The first item on my list of negations was “the world is not beautiful.” Here is a reason for thinking so: the great Stendahl has given us a succinct definition of beauty that to my mind can scarcely be contested: “La beauté n’est que la promesse du bonheur.”. But if we accept that, perhaps we should also accept the symmetrical thought “La laideur n’est que la promesse du malheur.” No one can reasonably deny that there is much about the world that portends a vast amount of sadness, misfortune, misery, all that might be encompassed inside the concept of malheur and that, especially if one accepts negation 9, that life is on balance suffering, then the world correctly read promises rather more malheur than bonheur. But granting that, the world can hardly be said to be beautiful, n’est pas?
You mean la laideur ? N’est-ce pas ?
You know, that’s exactly what I thought before I second-thought “it’s been a couple of years and I’d better check.” Only I checked somewhere unreliable, apparently. You are correct — the noun is feminine and I have corrected it in the post.
I propose to refute you thusly.
Take a beautiful sandwich. Full of rich, flavorful ingredients, ripe with the promise of happiness.
Now blend it, thoroughly, in a blender.
There is now much about the sandwich that portends unhappiness, and little that portends happiness. It is no longer a beautiful sandwich.
Insistence on taking the world “on balance” is like insisting on blending the sandwich before you evaluate its beauty. The beauty that is in the world is situational, transitional, and fleeting. Sometimes the promised pleasure is just as fleeting; the sun will finish setting, and the pleasure in viewing the beauty of the sunset soon ends. The pretty girl, smiling, stops, and turns away. But there was still beauty — promise of pleasure if you will — in the setting sun and the smiling girl.
To say that the world is not beautiful, I think, requires you to avert your eyes from any sight that promises pleasure simply to look upon it Or to look, while maintaining a firm mental focus on a thousand countervailing promises of suffering that also exist in the world. One might do that…but why?
I say the the world is beautiful. It is also ugly. It is many other things, too, and all of them at the same time.
I. Slightly serious reply
Georges Rey, in an essay “Meta-Atheism: Religious Avowal as Self-Deception,” discusses what he calls “peculiarly selective perspectives.” Rey is specifically speaking to the beliefs of people who avow religions, but his point might apply more broadly.
The reason why one might (from time to time, anyway) want to try to think about the whole is because one might be curious about certain highly abstract value propositions. Religious apologists sometimes are — it’s a caricature, but one with a grain of truth in it, to have them saying things like “look how beautiful the world is, ergo God!” (This is why Rey is writing about the point.) Unsurprisingly, I see stuff like this as something to resist.
II. Somewhat silly reply
Imagine a life-size, high-resolution reproduction of Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earing. Most people would say this is a beautiful object, even if it is just a reproduction. It’s a pretty small painting (Wikipedia puts it at 17.5″ by 15″. )
Now imagine that this Vermeer reproduction is stuck (as a collage element, perhaps) inside a giant canvas painted by Thomas Kinkade. You will have to forgive my skepticism about the prospect of the whole artifact being beautiful. And if you can concentrate on just the Vermeer inside the Kinkade, well, your powers of concentration would be much greater than mine.
What is that old aphorism? “Where you stand depends on where you sit.”
My slightly serious response to Rey, if not to you, is “Who appointed you the arbiter of the peculiar?” To me it seems peculiar not to be selective about one’s perspective, and I’m not sure why I ought to privilege Rey’s viewpoint on peculiarity over my own.
Even Rey’s laundry list of ugliness in the world doesn’t strike me as particularly long, compared to the inventory of beauty the world has to offer. If I were trying to bootstrap a deity with that inventory, the right response seems to be challenging my logic, not trying to arm-wave away the beauty by reference to simultaneous ugliness or even suffering.
Your “somewhat silly” reply actually strikes me as a much more worthy argument. If each bit of beauty in the world is overwhelmed and surrounded by ugliness, it would be truculent and petty and implausible to squint and say “I can only see the beautiful bit.” But this is not my subjective experience of the world. Beauty and ugliness, pleasure and suffering, all are mixed and swirled through a lifetime of experience. In varying amounts they’re all in view at any given time, but for me at least, beauty is rather more accessible than pleasure. There’s plenty of beauty, it’s easy for me to see a lot of beauty most of the time even if some ugliness is also in the frame, as it usually is. (Would that I could say the same about pleasure versus suffering — you’ll note I agreed with #9 even if I didn’t agree with #1.)
