere we look there's a kind of brash in-your-face culture displaying itself the culture of the consumer society which says which invades everything and asks of every event and episode what's in it for me the me idea is written on the face of those glass boxes and it's about the only thing written on the face of them this clamor for attention as well of anything that presents itself as art and if you complain about this you will discover that you are acts the part of the enemy we belong this this consumer society is also society which refuses judgment judgment is the original sin somebody who says you know there is a right and wrong way to build or right and wrong way to dress a right or wrong way to decorate that there is there is beautiful language and ugly language and so on such a person is condemned as the great spoilsport and the one who is judging others when he has no right to do so because the whole realm of aesthetic experience is judgment free and this so this ugly fired world accuses the one who wishes to criticize it and it wishes to remove all obstacles to the gratification of the self and we've seen this in all kinds of walks of life nobody can no outsider to America can look on the recent dispute over the nomination that so the Supreme Court without recognizing the extreme ugliness of the whole thing It was as though America had decided overnight to put on display to the to the external world that this is the ugliest Society in existence whichever side whichever side you took in the dispute it was a side which required shouting and screaming did the deformation at the face lying and manipulation and and also the undermining of anything that suggested that that human beings could rise above this and decide the issue in a rational and calm way so that uglification of the political process has occurred also the uglification of cities roads landscape and the rest and a lot of it has to do of course with television and the internet which have so trapped our attention that it's only the shocking and the disturbed that can give us any sense of saying something new but of course what they're saying is the same as they've always been saying namely that the world is not worth living in so nothing else only ugliness can capture our jaded attention that seems to be the the basic assumption behind the the ugly fired society and it goes also with what all Catholics will recognize as a an important social phenomenon which is the D consecration of the sacred things and it's very obvious to Catholics at least that this has happened in the case of personal life of of birth and reproduction and death though the made of the most important events in our lives these have been deconsecrated marriage of course has been deconsecrated handed over to the state and then ugly fide by being made into a mere pursuit of me of my gratification rather than a devotion to you and this D consecration therefore has led also to a desecration of things nobody is happy with the result including those who brought it about their unhappiness is manifest in the ugliness of the thing that they've produced so what is the antidote to this obviously the antidote is beauty and I don't think that we have lost the power to use that antidote and to reconsecrate our lives by means of it what is this distinguishes beauty in all of human endeavors is that the beautiful object is not appreciated simply as a means to something else it's not a tool it's not an instrument for gaining advantage or anything like that the beautiful object is something which is understood and appreciated for what it is for its own sake it has an intrinsic meaning and value and we in the situation in which we are now in this ugly fired world are looking for something which will redeem that world by enabling us to rise above the whole idea of instrumental values you know to look on the world in such a way that it isn't simply being treated as an instrument for my own gratification for for enhancing my position giving me power pleasure and all the other worldly values which which will which caused people to annihilate their surroundings so it was the through Beauty attribute pursuit of beauty we are trying to refashion human life so that peace and rest form the heart of it and this I think me connects the pursuit of beauty automatically with the two forms of life that have always been associated with it first of all art and secondly religion art means the pursuit of art the creation of art means taking aesthetic choice and raising it into a realm of its own so it becomes a way of life a way of expressing the life in you a way of praising and endorsing the world and affirming your own being and being of others along with it but at the same time subduing those appetites that that cause you to obliterate the existence of others now in everyday life obviously means and instrumentality dominate our ends and our purposes but the judgment of beauty brings that domination to a limit it conveys a sense of the end a sense of the intrinsic value of certain things that we pursue and in art there is only intrinsic value when you tell a story writing a novel or a story or or a an epic in verse four insert for instance such as the great epics of Homer you do so not to convey information but to give an example of something to your you're creating an imaginary world which is interesting for its own sake precisely because you the creator and the listener or reader don't inhabit that world it's not a world which this is possible for you to enter so you can stand back from it contemplate it look for order in it see exactly how things fit together how they can be completed and fulfilled so they become interesting intrinsically for what they are and in that way a work of art a work of fiction can lift human life out of the whole struggle of instrumentality and an appetite and present it as an object of contemplation for its own sake and maybe that work of fiction that epic or whatever it is is full of tragedy and unpleasant things but in presenting it in this imaginary for presenting tragedy in this imaginary form we enable people to stand back from it to recognize its intrinsic connection with the rest of our lives so that it's part of the order of the whole it's this at the tragic work of art shows us that death and suffering are part of the human condition and without them all those good things that depend upon them wouldn't be available to us so art in that way reconciles us to human life gives us a sense that art that life has an intrinsic meaning and is as such justified in itself and that is one great antidote to uglification and it's the antidote which has informed my life I'm a relatively sedentary person at least I wasn't until I met my foxhunting wife and this the result of which has been a series of interesting accidents but but nevertheless it is second nature for me to sit around reading listening to music playing the piano and so on but who are all of that I flatter myself perhaps but I know of that I think I have found a way of looking on life as intrinsically meaningful as having a making a place for me without me having to to pursue in a clamorous way my own appetites I can stand back and say it is good to be and I that