Daniel Massett

Tag: life

  • Beauty & Despair

    The loss of beauty leads to despair. This is the condition of our world without art and it is precisely what Tolstoy found when, confronted by the many competing definitions of beauty, he despaired of its existence and the effect this would have on his art.

    It’s actually difficult to understand this as a modern person because we are completely engulfed by ugly art. Not only art, but also anything made that could and should be beautiful is now not. As a teacher, I think a lot about classrooms and school buildings, with their low ceilings and intense fluorescent lights, their walls covered with ugly patterns of ugly-colored paint, their tiled floors. Where classrooms and academic buildings once, at their best, were designed to look like this, the University of Michigan Law School library:

    they now looks like this, a typical contemporary library at the same university, Michigan, as the above library:

    What is the difference between these two rooms? Why does one room, with its deep brown woods, its vaulted ceiling, its chandeliers, make one think of how pleasant it would be to study, how good it is to learn and commit oneself to learning, while the other, with its low ceilings, trademark fluorescent lights, ugly mass-produced tables and chairs, and puke green walls, make you feel ill-at-ease? The difference, I would argue, is that one was designed merely for its function (both are places of learning, broadly-speaking), while the other is designed for that same function but also for beauty. When beauty is not considered, ugliness and despair follow. You would want to leave the modern classroom as soon as the class period ended. You would want to stay inside that library until they forced you out. Why is that? What exactly is beauty, and what effect does it have on the human person?

    What is Beauty?

    Let’s return to Tolstoy. In his work, What is Art?, Tolstoy examines the myriad definitions of beauty, and, despairing of finding common ground between them, tosses up his hands and decides that beauty does not exist. He has become trapped within the cave. This loss of the reality of beauty leads Tolstoy to conclude that, if fiction isn’t simply for writing something beautiful, which it can’t be, then it must be for teaching moral lessons, and, since beauty doesn’t exist, he lambasts works of the past that don’t possess a strong moral lesson, such as his own masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina, as well as works by Beethoven, Shakespeare, Dante, and many others besides.

    It’s important to note that, just because there are many competing definitions of “beauty,” this in no way means that beauty does not exist. People could have many different definitions of “peanut butter”. One person might say they’re the things that you wear on your face that help you see. One might say that its peanuts ground up so finely that the oil releases, making the peanut spreadable on bread. One person might say it’s the briny water that surrounds the landmasses of planet Earth. But these sundry definitions don’t mean that “peanut butter” doesn’t exist! It only means that many of those definitions are wrong, and only one is right. The point being, many philosophers have simply been wrong about their definition of “beauty”.

    Beauty is one of those things that we all know exists until that knowledge is beaten–or should I say, educated–out of us. One of the great “common sense” philosophers, St. Thomas Aquinas, defines beauty as “that which, when seen, pleases.” Now, there’s a start! This strikes one as being patently obvious, and yet, compared to the modern declaration that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder (and, the implication being, it therefore doesn’t really exist outside of the individual’s mind),” Aquinas’ definition has the wondrous quality of actually claiming beauty does in fact exist. It is a thing outside of oneself that pleases those who behold it. Great!

    But he goes further, trying to define the core of beauty. “”For beauty three things are required: this first is integrity, or perfection; (second) due proportion, or harmony; and the third is splendor.” Again, this isn’t to get too lost in the weeds, but essentially, these means that there is a core to beauty. There is a certain perfection to it (so, a song doesn’t have a sour note, or at least, no sour note/dissonance without adequate reason for it being there); a harmony (so a work of fiction will harmonize, say, on several layers–character, plot, symbolism, theme, etc), and splendor, how bright it is, how deep (so a work of fiction whose theme is, say, the nature and meaning of suffering–The Brothers Karamazov–is going to have more splendor than one whose theme is a fairly surface-level examination of love and friendship–the Harry Potter series; or, to compare apples to something more like apples, the examination of good and evil in The Lord of the Rings has far more depth and splendor than the examination of the same in the Harry Potter series).

    Another way of applying this, and perhaps a better way, is to say that if a work of fiction has integrity (all of its character arcs, plot, and theme, etc. are satisfied) and harmony (all these things work in conjunction with one another, with nothing out of place), then a deep splendor, a kind of radiance, shines through–that feeling one gets of the depth of beauty when one closes Anna Karenina or The Iliad or some other beautiful work. A kind of deep joy is felt as the human heart and mind connect with the objectively beautiful, and we can deepen even more this splendor through contemplating a great work and understanding it more deeply for its richness.

