There are two claims in Joe Sach’s article¹ that I promised I would return to in my previous piece, but chose not to because it was not wholly relevant to the line of argument it had taken on. However, I did not intend to abandon them. These two themes coalesce around a phenomenon that I have seen when I studied the history of art: that we have become viscerally afraid of beauty. Sachs lays out some of the groundwork:

“I want to pause for a moment, before ending the lecture, to comment on the fact that the beautiful in the Ethics is not an object of contemplation simply, but the source of action. In a lecture on the Poetics I discussed the intimate connection of beauty with the experience of wonder. The sense of wonder seems to me to be the way of seeing which allows things to appear as what they are, since it holds off our tendencies to make things fit into the theories or opinions we already hold, or to use things for purposes that have nothing to do with them. That is why philosophy begins in wonder, as does the whole of the contemplative life.”²

Sachs understands, I think, that the fear that translators have in rendering kalon as ‘beautiful’ comes from an underlying uncertainty about the nature and importance of aesthetic qualities and experience as a preeminent way of thinking about the world. I can understand its difficulty: aesthetic criteria are hard to come by, and may be posed challenges by fluid and diverse cultures and traditions, but the history of art is oftentimes mistaken for the study of aesthetics or otherwise unfortunately conflated. While art took a ‘modern’ turn at the end of the last century, aesthetics and even political philosophy was filled with a malaise that seemed impossible to cure. However, political philosophy regained its vitality—and so did its brother, moral philosophy. Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue along with Elizabeth Anscombe’s exhortation to return to moral virtue managed to save moral philosophy from becoming analytical casuistry. But we forgot art, having pushed it to the avant garde and forgotten its purpose: beauty. We went from David and Ingres to Mondrian and Duchamp in less than a century; we turned from works that at the very least engaged in mimetic representation of man to work that represented the perceived emptiness and hollowness of our lives, oftentimes with the aid of squares and urinals.

Going to a museum of modern or contemporary art is a rather desultory affair. Who can even begin to compare Raphael’s School of Athens, a portrait of wisdom personified on a wall through the great men and women who taught us to love it and then pursue it, with the travesty that any of Piet Mondrian’s painted squares or Picasso’s equally ghoulish ‘cubist’ work? What happened between these two points in time, ostensibly part of the same modernity?

The answer, I suppose, to why the translators of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and for the great mass of us prefer to skirt around and turn away from the ‘beautiful’ is that we are viscerally afraid of it. Don’t let rising museum attendance and a record number of selfies make you think otherwise: we are more invested in being ‘performative’ or being seen doing things that may ostensibly seem good and ‘cultured’ than in recreating and reproducing the fundamental aesthetic experience of our forefathers at the highest level. What effect does taking a selfie with the Mona Lisa have on one’s aesthetic understanding? I dare say that roaming around a museum like one is out for a stroll in one’s night clothes is nigh improper and unbecoming, and those who do so find themselves out of significant sums of money for they travel but to no avail.

Why we have this visceral fear is hard to explain, but its effects are much more palpable. We do not wonder anymore; many of us barely think about the larger questions that beset us. The rot that has set inside of us is a rot that starts from the aesthetic and ends with the ethical, and although we do not comprehend the links between the two, we know that they are bedfellows; without one, there is no other. We try, perhaps ceaselessly, to make ‘art’ that ‘speaks to us’ or conforms to our anxieties but never art that aims at the elusive concept of the ‘beautiful.’ We have become middling relativists: we excuse most conduct because many of us do not think that there is anything right or wrong, objectively so. In other words, we live in a cynical, nihilist utopia and a dystopia for those who look out and wonder why we are the way we are.

We turn away from beauty because we find it too uncomfortable to look at anymore. If beauty overwhelms, we are incapable of being moved because we have cast ourselves into a sea of empty feelinglessness. If beauty pulls us to think about ourselves in uncomfortable ways, we are unable to do so because of our conversion to Epicureanism. If beauty demands, we cannot follow for we do not comprehend obligation. Magnanimity is the necessary victim.