the things that are impinging on me and uglify my my existence can be resisted I can turn away from them and make my own sphere where I can build life in another way but of course most people in this room I'm sure who will be of Catholic faith and will recognize that that art is all very well but it itself depends upon something deeper upon the religious sentiment from which our desire to be at home in the world originally begins and many religious people will say with that without faith you aren't ever really at home in the world you sense your condition as one of alienation you're looking for something even if you don't yourself know this something that will reconcile you your way of being not only to yourself and to others but to the divine order that governs everything but whatever you think about that it is certainly true that religion like art is a realm of value it's a realm in which we try to raise up the human condition into a light that shines from elsewhere the light of the divine we know whether we're believers or not we know that that we cannot ourselves create the light which fully redeems our world we look for it elsewhere we can look for it in art but for most people and most religious people the real source of that light is the divine and the search for beauty in earthly things takes us first to art and through art to the ideal in which the divine is prefigured and I think this is one of the most important features of religion that at least for someone of my formation namely that it attaches Beauty to the world brings down into the world the beauty that rescues it from this craven ugliness which is growing all around us and religion religions in particular the Christian religion are founded in activities which are intrinsically beautiful in themselves which create a fabric of meaning that is laid over the surface of the world in such a way that the world indeed becomes a home for us rituals do this the mass of course does this that the habit of prayer and the recognition of the sacred in things the re consecration of the world and that I think is the point on which I'd like to leave you that that the answer to the uglification that is growing all around us which is putting the whole world on sale to the to our selfish appetites the answer to that is a gesture Wow after we arrive at it of re consecration we must reconsider eight the world as a place where we can belong as complete beings and belong to others and to the community around us and to the world as a whole and expel these this ugly fication from the middle of our lives but I will leave that to my now to my fellow panelists to say what that means thank you thank you sir Roger so next we'll hear from from dr. David Schindler who I think needs no introduction but to those of you who who have perhaps come from elsewhere dr. Schindler teaches philosophy at the John Paul the second Institute for marriage and family here at Catholic University he is deep deeply rooted in the world of hans von Balthasar and our encounter has been driven in part by an interest in bringing together the aesthetics of Anne Hildebrandt and from Balthazar so in any case I'm very happy to have have you with us David and so invite you forward [Applause] thank you John Henry its it really is a privilege to be able to participate in a conversation on beauty which i think is one of the things that has has drawn us all here a sense of the problem that sir Roger just presented that that an attention to desire for beauty is something that has been lacking in our in our culture so I'm grateful to be part of the conversation it's it's a privilege hunters from Balthazar observed that that truth and goodness are obviously important matters and in every age we find people willing to defend those those transcendental properties as he calls them but it's that's less often the case with beauty I think it's not as obvious that beauty is a serious matter something worth dying for in fact and and therefore defenders are much more rare but Balthazar argues that without beauty in fact it may not seem as serious initially but truth and goodness ultimately depend on them and we if we lose Beauty we ultimately lose truth and goodness so it's it's a crucial task in every age to defend beauty and for that we can be grateful to dietrich von Hildebrand of course and hunters from Balthazar but more recently to serve Roger for the work that he's done he's no doubt one of the great defenders of beauty in our age in the Anglophone world so we have a debt to him for that one of the points that he insists on is that beauty is not simply an experience but a revelation of meaning especially in the in the realm of art and that that the meaning that it reveals is we saw in the in the presentation that he gave bears on the meaning of air and not just particular objects of art so I I thought the most fruitful way for me to participate in the discussion would be to raise two questions and these are questions that were prompted by Sir Rogers book a very short introduction to beauty a wonderful presentation of his aesthetics and the first question is really a request for elaboration so one of the most illuminating things that I found in sir Roger's book is a fascinating distinction between imagination and fantasy imagination and fantasy we often think of those two get together and I would like to to request maybe an elaboration of that distinction in our discussion and the significance because I think it might be illuminating for for other people as well in particular what I find interesting is as as Sir Roger explains the fantasy world seems to have a strange sort of mixture of the real and the unreal it's it's it sort of blurs the lines whereas as we heard in the presentation that he gave the world of imagination is a world that's distinct from the world that we live in it's very clearly distinct the world of fantasy seems somehow to blur the line between the the real and the unreal or the the interested and disinterested and and the strange thing is that that that that seems to give rise to a paradox and this is alluded to in Sir Rogers book but it would be helpful to to hear perhaps an explanation he points out in the book that imagination in spite of the fact that it's an elevation out a lifting and a certain sense beyond this world and in a certain respect allows us to enter more deeply into reality so if it doesn't itself foster the connection between the soul and and and the real it it opens up that possibility in in in a profound way and he I think he made some very interesting comments already in his his presentation there but he points out the contrast in fantasy there's there's a certain inner dynamic and inner logic that drives the experience of the fantasy world to addiction and takes the form of addiction which really is an isolation from reality so strangely the thing that elevates us beyond reality helps us to enter in whereas the one that's sort of a mix between the real and the unreal takes us out of reality it would be helpful perhaps to hear a comment on that especially in our age that is increasingly dominated by I think fantasy as opposed to imagination virtual reality and even oddly the the it seems the increasing