    And this definition gives much flexibility to art to capture some “fragment” of the beauty of God. As Jacques Maritain says in Art & Scholasticism, “There is not only one way, but a thousand and ten thousand ways in which the notion of integrity, or perfection, or achievement cah be realized. The absence of head or arm is a lack of integrity very noticeable in a woman, and slightly noticeable in a statue, no matter how disappointed N. Ravaisson may have been at not being able to complete the Venus de Milo. The least sketch of da Vinci, let alone of Rodin, is more final than the most finished of Bouguereau. And if a Futurist thinks fit to give only one eye, or a quarter of an eye, to the lady whom he is portraying, no one denies his right to do so, one only asks-that is the whole crux-that this quarter-eye be all the eye needed by the said lady ‘in the given case.’” A beautiful object captures some part of beauty particular to itself, yet still in relation to that eternal beauty of the Divine Being. There are endless characters, themes, plots, and so on that could make for a beautiful work of fiction. Beauty is larger than any one work of art, and larger than every work of art ever created or to be created put together, as beauty is ultimately God Himself.

    We can see beauty most clearly, it seems, when we are merely living in reality. Nature is one of the great works of art, and simply looking up at the night sky, or standing on top of a mountain in the woods, or looking at the sun set over the ocean, is enough for us to feel beauty’s strong pull over our hearts and souls. It’s also clear to see how leads the heart to God–the beauty of these things very nearly wounds us. We are reminded of what we are made for. We feel the urge to throw away our phone, hug the people we love in such a way that they understand how deeply we love them, to live a meaningful life. It is the “wounding thing,” as Benedict XVI says. It wounds us because it reminds us of everything we so desperately, deeply want–to live in the spirit of God, to “choose Life, not Death” as Moses says to the Israelites (afterwards teaching them a song to remind them always of this choice–he knows he must appeal to their heart, and that truth found within beauty is of deepest power).

    Despair

    I don’t want to linger long on ugliness, but it is also noticeable when we compare it to something ugly, like modern art, which rarely possesses beauty. As such, no one is called to any sort of higher life when beholding it. To suggest that someone was put into the raptures of beauty while looking at a Jackson Pollack is absurd beyond absurdity, because it would be a total rejection of beauty and human nature.

    Ugliness leads to despair because we aren’t treated as spiritual beings. As von Hildebrand writes, there was once a time where even utensils were small reminders of our humanity, our strange nature of being both matter and spirit. As Pascal says, ““Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapour, a drop of water is enough to kill him. but even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows none of this.” We once created things that were little reminders of this simply by being useful and beautiful. Alice von Hildebrand writes of even children’s toys once being “little masterpieces,” where now children only recieve mass-produced, ugly, plastic toys. And again, a cheap plastic toy is nothing compared to the horrors of looking at an AI-generated video.

    Beauty draws us in. It acts on us, and we can meet that act. Ugliness does little to act on us, certainly at our highest, most spiritual level. We must act on it to make any sort of meaning out of it.

    Moreover, we used to create art that far more powerfully and directly spoke the same truth.

    The ultimate end of all finite beauty is to manifest, even if in fragments, the infinite beauty of God.

    – Rev. Robert E. McCall, S.J.J.

    What is Art?

    An old distinction is useful when thinking about the question of art. People once distinguished between the “arts” and the “fine arts”. Remnants of this distinction still exist today. My degree is a “Master of Fine Arts”. But few could really explain the difference between the arts and the fine arts, and this collapsing of distinction has led, as it always does, to not insignificant confusion.

    An “art” is anything that is made. It is an art to build a house, or cook a meal, or put the sole on a shoe. It is an art to make a table, or to make the silverware that is set on the table. A “fine art” is anything that is made with the express purpose of being beautiful. A “fine art” is a “thing of beauty…a joy forever.” We have art forms that have been cultivated for millenia around this idea, from dance to theatre to poetry. From time to time, a new artform emerges, such as the novel (though there were novels in antiquity, the “modern novel” began in the 17th century, often with Don Quixote being named the first modern novel) or cinema, and the jury is still out on if video games are fine art (a question I’ll attempt to answer below as a huge fan of video games and art).

    Again, the idea of primary and secondary purposes comes into play here. A spoon need only be a spoon. A good spoon is one that can ladle soup from a bowl into your mouth. A bad spoon is one that cannot. “Arts” have their primary purpose in something other than beauty. And yet, they can still possess beauty to greater and lesser degrees. Dietrich von Hildebrand, in Aesthetics, writes on this so well that I feel I should quote him in full:

    [U]ntil the beginning of the nineteenth century and the triumph of the machine, culture had not yet been strangled by civilization. The expression of the spirit, the gift of giving form in such a way that was not practically indispensable, penetrated all the practical spheres of life up to that time. A knife should not only cut well; it should also possess a noble form. A chair should not only be comfortable and solid; it should also be beautiful, in fact it should sooner be a little less comfortable than be sober and prosaic. Practical life as a whole possessed an organic character and was therefore united to a special poetry of life. Related to this was the penetration of life by culture.

