Bach to Beethoven: Music and Culture, the High and the Low

The creative aspect of human nature, which according to Dorothy Sayers is the very essence of the image of God in man, expresses itself in art. While the word art immediately brings to mind physical works, like painting and sculpture, that we experience through the sense of sight there is an art that is at least as old as either of these which is audible rather than visual. That art is the art of music.

What is music?

Music is created by the deliberate arrangement of sounds, whether produced by instruments, voices, or a combination of both. That is not a definition of what music is but a description of how it is made. It is easier to describe how music is created than to define what it is. For to say “music is the deliberate arrangement of sounds” would not be correct. That definition would also apply to speech which is not ordinarily considered to be a form of music. It does not help to define speech as “the deliberate arrangement of sounds produced by the human voice” because singing is an element of music produced by the human voice and some forms of music consist of unaccompanied singing.

Can we distinguish music from other forms of arranged sound such as speech by its function?

If we understand “function” in its utilitarian sense this would be very difficult to do because music is composed for a multitude of different uses, perhaps more so than any other art. Some music is written for use in worship to glorify God. The purpose of some music is to relieve the monotony of drudge labour. Other music is written to pass down a people’s history, legends, and myths in a way that is easy to remember. Some music is written to be listened to by an audience in a concert hall. Other music is written to be danced to.

If we think of function in terms of ultimate purpose, apart from the question of use, then music, as a form of art, has the same ultimate purpose of other arts, the creation of beauty. A painter arranges colours and shades on his canvas in such a way that whether he is depicting a person or place or telling a story in picture, the resulting work is beautiful to the eye. Likewise, a musical composer, seeks to arrange sounds in a way that is beautiful to the ear.

This still does not distinguish music from all forms of speech. For beauty can be created through the arrangement of words too. This is the goal of the literary arts and especially of poetry. Perhaps it is impossible to define music and poetry separately however. They have been closely associated with each other since the days of Ancient Greece, they share common elements such as rhythm and metre which are often spoken of as “the music” of poetry, and what are lyrics, after all, other than a form of poetry?

The overlapping relationship between poetry and music suggests that music, like speech, is a means of communication, a language. Since music affects our emotions, our feelings, it is possible that the best way to define music is to say that like speech, it is a form of communication through arrangements of sound, but whereas speech is primarily directed towards human reason, music is directed towards our emotions, our feelings. A possible challenge to the accuracy of this definition may exist in the fact that some forms of music are written to inspire reflection and contemplation, both of which are actions of the rational mind. The kind of reflection that good serious music inspires, however, is not the same sort of reflection that a well-written treatise inspires. The latter speaks directly to our reason, offering us proofs of what it asserts, and inviting us to pass judgement on whether or not its thesis is sound. Contemplative music speaks to our reason indirectly. It first inspires an emotional response and then invites us to contemplate that response, its immediate source in the music itself, and its ultimate source in the meaning conveyed through the medium of the music.

Music, like other art, is an important component of culture. Culture is the shared way of life of a community, society or people group. It unites the members of these social groups, giving them a sense of a shared identity. It binds more than just the current members of a society, however. When it is passed on from generation, to generation, we call it tradition, and it serves to unite the past and future generations of a society with the present generation. It is through the passing on of culture in tradition that a society’s greatest achievement, its civilization, is transmitted.

Social cohesion within a community is usually not the first thing we think of when we think of music. We recognize that various forms of ethnic and folk music are musical expressions of the culture of particular people groups but we seldom think of the larger categories of music which are more widely listened to in these terms.

If anything we think of such music as having the opposite effect. Musical tastes divide families, communities, and societies. In any given large community in the Western world, you are likely to find fans of country, jazz, rock and pop music as well as classical music aficionados, and some poor misguided souls who think that the cacophonous noise that is called rap is a form of music. Musical tastes frequently divide members of the most basic social unit, the family – rock music in particular has an infamous reputation for creating a generation gap within families. Where music does create social unity nowadays is among the cult followings of various bands and musical icons.

Perhaps ironically, in all of this Western music does continue to express something significant about Western culture, societies, and civilization. What it expresses is how completely liberalism – the idea that the individual is more important than the family, community, or society – has triumphed in Western countries. It also shows how easy it is, in a society atomized by liberalism, for charismatic figures to form large cult followings out of the masses of alienated individuals.

Culture exists in many layers. Local culture gives identity to local communities and when several of these comprise a larger society their local cultures share elements which make up the larger culture of the society as a whole. Depending upon the size of the society there might also be a regional level that is intermediate between the local and the societal. There is also a level of culture that transcends the particular society. We call Canada, Great Britain, the United States, the countries of Europe, and a few other societies “Western” because these societies all share in what we call “Western civilization” – the tradition of achievement which began in the Graeco-Roman civilization of classical antiquity and came down to us through medieval Christendom. There is therefore a sense in which we can speak of a “Western” culture which all these societies share in.

There is another sense in which we can describe culture as being multi-layered. Matthew Arnold, the insightful 19th Century inside critic of liberalism, in his Culture and Anarchy, wrote that culture is “a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world”. Clearly this is not a description of a society’s culture as a whole. What Arnold is talking about is what is usually described as “high culture”. High culture is a level of culture that exists within the culture of societies which have achieved a high degree of civilization. High culture contains high moral and aesthetic standards and has an elevating effect upon its society and that society’s broader culture.