preoccupation with politics in the realm of art you can't go to a concert now without a political message being spoken and you wonder why what's there is there is there somehow a misunderstanding of what art is precisely in the in the aim to make it meaningful the second question that I wanted to ask is a little more of a critical question I suppose but I was struck at the end of Sir Rodgers book on beauty he said in his concluding remarks that implicitly in the book he had rejected the Neoplatonic and scholastic notion of beauty as a transcendental property as a reflection of being and he said the book implicitly rejects that I would I would like to know why exactly and what would be important why what would be gained by leaving that tradition early on in the book sir Roger had offered an explanation of the ways in which beauty seems to be in tension with truth and goodness and perhaps that might remove it from that that category but many objections to those arguments occurred to me which I won't elaborate here but but it seems to me that there must be more to it now why is that important it seems to me that there's there's a great deal at stake in the question of whether beauty is a transcendental property in the sense of being a manifestation of being having a having its roots in being it why is that on the one hand it seems to me that without a sense of the transcendental depths you might say of beauty it would be very difficult to sustain many of the things that that Sir Roger argues for very very centrally in his work an important sense that that beauty is a revelation of being sorry of meaning that it that it that it had that it's it it's a communication he speaks in another book of things that the soul of things things having something like a face that their beauty is somehow a revelation of of a kind of an internal depth and it seems to me that that saying something like that is only possible if one understands beauty as as a transcendental property the danger would be to deny that one would I think eventually fall back into beauty as principally a subjective experience and and in the end if beauty is a transcendental property we can think of God's beauty as a communication of his reality so the the beauty of the world would be a communication of God's reality if we deny the transcendental status of beauty it seems to me that it becomes very difficult in the end to make an ultimate distinction between religion religious practices that evoke a sort of sense of the sacred and really good art which does the same thing and it seems to me that that's if if we have difficulty distinguishing between those that raises a question about our understanding of beauty so those are my two questions about fantasy and about transcendental character of beauty thank you for so this is just what we want the accumulation of thoughts and questions and I assume that that is happening in all of your minds as well but what we'll do is we'll finish our presentations and then we'll we'll go back to the questions and I've noted your very good questions David so finally we will hear from from dr. John Crosby who as I mentioned before is a student was a student of dietrich von Hildebrand in the 1960s and to the end of and Hildebrandt's life in 1977 dr. Crosby was also a kind of student of John Paul the second through his participation at the John Paul the second Institute in Rome in the early days before the Holy Fathers health became an obstacle to his time with people so there was a great deal of learning that happened there the whole encounter with Christian personalism was deepened there and finally among many publications the thing to note here is that dr. Crosby is the one of the primary translators of the Hildebrand aesthetics that will be forthcoming so let me welcome dr. Crosby to the podium [Applause] with all the talk about dr. Crosby it may not be evident to you that I'm the father of John Henry many many thanks to Roger Scruton for not only his lecture today but for his lifetime of defense of beauty against its many detractors now my task is I'm a senior fellow in the Hildebrand project is to build some bridges between Roger Scruton work in aesthetics and that of dietrich von Hildebrand and I lay out or propose these bridges eager to hear whether Roger Scruton recognizes these as indeed important points of contact between himself and von Hildebrand now in his aesthetics von Hildebrand has a great deal to say about the way in which beauty nourishes the human spirit he's always insisting and it seems to me this is exactly in the vein of Roger Scruton always existing that the aesthetic experience is not simply a matter of being entertained this experience goes much deeper and touches the sources of our real flourishing and our real happiness he argues that the experience of beauty is not a luxury but a necessity and it follows that a life deprived of beauty is an impoverished life this means that a world full of ugliness a world in which beauty is often replaced by kitsch is a world which oppresses and demeans and deforms the human spirit this leads me to the Hildebrand Ian's contribution I would like to make to the discussion with Roger Scruton I want to identify certain depravations of the human spirit discussed by von Hildebrand and explained why von Hildebrand sees beauty as the antidote to these depravations in this way he helps us understand and understand quite concretely how it is that we are made for beauty and can't survive spiritually in a world that lacks it so the three deprivation three antidotes coming from beauty here's the first in his aesthetics when Hildebrand speaks about the prosaic by which he means not just the everyday like washing your hands driving to work but rather a certain aesthetic decel view he says and I quote the quality of the prosaic emerges most clearly in certain human beings the bureaucrat is specifically prosaic the prosaic is the mechanization of the Spirit a mere soulless adhering to the shell of something the Philistine is even more prosaic than the bureaucrat this person thinks that things are real only in the sense of an austere usefulness he regards everything else as a romantic trifle an illusion a waste of time such persons emanate a prosaic oppressive dull atmosphere and of that quote in the next sentence von Hildebrand brings home to us academics the concept of the prosaic he says the prosaic exists analogously in the world of the University there is a specifically professorial dullness a distressing pedantry which constitutes a specific antithesis to true personal culture and of that quote so if you don't get the idea of the prosaic at first you'll surely get it now when it's presented in its professorial form melvin Hildebrand wants to say that the prosaic constitutes a specific antithesis to beauty the dullness of the prosaic is antithetical to the radiance of beauty the prose of the prosaic is antithetical to the song of beauty when Hildebrand says that all Beauty sings this perhaps no better way to characterize prosaic people and to say that they don't sing they are devoid of the spirit of song now what if most of all want to point out is that the prosaic type is an impoverished human being and that by contrast