    But as the practical life of the human being was robbed of its organic character and was mechanized and thereby depersonalized, so too the poetry of practical life was lost. The practical requirements in residential homes became a prosaic matter that was radically detached from the affective and intellectual life that we lead as persons. Railway stations, factories, airports, filling stations, and department stores were built to serve technical, neutral purposes. Cities like Phoenix and Tucson in Arizona largely consist only of such buildings, which are completely separated from the residential homes. In all these buildings, it is clear that there is no link between practical requirements and the spiritual requirements of the human being. The latter are neutralized in such a way that they no longer offer any artistic stimulus for the architectural shaping of these buildings and rooms. The building itself becomes an object of technology.

    -Dietrich von Hildebrand, Aesthetics, vol. 2

    So, a practical “art” can nevertheless have beauty, and yet, in our mass-produced era, they typically do not possess much. And yet, the lack of beauty in practical arts is one of the great causes of despair in our times, because things that could remind us of our spiritual natures no longer do. A spoon is just a utensil. A classroom is just a space for receiving information. A city street is just a set of lanes for getting from one ugly commercial building to the next, with the potential to see some ads along the way. We are never reminded by these things of our spiritual nature, though in a better world, we would be, and we once were.

    The fine arts, on the other hand, pursue beauty above all else. If they are useful (say, a song written for a film score, or a painting to be displayed in a political building, or The Aeneid being used to secure a kind of political narrative of Rome), that is all well and good, but they do not need to be useful. They need only be beautiful.

    The beginner fiction writer should be aware that art must lead the way to reforging the connection to the Divine through the Via Pulchritudinis–The Way of Beauty. The connection between fiction and truth will be explored in the next chapter. For now, it is worth saying that a work of fiction that has great plot, deep characterization, and great language–to oversimplify something that will be explored later–is what makes fiction beautiful.

  • My Students Don’t Know What a “Community” Is

    Socrates, in Plato’s “Phaedrus”, says that there is a danger in learning to write. He fears that, with this new technology, people will lose their memory and will become less wise, seeming to be very wise for having read, but being in truth unwise for never having thought through anything on their own or through dialogue with another. Writing, in short, is bad. It is a technology best ignored.

    This is a famous scene from Plato, famous as to almost be a cliche reference. Yet, it should give us fresh pause here to note that something we don’t even consider a technology or to have any negative effects could once have been thought of as a danger, a thought worth lingering on a while. Most of us wish we read more, or that our children read more, or that our society read more. We hear Plato, but perhaps our mind immediately turns to what we’ve gained through writing–access to different cultures, history, the Great Books, empathy and compassion and understanding!

    Yet, did we actually lose our memory? Perhaps individually we have, and as communities, we almost certainly have. How many of us know our family history? Know the street our parents grew up on? Our grandparents? In losing our own ability to reflect and converse, our wisdom has been lessened along with our memory.

    This loss of wisdom through communal memory became apparent to me through an essay I assign each semester to my college freshman which tasks them with locating a problem within their community and researching a potential solution. Anxiety sets in immediately. Some look lost, hopeless even.  I’m not trying to be dramatic or overwrought–they really don’t know how to begin this assignment, which is the largest grade of the semester. Inevitably, when I approach these students to ask if they have any questions, they tell me they don’t understand the assignment.

    “Well, what’s your community?” I say.

    “I’m not sure.”

    “Where did you go to school? Church? What town did you grow up in? Who are the people you’ve grown up with and known all your life?”

    Some are able to step off here, and I have received some great essays written about local communities. Essays about the need for walking spaces, essays about basketball courts in disrepair. But many still cannot. Instead of being prompted by these questions, they shrug. They still don’t know how to move forward. With this type of student, I then say, “What about a community online? Maybe you’re part of a video game community, or a community of people with similar health problems, or whatever.”

    These students then light up. “Oh! I can write about that?”

    I tell them yes, and they’re off to the races.

    They don’t have a local community. They have an internet community. 

    Do you see what has happened? Technology–here, the internet, social media, and so on–have robbed these students of something once an obvious part of human life, namely, the fact that everyone lives their life around others and shares a life with them. Those people are your community. Technology that, yes, plugged my students in with people who share an interest, has also completely disconnected them from an actual flesh and blood community of the people who live on their street, go to their school, their church, their parks, their restaurants, their grocery stores. They don’t even realize it has happened. They don’t know another way. Technology that was forced on them from childhood robbed them of something essential to human life.

