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Beauty

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Roger Scruton is a moral philosopher whose work is for many of us a source of reassurance and hope. He stands against the modern and especially post- modern trend which suggest that Truth , Goodness and Beauty are not values, but forms of oppression which must somehow be violently opposed and devalued. In a sense his heart is that of an Enlightentment Rationalist who argues that our Thought and our Art are meant to enhance our understanding of the world, and our appreciation of Life. In seeking in a sense to give us back our sense of how Beauty enriches our life Scruton does a service not only to Aesthetics but to the way we live in our everyday world.
I find his work among the most persuasive and inspiring philosophical writing that is being done today.

In this brief volume, Roger Scruton persuasively comes to the aid of those of us eager to hear nowadays, say, a Mozart opera or a Shakespearean play but who to do so have to endure the by now conventional shenanigans of Regie directors bent on defaming clearly admirable characters and setting noble works of Western Culture in brothels or other tiresome dens of iniquity. Scruton makes an unanswerable case that such post-modern exemplars are engaging in a predictable, frankly adolescent sort of sacrilege, not so transgressive in fact as just merely and less glamourously repetitive of their own peers' practice. Post-modern "rebellion," reminiscent of teenage behavior, is a rebellion by its numerous advocates marching in embarrassing lockstep. If his book were to be widely read, it would surely influence younger artists to innovate, moving out of the dead-ends of such trite postmodern practice.

Scruton's central thesis is that while Beauty is something that must be individually experienced, nevertheless it is essentially rational and thus connected to Truth and Goodness, rather than being a mere preference one cannot expect other rational selves ever to agree upon. Scruton's knowledge of aesthetics, ranging from Plato and Plotinus down through the centuries to contemporary theorists and artists is undeniably impressive. His is a work to reread and savor.

Few books have fulfilled my expectation as well as Roger Scruton's Beauty. Many decades ago, I entered college intending to become a graphic artist. Going into publishing instead, I became disgusted with art as it succeeded in its efforts to be disgusting. Scruton reconnected me with what I once valued so much - its transcendence. It was a pleasure to read someone who takes art more seriously than most artists do. I strongly recommend this book. -- [...]

Although Scruton doesn't come out and tell us what Beauty is he does manage to write a superb and provocative book on the subject throughout history. His chapters include: Judging Beauty, Human Beauty, Natural Beauty, Everyday Beauty, Artistic Beauty, Taste and Order, Art and Eros, The Flight from Beauty and Concluding Thoughts.

Before reading Beauty I had long felt that much of the art of the twentieth century has suffered from a nefarious need to ruin beauty. Scruton, with this book, is preaching to my choir and I was immediately sympathetic.

For those who are disgusted by the shock theatrics of modern opera directors, the pseudo story-lines and characters of kitsch romanticism, the prevalence of garden gnomes and the porn-horror of the Saw genre, this book is for you. Scruton begins by discussing how we judge beauty, quoting Kant and Plato. He then explores the realms of Human, Natural (i.e. landscapes), Daily and Artistic beauty. From the human body to gardens, to the beauty of the mundane (a wife setting her table) and to the works of artists, he covers the gamut succinctly and stylistically. Art and Beauty concern expression, style, thought, philosophy, love and appreciation.

Beauty is closely related with the sacred and for Scruton we live in a loveless culture wherein beauty is desecrated because people are afraid to love. The rise of Kitsch he notes is closely aligned with the rise of the Holocaust and the Gulag where the human being is like a doll we kiss in one moment and throw away the next.

Considering we live in an ipod world where everything is at our fingertips, art is fast disappearing, either through the morass of entertainment or the cheap effects of modern artists striving to stir as oppose to inspire thought. This book is an essential read.

Scruton is a philosopher who stands in stark contrast to much of what the modern world proposes on art....i.e., that beauty is something completely subjective; that it is a private elitist vision, directly related to undemocratic high art. By demonstrating that beauty is something much more objective...of which all retain an innate appreciation...Scruton quietly demolishes such nonsense, accompanying so much contemporary discussion on art, sculpture, and architecture. His discussion on popular kitsch is particularly revealing of the modern (and post-modern) world's intrinsic reductionism, and of the false and insulting premise, which strongly asserts that the common man is not capable of appreciating anything but the lowest, unambitious, and highly subjective artistic expressions.