the type who sings in the presence of beauty has a full abundant humanity the professorial dullness and the distressing pedantry of certain intellectuals gives evidence of a withered existence as persons whereas those who are deeply affected by beauty sing and give evidence of an awakened existence as persons it follows but if a person wants to recover from his or her prosaic dullness that person has to stop thinking of beauty as a romantic trifle and to start taking it seriously letting its spirit of song affect him deeply Beauty is then one main antidote to that flattening out of a person that van Hildebrand deplores in the bureaucrat and in other prosaic type there's a second personal deformation for which von Hildebrand sees beauty as the antidote in his esthetics he writes extensively about what he calls the mediocrity of certain persons by mediocre he does not mean average undistinguished getting a grade of C he rather has in mind a certain personal this value this value that forms a specific antithesis to beauty he sees it embodied in the Philistine and the bourgeois it's akin to the prosaic but not exactly the same here is how he characterizes the mediocrity that concerns him in aesthetics and I quote the Philistine hits everything that is unconditional he never wants to leave his warm nest or lose the solid ground under his feet in keeping with this basic attitude he regards all that is unconditional and heroic all glowing enthusiasm and the total gift of oneself as exaggerated he does not wish to utter a Promethean protest against the world of values and ultimately against God or to commit himself genuinely to them he is not driven hither and thither by evil passions he wants to remain on the golden middle ground in every sphere of life he never wants to relinquish possession of himself to anything he does not want to be swept off his feet by great passions or to be touched in the innermost depths by lofty goods which are greater than himself and of that quote when Hildebrand proceeds to identify the opposite of this Philistine mediocrity he speaks of a certain freedom of spirit of a breath of mind and heart a capacity for that elevated existence that called divine madness but what most concerns us here is the antithesis between mediocrity and beauty again and again in his aesthetic writings von Hildebrand quotes the significant saying of aunt Stella the French writer of the early 20th century that quote there is nothing the mediocre person hates as much as beauty and of that quote what is meant is that beauty when it seizes us draws us into a kind of divine madness and this disrupts that security in control in which the mediocre person wants to ensconce himself the mediocre person does not want to be beside himself does not want to live ecstatically outside of himself and so resents the call of beauty and sees it as something excessive and overwrought now the point at which I'm driving is this a mediocre person is characterized by von Hildebrand is a person with a greatly diminished humanity and a person fascinated by beauty is a fully alive person beauty has the power to dislodge us from that small frame of reference in which we feel safe and to elicit from us the exuberance of a more abundant life and if you wonder what I mean by exuberance just recall the spirit of song that von Hildebrand sees and hearing in beauty so beauty is the antidote to the prosaic deformation of a person and also the antidote to a mediocre death deformation of a person and of the many other such deformations surveyed by Van Hildebrand I pick out one more that's my third and last he discusses the disorder that a person obsessed productivity there are people plenty of them at the University myself on many days included who are consumed with their many projects eaten up by them they never come to rest but are always driven to complete a project to start another one they feel that their existence is justified only if they are getting results and becoming ever more productive such people run the risk of turning themselves into instruments for production and in this way de personalizing themselves now how does beauty according to van Hildebrand heal persons who have lost themselves in their projects in this way beauty demands to be received so he argues in a contemplative attitude the beautiful thing is lifted out of all pragmatic use and admired for its own sake Sir Roger spoke of that in talking about the intrinsic value of beauty the beautiful thing can show itself is beautiful only after you have silenced all your projects all your use of instrumental reason only after you have learned to dwell contemplatively with the beautiful thing in this aesthetic contemplation you come to yourself as person you're no longer just want to exist for the sake of getting results but somehow for your own sake von Hildebrand writes in his aesthetics the specifically contemplative element in the frou-frou he is the opposite of OT meaning to use frui meaning to take delight in specifically contemplatively in the frui of genuine beauty in nature and art as an eminent significance for the entire personality few things the personal a human being as much as the complete absorption impractical tasks it is only when contemplation and contemplative acts receive their do in our lives that we can truly be persons it is only then that we come to our true self end of that quote and I conclude laying this all in front of Sir Roger eager for his reaction I think there's a fundamental kinship with von Hildebrand but I'll let him determine that and I conclude like this that the loss of beauty in the contempo contemporary world is not just a cultural loss but in individual existential loss it cripples persons and beauty for its part it's not just a cultural good but an individual existential good it has the power to regenerate persons thank you well I had originally thought that we would go to questions from the audience but I think that our panelists have put some very important reflections on the table so Sir Roger perhaps we could first hear from you and then we will if all of this resolves nicely then we'll go to quite week I promise you we will go to questions from you as well so would you liked it you can just do we can we'll do this next part from our seats okay well David Schindler made raised two points first really asking me to elaborate a bit on the distinction between fantasy and imagination and secondly declaring that for him at least beauty is a transcendental like truth goodness and being and that if we don't admit it to be so a crucial aspect of beauty namely that it's aware of rooting ourselves in being is lost to us something like that yeah I I would say about fantasy and imagination this is a distinction which has been made in different ways down the centuries and it was made by first in an articulate way by by Coleridge the poet who may be known to everybody as the poet of the ancient Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel and so on who distinguish fantasy from imagination and he said things which I wanted to read shape for the use of modern people and fantasy for me it's involves the creation or reception of fantasy objects whose appeal consists in the fact