Can adversity be beautiful?
We determine what is good/bad largely by what is pleasurable or is of biological significance to our organism. If we could alter this judgment of good/bad could we not see heartbreak/sadness/distress etc. all as beautiful in their own right?
All the world's a stage and we are the actors and the performance includes the subjection to evil which we find intolerable yet from outside (alien) perspective could be seen as beautiful. Why couldn't we learn to see that? Indeed, after not feeling my emotions for so long i am relieved to finally feel something and at times am glad I feel melancholic.
Is it not foolhardy just to seek vein pleasures and not swim the depths of sorrow that seem so much deeper and more important?
All the world's a stage and we are the actors and the performance includes the subjection to evil which we find intolerable yet from outside (alien) perspective could be seen as beautiful. Why couldn't we learn to see that? Indeed, after not feeling my emotions for so long i am relieved to finally feel something and at times am glad I feel melancholic.
Is it not foolhardy just to seek vein pleasures and not swim the depths of sorrow that seem so much deeper and more important?
Comments (9)
She shoots up her "vein pleasures" by the shot. She silently dances to her sadness, oblivious to the rest of the world. A negative pleasure.
I think for this the best reference is Aristotle and his ethics. Happiness means that all faculties of the human soul function perfectly. The more the function appoaches perfection, the more happiness there is. This perfect functioning is achieved through virtues and each virtue has it's extremes. For instance bravery is a virtue and its extremes are acting reckless and acting cowardly. The key is to not be reckless or cowardly, but somewhere in the middle. Now, feeling melancholic is not part of a virtue or something like that, but I do think that there exists some system in which feeling a certain kind of way plays a part in happiness. So it is not good to feel very happy all the time, as it is equally bad to feel sad all the time. We have to balance everything out so melancholy is part of life and being happy.
Without knowing sadness/melancholy/pain, you can never truly experience the highest highs of happiness/joy. You can never experience only one pole of a polarity.
Sadness and pain can absolutely be beautiful ... they open your eyes to what you didn't notice or think about before. They give you a better vantage point whence to look at life and the world.
That said, when you come to the realization that ultimately, nothing is good/bad ... that it is, as you so eloquently put, all part of a big movie ... a movie that we mostly watch, and only infinitesimally influence ... then, we can go beyond the superficial lows and highs of happiness/sadness ... to a deeper place of peace and tranquility.
Eckhart Tolle says, "The function of suffering is to awaken you. Suffering is necessary till you realize that it isn't."
The artist's production of a work of art is a struggle for a) the artist, b)the viewer c) and for society. The artist struggle is with the paint, the basketball, all of the matter and instruments used in the production of the work, shaping them to his will in with the creation of form making the invisible visible. The style of the work is like the flow in team sports. All goes well when the viewer's mimics the artist's creative struggle because the work, if beautiful, give us pleasure which enables us to move beyond our determinate concepts, in pleasure and pain, in the aesthetic effect, we move beyond the visible. Maybe like 'hang time'
Beautiful art pushes against norms, declares itself against the preconception of our normative ideas, like Michael's hang time. Art that is merely political is kitsch. The artist pushes against norms and the beauty of the work is its battering ram and its siren.
My thoughts seem to be close to what you have outlined.
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", reminds me of Protagoras "Man is the measure of all things", subjective yes, it is a form of relativism and perhaps pragmatism is the only way around relativism. The only pragmatic aspect to beauty as I see it, is the qualification of the beholder's ability to recognize Beauty, be able to distinguish creativity from that which is derivative. The combination of history, natural talent and education which enables a sense of Taste in the beholder.
If it is a measure, then it is a measure of affective intensity, and not signification or meaning. When I view a great work of art, it announces itself, and yes the effect is within me, but at the same time these works differentiate themselves from all other objects. If I recall correctly, Hanna Ardent called art works thought-objects.
There are different aspects to beauty, so yes beauty gives "moment its greatest presence" but the immediate beauty in a complex line of poetry may be paralleled by a less immediate, more contemplative beauty embedded in our imagination. (I think terror is in the provenance of The Sublime.)
We live in a world full of narratives, they enable us to communicate with each other. The beautiful suggests its own narrative, which when successful gets incorporated into this world of narratives. The creativity of a beautiful narrative enables us to expand our concepts. It opens up space in our imagination by struggling against existing narratives, in this strife the work's truth either prevails or it is still born,