What is a Beautiful Thing?
Some years back, a research on aesthetics upended an age-old aphorism that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. By that research, it isn’t so. It turns out that there must be a minimum content of tastefulness before we conclude that something is beautiful. This shouldn’t really come as a surprise. Despite our differences in preferences, at art fairs, fashion shows, design shows, etc, we often reach a common decision about what is most beautiful.
And although philosophers have not definitively agreed on how beauty should be perceived, some of them, such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus, have agreed that beauty was objectively seen. They have reasoned that beautiful things (perhaps beautiful people as well) are in fact beautiful regardless of what one thinks or feels about them.
Another research done 10 years ago has dispelled the notion that taking cue from love, ugliness may ultimately grow on us. This research has shown that no matter how long or how often we are subjected to viewing an ugly thing, we won’t perceive it as beautiful. In unavoidable blunt terms, this study has made it definitive that ugliness is never softened by familiarity!
What then is a beautiful thing? It is anything whose existence captures the energy and passion of its creator’s quest to give pleasure to those who behold or hear it. Consequently, beauty is pleasure derived from the quality of a thing. Understood this way, beauty is therefore a value, a moral value really, as Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher, has characterised it.
Just as with truth and goodness - being the only other ultimate values that justify our moral and rational inclinations – beauty is pursued solely for its own sake. In other words, beauty is not pursued for money, fame, power, influence or any other interest except only that in and by itself it is good for us. Further, as Kant insists, those who have a personal interest in beauty often have a personal inclination to a good moral disposition. This is why everyone should have an interest in beauty.
The results of our perception of beauty also explain our moral interest in it. These results are how beauty improves our emotional, physical, mental, cultural and environmental wellbeing in every way imaginable. (Correspondingly, we would be at a grave loss if beauty was absent from our lives.) Additionally, beauty requires us to think. When we think, as Hannah Arendt, the German-American philosopher has written, given that we will be able to tell right from wrong, we will also be able to tell beautiful from ugly.
Actually, the corollary of thinking about beauty is that in the presence of a beautiful thing we feel a wide range of emotions, from admiration to awe and from fascination to wonder. Unsurprisingly, beauty always creates a first but strong impression on our minds.
By this impression we often go beyond looks and sound and instinctively start making assumptions – often correct but occasionally wrong – about the owner of a beautiful thing. Sometimes we assume that they are probably successful, other times we assume that they must be people of high status, and even at times we assume that they ought to be intelligent or at least be highly educated people. Ultimately
therefore, at its best, beauty serves us. How then does one identify a beautiful thing? In his book, The Quality Instinct, the art historian Maxwell L Anderson writes that the skill to identify a beautiful thing can be developed by everyone everywhere. Formal training or growing up in an environment where beautiful things are held or displayed might be the foundation for developing taste but they are not the only place where an eye or ear or discernment for taste may be trained.
Everyday examples in our lives may drive this point home: consider that any thoughtful mother has an instinct for quality baby clothes and associated wares; any attentive classical music aficionados can make a distinction between good and bad composition; any writer who approaches his or her words with the carefulness and balance of a skillful tailor conveys pleasure to his or her readers; and any experienced home owner can see kitsch house display from tasteful ornamentation.
As Anderson writes, through deep immersion, individuals with taste have developed in their brains, visual, audio and other sensory impulses that intuitively help them differentiate between good and bad art, design, composition, writing and other forms of creative expression.
What they know, which we too will know once we have acquired good taste reflexes, is that beauty in creative works emanates from superior artistry, forceful imagination and extraordinary technical skill. Additionally, Anderson writes that those who don’t have this intuitive skill will often use the price of a thing as a gauge for its beauty. When they do so, invariably they fail to see the merit of the creative work on its own but wrongfully attribute its beauty to its price.
It is rare but possible that a beautiful thing can be found randomly and in an unlikely place, such as in a family kist, or at a flea market or even at a junk shop. But usually, the hunt for a beautiful thing begins as a conscious decision, followed by an intrepid search, and ultimately an acquisition of it.
This odyssey typically requires both patience and a surrender to a sort of love, the love of good taste. The reason for the quest for it and the pleasure derived from the acquired beautiful thing, far exceed the effort and expense incurred in that odyssey. Sometimes the acquired beautiful thing even becomes an heirloom in the estate of the acquirer or a people’s inheritance.
This heirloom may be any form of tasteful traditional craftsmanship such as this country’s beautiful huts memorialised by Sandy Grant in his pictorial book on the subject; everyday useful things such as the baskets made in the north west of Botswana; cultural attire created by ordinary folks in our villages; and even that place of worship (in the Gaborone Main Mall) which is garbed in minimalist colours like a raiment intended to delight with its simplicity.
In these circumstances, all these beautiful things and others are part of our beautified lives. Expectedly, as we immerse ourselves in them, they should give us a foundation in matters of aesthetics. Then the experts’ claim that tastefulness is the right of all of us will be confirmed. But first, we must each be willing to pay attention to quality details that make some things beautiful.