that they are indistinguishable from reality or at least give you an alternative reality and as a result awaken real feelings and give them if you like an artificial satisfaction where as imagination involves the the invocation of an entire world a world which is other than this one which you know to be other than this one which are not tempted to empty enter because you know you can't and therefore you can exercise your emotions freely in that world as we do in the theater or in reading a novel or an epic poem and as a result imagination leads to the education of the emotions whereas fantasy precisely because it's sort of ends it aims at a kind of substitute reality it bleeds into the actual world and traps us there the obvious our example is pornography of course as compared with genuine erotic art such as the the Venus's of Titian and and you know pornography as as as people now know it is something which intrudes into their world arouses all kinds of substitute emotions and feelings which nevertheless demand satisfaction and as you know and you made this point it becomes addictive and addiction is as you again rightly said is a way of taking you out of this world taking away from it whereas you never get addicted to imaginative things they're each an imagined world requires an effort on your part to enter it and to understand it and to see what it would be fie how it could translate into real experiences of your own you learn from imagination you become enslaved to fantasy and once you if thinking about these things is very difficult I know but there are people I'm sure in this audience who've had to think about them in the course of therapeutic activities and so on and to recognize that that for instance sexual fantasy is a door into into a nightmare world whereas the the erotic art of petition or Shakespeare or Keats is a door into something beautiful way you can roam freely without being tempted so that I think is a very important distinction the reason why I think beauty is not a transcendental has something to do with the fact that I don't believe that there are transcendentals better but it is also that I have such a vivid experience of ugliness you know the the ugly things that surround us and intrude on our lives for me they're really real in other words the absence of beauty can exist with something which nevertheless is replete with being you know and it oughtn't if beauty was a transcendental it ought to belong to everything even to those those horrible blocks that dominate the center of Detroit for instance you know if Beauty is a transcendental then Detroit is saved but it clearly isn't so but I agree with dr. Crosby who had John Crosby over that that there is a much in common between between Hildebrand some sense of what's at stake in the pursuit of beauty with what I said as you rightly said you know the the sense of beauteous as the thing that heals these these diseases of the soul is really important for me than the disease as you mentioned you know the prosaic the prosaic cessation of the world and the the kind of bureaucratic depersonalization etc it's the instrumentality instrumentalization of things these are all things which I think we are all aware of quite difficult to say exactly what they are ond Hildebrandt deserves some credit for having tried to say what what they are many poets have also endorsed this message and yeah I would say that this doesn't really differ from things that I would say in a in another tone of voice the the great problem I think for everybody is one that was pointed out by can't namely that while we all love beauty and want it we are not all artistically inclined he himself being one of them you know there are unmusical people in this room for whom music doesn't mean anything yet for a musical person music contains the secret of life it's the thing well that will give us that that sense of wholeness that we're all looking for but how can but we if we tie Beauty to too closely to artistic activity we as it were remove it from from humanity as a whole we make it into a into an elite possession and and it shouldn't be that if it is going to be the the real healing force but it's one reason for thinking that perhaps beauty or art rather it has to give way to religion in the end if we're looking for if we're looking for something that will heal everyone so let anyway that's my pursuing a little bit deep everything you know okay we can do that [Music] so Roger on the panel have a question about the intersection of a number of concepts the first is with regard to Christian personalism as it relates to socialism capitalism what are your thoughts on how it is that weekend that on the one hand encouraged in individualism and the experience of beauty and at the same time go down the path as you were describing Sir Roger consumerism at the same time we have our current Pope who seems to be if not indifferent not fully supportive of capitalism in the way that our previous two popes were so be curious to hear your thoughts about the intersection of those concepts thank you well the this is a more political question obviously the let's go back to to what I think personalism is I'm not speaking as a Catholic I'm an Anglican which is a nondescript kind of thing to be but I do believe that the concept of the human person is fundamental to understanding not just what we are as individuals but our relations to others we see other people as persons that means recognizing that they are free and accountable just as we are and under that some people don't live try and live through their lives not recognizing the freedom of others seeing others simply as instruments to be used and that is one of the great sins that is to be the beginning of evil when you when you instrument even the human being and it's what we lived through in the 20th century and we haven't finished living through it as well but it's also the case that that there are things which are not human beings which are persons for instance governments nations you know you here are quite lucky in America that you have a government which is a kind of corporate person let's just say it takes responsibility of what it does it acts freely it can be accused of its faults and held to account for them and that's and the same is true of corporate persons you have businesses and so on and when people complain about capitalism that it D personalizes everything they have a point but they tend to forget this other thing the way in which you'd also personalize is everything by making corporate activities into things for which we are accountable there is no solution no political solution in my to my mind to the problems that we have all been taught three three have been talking about you know the uglification of the world you're not going to get a political solution to that you can get a cultural solution perhaps and everybody grows up to knowing what is at stake but whether whether socialism or capitalism is more compatible with the personalist vision is not something which is very easy to determine all I know however is that personalism became a real force in Central Europe when it was first growing in the philosophy of Shayla and Hildebrand and Vojta wah and so on he