I think this little essay is a strong assertion for a reconnection to the great traditions of art, not as something of the past...not as something to build a wall against...but as a living vibrant tradition, to which all can aspire, in our own era.

The sense of beauty is one of the most fundamental human universals. No one is immune to aesthetic appeals, and it seems that the appreciation of the beauty is an exclusive human characteristic. This very short introduction aims to introduce the general reader to some of the fundamental intellectual underpinnings of this essential concept. Unfortunately, the book falls short with respect to this objective.

I am a huge fan of Roger Scruton's writings, and have read many of his articles and books, and have reviewed several of his books (including his other book in this series Kant: A Very Short Introduction). He is extremely erudite and insightful, and he is able to find a new, fresh, perspective on many of the ageless topics. However, I think that with this Very Short Introduction he has widely missed the target. He makes no bones about the fact that this is an exclusively philosophical outlook on beauty, which is extremely disappointing considering all the great insights that the psychology has given us in recent decades on that topic. At the beginning of the second chapter Scruton attempts to give some evolutionary backing for the sense of beauty, but after just a few pages that approach fizzles away and transforms into various philosophical speculations and musings on sexuality.

In his philosophical musings Scruton doesn't seem to be grounding much of his ideas within the overarching western philosophical tradition. He mentions Plato and Kant a few times, and maybe on a few occasions some of the other prominent philosophers. For the most part, though, one gets a sense that the material in this book has been wrought whole-cloth out of Scruton's own omphaloskepsis. Scruton is indeed a great thinker, and many of his ideas are extremely interesting, but after a while I got really bored with all the self-indulgent writing.

The book is very long for a very short introduction, and at 164 pages it is one of the longest ones that I had read. It could have used a fair amount of editing for content length.

If you are interested in some interesting philosophizing on the topic of beauty, then this book may appeal to you. However, this is far from being an authoritative and up-to-date account of our understanding of beauty as a concept.

Think fast: would you prefer a rose or a roach as a gift? Unquestionably, most humans would go for the first. Never mind the difficulties in defining beauty, it is an intrinsic part of normal human experience of the world and ourselves. That an apology is needed for beauty might be a sign of the complicated paths of humankind.

This book is about beauty and aesthetics. It is written in a comprehensive, engaging and accessible way. It starts by presenting six platitudes about beauty and follows by covering body beauty, natural beauty, everyday beauty and artistic beauty. Despite the limited space available in the Very Short Introduction series, the author succeeds largely in providing a variety of interesting case-examples from literature, painting, music, and architecture, which provide pointers for further explorations by the reader. As could be expected, a good deal of attention is given to Kant's famous approach to beauty, which is revised and remodeled, in a critical way, by the author. A similar treatment is taken regarding several other relevant philosophical and theoretical approaches.

Generally speaking, I tend to concur with most of the positions and conclusions drawn by the author (and many they are). Personally, I believe surprise and power to engage and motivate (even challenge to understand) is also related to arts, complementing in a sometimes orthogonal way to the requirement of beauty. Perhaps even more striking, beauty in art could be thought as being able to induce us into a kind of suspended state, where we forget about ourselves while transcending into something bigger and higher, in a way that is not too different from meditation (the interested reader should also consider reading Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art, by S. Nachmanovitch).

One of the many seminal discussions included in Scruton's book regards the importance of style (and even fashion), as providing a reference that allow people to communicate in ways that may either adhere to or confront the aesthetic conventions. I believe much has been lost by the dismissal of the canons. Perhaps that is why it has become so difficult to find meaning in so many pieces in contemporary art. It is symptomatic that concerts are still dominated by pieces over 200-year-old by Bach, Beethoven and Mozart (among others), and that queues keep forming in front of most Van Gogh's paintings. Would it be that contemporary art is being produced for the academics? In this book, recent trends in arts, driven by shock, are understood as a kind of "desecration" of art away from reasoning and meaningful content. Still, the author reminds us about the possibility of re-inventing beauty, as in the works of Edward Hopper and Vaughan Williams.

All in all, even if you might not agree with all of the author's positions, this is a most interesting and welcomed book, highly recommend not only to those interested in aesthetics, but also for everybody wishing to better understand and evaluate art and art theory in a critical, rational, and personal way.