    This is but one example. And the fact is, far more frightening technologies, ones with very little obvious good and much obvious bad, are right around the corner with AI and the new Transhuman technologies headed our way. AI has destroyed my students’ ability to write and their ability to think. Perhaps “destroyed” is the wrong word, as that implies it was there to begin with. Rather, they were robbed of it. AI came out in their prime learning years of middle and high school, and by the time they reach college, they perhaps have not set down their own words in years. They also don’t want to do research–after all, the AI can summarize research for them! But of course, they lose the strengthening of the mind through deep reading and interpreting and correlating facts. It’s as though they’ve only eaten baby mush–if presented with a steak, they find it distasteful because they no longer know how to chew. One day, perhaps they’ll see nothing wrong with their jaws being removed from lack of use. “Don’t give in to AI!” I tell them. “I teach you writing not so that you can get an A in a class, but so that you can write a Maid if Honor speech for your sister, or a letter to a friend going through a hard time, or a eulogy at your father’s funeral.” But to many students, I fear such examples are too abstract, too far away, and the allure of the easy A and a night spent smoking pot and playing Fortnite and scrolling Tinder are so real and so tantalizingly close….

    We have come, I think, to the place CS Lewis saw in his masterpiece, The Abolition of Man, where we have begun to give up the very things that makes us human, to cede over our humanity and the humanity of the future to technocrats, CEOs, Silicon Valley, the powers that be. 

    Why is this happening? I think, for one, those in power wish to create the Homo Deus, to reference Yuval Noah Harari’s work of the same name. This is, I think, the great modern project, one dreamt if in Comte and Nietzche and Feurerbach and in the minds if countless scientists and technologists and businessmen who could profit from it. These are the very same people who now run our world. It is the secular project to create the man who is forever young, beautiful, to finally cast off the yoke of religion which they see as tied only to our fear of death and psychological need for an afterlife. If we live forever, then we need not worry about these things. They have encouraged us to think this same way. We worship celebrities who don’t seem to age. We turn to gurus like Dr. David Sinclair who promise eternal life on this earth (even as he begins to appear more and more sickly, more and more wasted away). We try to keep up with modern slang as though we’re going to be here always to use it. We all study STEM, being so certain there is no future in the Humanities and all future in perfect health and new technology. If we could cure cancer, cure obesity, cure alzheimers, cure death itself. Pills pills pills. Botox and plastic surgery. This is the culture we are in. It’s the water we all swim in. If you don’t, it is because you actively resist. Dead fish swim with the current.

    It is also happening because of our wrongheaded idea of progress. We think of moving in one of two directions: forward or backward. Again, we are convinced from an early age that everything new is good. Of course we should perform trans surgeries. Of course we should perform abortions. Of course we should use IVF. And once we start, of course we can never stop. That would be Draconian! But we fail to see that we can not only move forwards or backwards, but we can also climb up or down, and this is a far more important movement to consider. We can grow colder, more violent, wishing evil on our political opponents. We can grow bitter, doomscrolling until we are certain everything is over. We can grow detached, thinking our lives don’t matter. Or we can grow bold, loving others, really loving them and looking them in the face and speaking to them. We can grow devout, going to church and thinking often of our God and if we are living up to His call for an adventurous life. We can grow happier, the rich, deep happiness of a life spent doing the right thing over the easy thing. 

    Every person has to look inside themselves every day and ask fundamental questions. Am I living the life I am meant to? How did I fail those around me who need me? How can I be better? Notice, these questions will not lead to top-down, idealistic and ideological solutions, the kind you will hear from the elites at the World Economic Forum or Silicon Valley. They will not lead to prescriptions everyone must follow. The answer to those questions will differ for all depending on their own lives and their own days, which are all we are responsible for. We may have to give up certain things we’ve grown accustomed to. I block the internet on my phone. I’m considering doing away with video games. I don’t drink except on the right occasion. Why? I want to be a present dad and husband. I want to be a great fiction writer. I want to read some books, because, though Plato is correct, books are a technology I think have benefitted me more than harmed me. Though I also don’t want to read too much, because I can become obsessive about reading and begin ignoring more important things. Simply, I want to live. I don’t want to live a life that is actually death in disguise. 

    We can give ourselves over completely to technology, and many do. Even hearing these arguments, many will shrug and say that it’s the way of the future–why worry or resist? It will certainly end up just fine. But of course, this isn’t true. Technology, especially this newer stripe, always promises us more life but actually robs us of it. The alternative is that we reclaim ourselves, and when we reclaim ourselves, we can come to reclaim our relationships, and from our relationships, our communities, and perhaps then, for a time, our world.