became a real force as a center of opposition to totalitarianism as Nazism on the one hand and and communism on the other and he is a seriously anti-socialist position but not necessarily a pro capitalist one thank you so much I teach at a high school down in Lynchburg Virginia it's a real pleasure to be here sir I had a question for Scruton I teach literature to tenth graders I teach them homer and Dante among other things I try to convince them that there is a difference between good books and bad books and one of the one of the ways I did that as I said Dante is better than us a today we can all agree on this but I got myself in trouble when I said that we can make the judgments in other areas as well I told them that Bach was better than Lady gaga objectively so I got in trouble there where all of my students seem to be already indoctrinated this idea that to make judgments concerning beauty his sign that one is a bigot and I even had meetings with parents afterwards there were a lot of people very upset about this yeah how could I best go about persuading my audience that this is so it's a very interesting question and I think one has to start very tentatively when it comes to this music thing trying to get your students to judge between different works of different pop songs get them to see that in pokerface Lady Gaga is singing on one note only and they will recognize oh isn't something missing here that thing called melody you know and and then compare it with say Elvis's Heartbreak Hotel where you've got a melody and it will give them a message yes there is a difference between these two things and there might be a reason for preferring one to the other and gradually work up to the point where they can accept judgment at least about the world in which they are and point out to them the connection between repetitiveness and addiction you know that you're becoming enslaved to this music because it's simply giving you those three wretched chords over this four and a four four and a bar you know and and so that you can't emancipate yourself from that rhythm and here is something you know try spiral architects is a metal group which has eight pieces with twenty five and a half beats in a bar or something like that you know this is at least it's different you're not gonna get addicted to this in fact you want to turn it off don't you you know and I think if you do that enough young people do recognize that judgment is actually part of what's already going on in them it's just that they're killing it by becoming addicted to certain easygoing ways of listening you won't get them to bar yeah yeah just like that because to get to bark you've got to go through that territory which really frightens them which is silence you know that means turning that thing off for 12 hours then listening thank you very much sir Roger so you spoke about beauty and the beautiful as that which pleases and sort of draws us for throw us into community and the ugly as repellent and what displeases but then you also spoke about the uglification of modern life which suggests that there are a lot of people who are choosing the ugly either choosing to constructed or choosing to pursue it or choosing to be attracted to it and so I'm wondering how you account for that is there some compelling power in the ugly or or what is it that makes a person choose the ugly when beauty is on offer it's a very good question well the fact of course the need for beauty is rooted in the human soul and that is undeniably true but there are shortcuts you know that people take and David or where do you mentioned this in by referring to addiction that comes through fantasy those shortcuts gratify without satisfying you know there are things which produce the instant pleasure you press the button but then the pleasure is gone so you had to press the button again you press it again and again until finally you're enslaved but on these condition of enslavement is a paradigm ugliness that's how people even beings make themselves ugly so it was as it were elderliness arises in that way by an invisible hand from the intentions of of ordinary people to gratify thing themselves immediately and I think that's the general you know beauty beauty requires a long-term view and that the long-term view is is painful to acquire thanks to all three of the panelists for your talks really appreciate it um I just wanted to pick on some up on something right at the end so Roger Scruton you said that you know not everyone has stand up not everyone has sort of an artistic soul or access to the artistic we can't all appreciate music or even make it right but if Beauty it really is so important to human being then it seems to me that there has to be some way that it's not just we're spectators to it or only the few can create and then everyone else it has to be spectator and I was wondering and this is partially based on the fact that you brought up john paul ii if we could say and how we could say that our work itself has to be beautiful not just that the what we make should be beautiful all the time I mean and that would be great but that work itself like the act of working should be beautiful and therefore all of humanity could be brought into sort of this act of making the beautiful so to speak and I mean I would ask all three of you to respond to that thank you well I'll begin then yes I think this is one of the this is a very important thing that unites Christianity and Islam the view that there is a beautification of everyday life performing what what you have to do which might be sweeping a room you know or sweeping the street but doing it beautifully doing it in other words in such a way that you as to recognize others unrecognized that how it looks to others one may want to make it look to others as though this is part of their life too you know and I think that that that beautification is a most important part of the human condition it's what is taught of course paradigmatically by islam and christians used to teach this too I mean it was part of the old Puritan message and if they were settlers of Massachusetts from whom all of you lot are in tremendous rebellion of course but that you ought that your daily life is isn't offering to God and it's it is it is so because it is made beautiful by what you do I think that's a very good suggestion but I think there's another thing to be said though when ordinary people down the centuries have people uninfluenced by mass communication and all that consumer society in all the things that we know when they have let them express themselves in in artistic forms through their ordinary building for instance the ordinary building of villages or through folk songs none of never do they produce ugliness the little villages scattered all over Europe all of them without exception beautiful and the folk music of Europe has no ugly examples in it and when people discovered started discovering folk music when the new the new ways of producing music came in and obliterated the folk music composers hurried to write down these treasures which were the products of ordinary people in ordinary unassuming people doing what they wanted to do and I think this is a very important thing that