There are two positions one can take here, which is to be either a realist or an anti-realist about aesthetic judgments. The realist position is that beauty is somehow “out there”in the world, some sort of mind-independent property which we might be able to perceive or deduce, something like the laws of physics or the propositions of mathematics (most, but not all, people are realists about these). An anti-realist about aesthetics denies the realist claim. What we judge beautiful or ugly is just a psychological fact about ourselves; there’s no objective truth of the matter. Probably most, but not all, people are anti-realists about aesthetic judgments. I am. I myself do not much feel the allure of lady warthogs, but understand that gentlemen warthogs in the full flush of their warthoghoods feel rather differently, and the more power to them. I suspect that in the comment “where you stand depends on where you sit” means you think similarly. People who are anti-realists about aesthetics can, I think, have interesting and productive conversations about what’s beautiful or not — one might try to draw the attention of another to aspects of some part of the world that the other has overlooked and thus change their perception of it. But one might also just hit the rock bottom of any such discussion, a point where people just do not have the same reaction to something, and that’s fine, as far as I am concerned.
But it’s probably not fine as far as the people that Rey is addressing in his essay. If memory serves me correctly he’s responding to arguments made by Alvin Plantinga and the like to the effect that the beauty of the world reveals a divine creator. Plantinga (and people like him) thinks that the beauty of the world is some sort of objective fact (that is, they’re being aesthetic realists). If you disagree with him, his explanation of the disagreement isn’t that you and he have different tastes or are different people with different psychologies and reactions to things. It’s that his view is objectively correct and that you can’t see what he sees because you are tainted and marred by sin. Many people who have had the misfortune to fall into conversation with religious believers have been subjected to similarly tedious and specious claims. (A similar example would be “my inner experiences are evidence for the truth of my religion, but your lack of similar experiences are not evidence against the truth of my religion.”) This is what Rey is pushing back against, as well he should. One of his rejoinders is that it is Plantinga (and by extension, religious people more generally) who have the curiously selective perspectives.)
I have had that exact conversation with a highly intelligent friend known to and respected by us both. Now that you mention it. (I suspect you have had the same conversation, possibly with the same friend.)
From your description of Alvin Plantinga, I would conclude that he must be a supercilious twat.
I think I must be an anti-realist on the question of beauty. I certainly do not think it is an objective truth. However there is a great deal of human consensus on the subject. Individual variation exists, but few people consider the Hoover Dam ugly or a poxy hooker with meth teeth beautiful.
I am left uncertain whether you find fewer things beautiful than do I, or whether my hunch is right that you are essentially stirring the beauty with the ugliness in a metaphorical blender before summing them and concluding that the world is not beautiful.
Plantinga is actually a pretty serious philosopher, inclined to abuse his abilities in defense of his religion. Hence he rates an entry in the satirical Philosophical Lexicon:
planting, v. To use twentieth-century fertilizer to encourage new shoots from eleventh-century ideas which everyone thought had gone to seed; hence, plantinger, n. one who plantings.
With respect to both that and our mutual friend I might make a general observation that intelligence is a very useful thing if you wish to sort true from false propositions. And if you’d rather armor your world-view against contact with the world well, it’s a very useful thing for that as well.
As for myself my sense that the world is not beautiful is a subjective weighing of what I’ve encountered in my life’s total experience. Isolated bits of it I find beautiful, the whole not so much.
I seem to recall that Martin Heidegger hated dams. by the way. Then again, he had an unseemly affection for National Socialism.
Assisted by copious servings of “Kentucky Blended Whiskey” (guaranteed to be “thirty percent Kentucky straight whiskey, seventy percent grain neutral spirits”) mixed with Pepsi, I would further observe with some amusement the choice of archetypal pseudonyms under which we are conducting this conversation. Are our rhetorical positions prefigured by the online identities we have assumed, which themselves are presumably reflective of our philosophical stances?
Cheerful inebriation versus embracing damnation? Yeah, I can see that.
Perhaps one reason for feeling the way I do is that I’ve met a fair number of people who were unswervingly convinced that they were going to heaven. These experiences led me to the reflection that if they were right, and heaven were in fact filled with the sort of people who were unswervingly convinced in their earthly lives that heaven was their destination, that perhaps hell would not be so bad after all.
“Will they have Mogen David in Heaven? Sweet Jesus! If they don’t, who the hell wants to go?”
From Midnight Choir by Larry Gatlin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffUz4lfVgkI
Tasting note for the curious: in no universe may “Kentucky Deluxe Kentucky Blended Whiskey” fairly be characterized as beautiful. But at $13.98 for the 1.75l bottle, it has the virtue of cheapness.
From your description of its composition, it sounds as if it could also be used as rocket fuel in a pinch.
Perhaps after stirring in a few tablespoons of finely-powdered brimstone?