The judgment of beauty is not just an optional addiction to the repertoire of human judgments

Roger Scruton: BEAUTY. A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2011 A short selection of some interesting ideas: PREFACE: – Beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it. (XI).

– Beauty is a real an universal value, one anchored in our rational nature, and the sense of beauty has an indispensable part to play in shaping the human world. (XII) CHAPTER ONE, JUDGING BEAUTY

– The minimal beauties are far more important to our daily lives, and far more intricately involved in our own rational decision, than the great works which (if we are lucky) occupy our leisure hours. (p. 10) …for most of us it is far more important to achieve order in the things surrounding us, and to ensure that the eyes, the ears and the sense of fittingness are not repeatedly offended. (p.11)

– Aquinas… defining the beautiful in the first part of the Summa as that which is pleasing to sight (pulchra sunt quae visa placent). (p. 19) CHAPTER TWO, HUMAN BEAUTY – Although there may be fashions in human beauty, and although different cultures may embellish the body in different ways, the eyes, mouth and hands have an universal appeal. For they are

2

the features from which the soul of another shines on us, and make itself known. (p. 41) – There is a beauty of an aged face, which has emerged, as it were, from a life of moral trials. (p. 45) – The beautiful and the sacred are connected in our emotions and both have their origin in the experience of embodiment, which is at its most intense in our sexual desires. So, by another route, we arrive at a thought which we could, without too much anachronism, atribute to Plato: the thought that sexual interest, the sense of beauty and reverence for the sacred are proximate states of mind, which feed into one another and grow from a common root. (p. 48) CHAPTER TREE, NATURAL BEAUTY – Works of art stand as the eternal receptacles of intensely intended messages. And often it is only the expert, the connoiseur or the adept who is fully open to what they mean. Nature, by contrast, is generous, content to mean only herself, uncontained, without an external frame, and changing from day to day. ( p.60) – It is difficult to believe that our attitude to natural beauty is founded completely differently from our attitude to art, when the two are so intimately connected. (p.64) – …aesthetic judgment is a necessary part of doing anything well. (p.66) CHAPTER FOUR, EVERYDAY BEAUTY – The best place to begin the exploration of everyday beauty is in the garden, where leisure, learning and beauty come together, in a liberating experience of home. (p. 67)

3

– The judgment of beauty is not just an optional addiction to the repertoire of human judgments, but the unavoidable consequence of taking life seriously, and becoming truly conscious of our affairs. (p. 69) – In much of our activity we are „home building“, erecting in the teeth of change and decay, the permanent symbols of a settled form of life. The invisible hand to which I just referred moves of its own accord towards style, grammar and convention: and this is what we witness in vernacular architecture, in folk costumes, in table manners and in the customs and ceremonies of a traditional culture. (p. 79) CHAPTER FIVE, ARTISTIC BEAUTY – Works of art… have a dominant function. They are objects of aesthetic interest. They may fulfil this function in a rewarding way, offering food for thought and spiritual uplift, winning for themselves a loyal public that returns to them to be consoled or inspired. (p.84) – And it really matters which kind of art you adhere to, which you include in your treasury of symbols and allusions, which you carry around in your heart. Good taste is as important in aesthetics as it is in humour, and indeed taste is what it is all about. (p. 84) – Art moves us because it is beautiful, and i tis beautiful in part because it means something. It can be meaningful without being beautiful; but to be beautiful it must be meaningful. (p.99) CHAPTER SIX, TASTE AND ORDER – Symmetry and order; …proportion; …closure; …convention; …harmony, and also novelty and excitement: all those seem to have permanent hold on the human psyche (p. 119)

4

CHAPTER SEVEN, ART AND EROS – Normal desire is an inter – personal emotion. Its aim is a free and mutual surrender, which is also a uniting of two individuals, of you and me – through our bodies, certainly, but not merely as our bodies. (p. 133) CHAPTER EIGHT, FLIGHT FROM BEAUTY – Soulless desert; …rejection of beauty; …a shock value; …desacration; …denial of love… Beauty is downgraded as something too sweet, too escapist and too far from realities to deserve our undeceived attention. (p. 140) – It is not merely that artists, directors, musicians and others connected with the arts are in flight from beauty. There is a desire to spoil beauty, in acts of aesthetic iconoclasm… For beauty makes a claim on us: it is a call to renounce our narcissism and look with reverence on the world. …The fear of desecration is a vital element in all religions. Indeed, that is what the word religio originally meant: a cult or ceremony designed to protect some sacred place from sacrilege (p. 145) – As Plato and Kant both saw, therefore, the feeling for beauty is proximate to the religious frame of mind, arising from a humble sense of living with imperfections, while aspiring towards the highest unity with the transcendental. (p. 146) – The art of desecration represents a new departure, and one that we should try to understand, since it lies at the centre of the postmodern experience. …Desacration is a kind of defence against the sacred, an attempt to destroy its claims. In the presence of sacred things our lives are judged and in order to escape that judgment we destroy the thing that seems to accuse us. (p.147) – The willful desecration of the human form …is also denial of love. It is an attempt to remake a world as though love were no longer a part of it. And that, surely, is what is the most important characteristic of the postmodern culture…: it is a