maybe that the mass of people have lost the ability to make beautiful things not because they can't but because this new great ugly flying machine that was referred to by the gentleman over there but you know there has mutilated the ears of his students has come between them and their natural instincts David would you like to say just maybe add a quick note that another I guess I suppose it's part of the medulla fication machine is the the economic system that that that drives work typically that almost requires a kind of instrumentalizing which is precisely a kind of uglification and and there's certainly a connection between that and this historical drift of the sense of beauty to a purely subjective experience becomes increasingly a prime atter of private experience and therefore not a matter of something that belongs in the world and so we we think if work is something that we do because we have to in order to acquire the means then to enjoy beauty now in the form of entertainment and something that's enjoy the home you know the response to that would require such a radical rethinking of how society is organized so that we don't instrumentalize the things that we make but treat them Schiller's got a friedrich schiller that the German philosophers want I think one of the best philosophers of beauty as a matter of fact um speaks of giving things dignity when you make something or even close that one wears you you give those the things themselves a certain dignity what does that mean means that they're not simply functional but have a certain you treat them as as as a certain sense as if they're granted granting you use there's obviously metaphor there and analogy but there's something to that that I think makes a lot of sense in in terms of work building a chair that has a certain dignity as opposed to simply fulfilling a function or meeting a bottom line or that sort of thing few more questions it's very hard for me to choose from here without feeling like I'm being selective and so urgent lady thank you very much for your talk so sweet and I really enjoyed it my question is about I've heard the saying that you can't develop a sense of you know since a beauty can develop your intellect unless all the needs of your body are taken care of and that you can't you know develop the body first or nurture the body before you can nurture the soul more or less and so my question was considering that intellect or beauty and a highly developed sense of beauty is for everyone how do you give that to people underserved populations who generally do not have their their bodily needs taken care of right it's difficult question this obviously if you're in a state of physical need say you're ill hungry in pain and so on it's rather difficult then to turn your attention to the beautiful the beautiful seems to be seems to belong to the realm of redundancy you know when all the jobs are done and we can take a leisurely attitude of things then the beauty of the world dawns on us it's only a saint who can find beauty when when in a state of pain or or sickness or whatever interestingly enough though we have a whole tradition of people who did just that cynjohn of the cross and similar meditative poets of the early ages were people who were familiar with the starvation and deprivation and sleeplessness and so on and often in cultivated it in order to have that vision of beauty which came suddenly in the in the early hours and that's not just a Christian tradition you know Rumi and and have his and the Persian poets likewise did this so we don't really there's no clear connection between being sated and being able to enjoy a beauty but for us for weak people like us in this room that's the easiest way to go about it but when it comes to impoverished people in world today impoverished communities in Latin America or elsewhere it should be remembered that that an impoverished community might still not be living in a state of physical need of actual hunger or or sickness or pain that they just don't have all the access to all the the pleasures and luxuries and comforts that we have but when we remember that those pleasures and luxuries and comforts have led to the uglification of our world we are apt to think that maybe they're going to get a better deal when it comes to beauty than we have I would look at their dancing and their singing for instance it's rather rather more cheerful and unpure than ours so that's one answer anyway thank you very much thank you my question is regarding dialectics and I wonder how you can avoid them what I specifically mean is a lot of our learning is learned through what we perceive to be differences east/west yeah and if not dialectics then we also understand things through hierarchy for an example a car can be more beautiful but doesn't make it less a car so you have a hierarchy of goods how do we avoid that and dr. Shirley I agree with you it seems to me that we would have a problem if we don't admit of transcendentals and would you say that truth is not a transcendental the good is not a transcendental or is it just beauty that's not a transcendental and my last comment about the prosaic person or the mediocre person what if that person is a contemplative person and is less active on the realm of our perception of that being does that person are truly of someone who is less full very efficient question asking there's a lot of questions there so all very interesting obviously we are questioning beings and we do automatically contrast the thing that we're interested in with some alternative and when you begin to be interested in music for instance or painting you are never satisfied simply to be exploring the Western tradition or whatever it might be you're bound to get interesting you know what did they do elsewhere what it's Indian and Balinese music really like and so and it's that's the way that actually our aesthetic sensibilities expand by coming to to identify in imagination with people to whom we don't spontaneously belong but we you know we come to see that they're of course their world is in its own way as interesting as ours so I think that this the dialectical process it's very important for expanding your cultural your cultural expertise or cultural acquisitions really now the other point I can't remember now a year hierarchies yes we do rank things this was a worried that the gentleman to your left hand you know how we rank things by judging them what is better than other things and so on it isn't it isn't vital to have a precise hierarchy in your mind of all the things that you like you know and often your content simply to have a repertoire that you can draw upon things that are appropriate for this situation or that situation rather than having a hierarchy of values even though you make judgments of a one kind or another so I think that's all very I mean we're now getting into the whole business of what criticism is and whether it can be taught or not people who teach literature and or teach art or music confront this question can you teach these things without also teaching some kind of a critical response to them if they someone who says that you know that finally Hawk and Thomas Kinkade they're the same kind of thing you know what you're going to say to him we're gonna give him a long discourse on the nature of kitsch and hope that it all that he'll learn from it or do you just show the thing you know that's just this is a big question of all critics have to confront I think I know that's do you want to say something David or no I would though like if I could return to an earlier question and give it a little more attention and I thought it was very probing the question about the ugly and why the fascination with the ugly when beauty is available and one can give one answer in terms of a certain cheap seductive appeal of what's ugly but perhaps a deeper account of the appeal of the ugly is that it's a way of striking a blow at the beautiful so there is an understandable antagonism to the beautiful with its mystery of transcendence and one way to strike out against that and live out one's resentment is to as it were emphatically produced the ugly and revel that you and your book mentioned an astonishing case of a desecration of a Mozart opera where in place of the lovers you have prostitutes performing obscene actions on the stage where the conductor wanted to desecrate the beautiful piece of work and so that I'd like to hear more from you about that motive where we're all not just to the ugly because we have a weakness for Kitsch but drawn to the ugly as part of a protest against the there were there was it in Japan this beautiful temple at Kyoto most beautiful building in all Japan and one day it burnt down and there they discovered it would be down by one of the monks and he was asked why did you why did you do this he said because it was so beautiful it made me feel really inferior I couldn't live with it and there is at least that's honest and a much you're absolutely right there is a desire to desecrate which is as old as mankind you know iconoclasm is all about this the history of the of the church through the early 10th the first ten centuries it has involved constant sweeping of the Econo class icon' a classroom across the continent of europe and we in in england tragically lost 98% of our art in the 17th century when the Puritans just went rampage through the churches smashing things pretending this was idolatry but of course they smashed them because they were in comparison with those things what they were and believed and were doing was so ugly and so we do have a desire to desecrate and and we have the desire to desecrate the human form which is what pornography is all about and to desecrate the human being to reduce him to a state of objects food and that's what the concentration camps were all about that's why Europe went through that terrible episode because speed the people who conducted it with just those sort of people who were made to feel inferior by the perception around them of ideals to which they couldn't match so which they couldn't live up and unfortunately had the power nevertheless just to bring those things down so I think we will have to take just one more question which is a very very silent lady the lady over there all right Katherine can you bring the can the urgent lady stand so Katherine so hi my name is red I go here thank you for answering all our questions I just have one more question but what if what if the it being ugly becomes mainstream and I study fashion marketing and when you brought up consumers and I thought that wasn't really interesting because there's this new wave of loving ugly things and before I used to be a protests of beauty but now I feel like it's lost it's become superficial it's lost its power so what happens when ugly is mainstream and everyone loves ugly and does that mean that beauty changes throughout time all right it's a very deep question and it's connected with what I was talking about the uglification of things around this the first response is to say can people really love things because they're ugly aren't they really deceiving themselves into thinking that in some way this uglification is a beautification and you know if you look at the the truly ugly things that you've encounter in modern art museums now they will always be presented not as as a manifestation of ugliness but as a challenge to accepted values you know they are the expression of this critical spirit which is which is raising questions about the complacent bourgeois world in which we live and that nobody very few people would say I do it because it's ugly and if they did they would accept the they would have to accept the rebuke you know in that case you know you shouldn't expect me to admire this and fashions which involve self conscious use of ugly details like mutilation of the body or whatever those fashions you know what they are a perversion I think we should allow ourselves to think that this is a perversion of something natural and it will not survive or if it did survive is because human nature has changed but you were seed you know down the centuries all kinds of difficult cases a difficult you know the the the the a certain African ways of decorating the face by distorting the mouth of rings or pushing the neck up with with metal rings and so on and we now look on that single less that's hideous but put it in its context and you will see that actually people didn't do this because they thought it was hideous this was a way of beautifying beautifying by showing the human body is somehow plastic a way of expressing an idea so just to do there are so few examples of people mutilating themselves in order to make themselves ugly but that's not a perfect example our answer to your question at all well I don't know if the answer is in one of your books then they could find it there but it might mean that you have another book to write and I think all of you know already that that sir roger has a a prolific presence online in the form of videos and talks and interviews and so those of you who don't know that you can you can learn more about what was discussed today and so much more and I also want to in closing just say that the Catholic University Bookstore has I think particularly in light of this event a number of Rogers books on questions of beauty and culture and conservativism so I invite you there and of course for the hildebrand aesthetics which will be forthcoming in November that can be you can become aware of that launch if you're not already on our email list or on our social media by following us there and that will come very soon and I want to thank once more dr. McCarthy of Catholic University's School lastly thank you very much for having us here we look forward to being back and we have a reception for you so we hope that you'll stay it's over on this stage left and we hope you'll stay and this is also your chance I suppose to ask Sir Roger a question we have to take him away unfortunately in the near future in any case thank you dr. Crosby dr. Schindler and Sir Roger thank you all for coming [Applause]

Channel: Hildebrand Project

Views: 63,177

Rating: 4.900208 out of 5

Keywords: Beauty, Aesthetics, Art, Scruton, Roger Scruton, CUA, Catholic University of America, Hildebrand, Dietrich von Hildebrand

Id: 1o0h1rcnOd0

Length: 96min 20sec (5780 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 04 2018