Or at least that is what traditional high culture is like. That which has been produced under the label “high culture” over the last century has progressively moved further and further away from the description. The reasons for this we shall shortly explore. First let us consider the nature of the musical element of high culture.

The label we most commonly attach to Western high culture music is “classical music”. What do we mean by the term “classical”? There are many whose first thought upon hearing the word “classical” is “old”. This could be because this is how the term tends to be used with regards to other forms of music. “Classic rock” and “classic country” are both virtually synonymous with “oldies” in either category of music. It could also be because most of the really big names among classical music composers lived or were at least born before the 20th Century. The word “classical”, however, does not properly mean “old” at all. It refers to outstanding quality and if it has any necessary temporal connotation it is of “timelessness” not “age”.

The term “classical” points to one of the most important elements of traditional Western high culture. Classicism in the arts is a striving for excellence that emphasizes form, structure, and order in accordance with high standards derived to some degree from Graeco-Roman civilization, especially the culture and philosophy of 5th-4th Century B.C. Athens. Among the traits regarded as characteristics of excellence in classicism are unity, simplicity, balance, harmony and restraint.

Not all “classical music” is classical in this technical sense of the term. Classicism has been influential at various points in the history of Western art music, but most notably in the style that developed in a particular period in the 18th Century. This period – the Classical Period proper – extended roughly from the time of Johann Sebatian Bach in the early 18th Century to that of Ludwig von Beethoven in the early 19th Century. Bach was the greatest composer of the Baroque period which immediately preceded the Classical Period. Beethoven embodied the transition between the Classical and the Romantic of the 19th Century. The period between Bach and Beethoven saw the careers of the two geniuses who with Beethoven were the first Viennese School of music – Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang A. Mozart.

Western art music contains a lot more music than what was composed in this era. The plainsong tradition in Christian liturgy extends well back into the first millennium of the Church and polyphonic liturgical music was composed in the late Middle Ages. J. S. Bach composed at the end of the Baroque period which also produced such giants as Antonio Vivaldi and George F. Handel and saw the birth of opera. The Romantic period in the 19th Century saw the work of Johannes Brahms, Frederic Chopin, and Franz Shubert to name just three. In addition most of the great opera composers – Wagner, Rossini, Bizet, Gounod, Verdi, etc. – composed in the 19th Century and in the case of Puccini in the early 20th. Why then do we refer to all Western art music as classical?

Since the real answer probably has something to do with the decline of precision in the English language I am going to give a plausible sounding ex-post facto justification of the usage. The music of Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven exemplifies everything that art music aspires to be. Earlier forms of music such as the concerto reached near perfection at the pen of these masters as did the new form, the symphony, which they introduced. Their music is unmistakably beautiful, both inspired and inspirational, and is enduring and timeless. It therefore lends its name to art music as a whole.

If the music composed in this era is all that art music should be what about the “classical music” composed today?

It, alas, is all that it should not be. The same downward progression can be seen in Western art music as can be seen in Western art in general. 19th Century Romanticism gives birth to the more rebellious Impressionism which is succeeded by a series of avant garde movements in the Modern Period in the early 20th Century and then collapses into the nihilism of Postmodernism after World War II. What Pablo Picasso, Henry Matisse, Gustav Klimt, and Marcel Duchamp were to the visual arts in the early 20th Century, Arthur Schoenburg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern were to art music. Jackson Pollock has his musical counterpart in John Cage.

What is the cause of this decline?

It depends upon whether we are looking for a cause within the culture or within the societies to which the culture belongs.

Within the culture the explanation is that romanticism was taken to its extreme and then beyond. Romanticism is a rebellion or reaction against the order imposed by classicism in the name of individual expression. It can be progressive – looking towards the future, or reactionary – looking towards the past, but either way it resists the structure and forms of classicism and places its emphasis upon the inner light guiding the individual artist.

Classicism and romanticism need each other. The structure, forms, and order of classicism and the internal inspiration of romanticism balance each other out. Inspiration and genius can result in timeless masterpieces of beauty as in the case of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Adherence to form, when inspiration is lacking, merely produces the formulaic, whereas resistance to structure and order, if taken so far as to actually overthrow the structure and order, results in chaos.

Which is exactly what happened. The rebellion of early Romanticism evolved into outright revolution, order collapsed, and chaos ensued.

What about the societal cause of this collapse? Culture reflects the moral and spiritual condition of the society and civilization to which it is attached. What changes in Western societies and civilization are reflected in the downward death spiral of Western high culture?

The weakening of the position of the Christian Church is one of the changes which is clearly reflected here. The building of cathedrals and churches in architecture, the painting of altarpieces and other religious art to decorate these buildings, and the composition of settings of the Mass and other sacred music, are historically and traditionally the heart of Western high culture. The secularization of Western societies has cut at that heart severely.

The triumph of Whiggery – liberalism and democracy – is also reflected in the decline of high culture. In many Western countries royalty and aristocracy have been eliminated altogether. In the United Kingdom both survive in seriously weakened form. Here in Canada the monarchy has survived as a weakened institution but it would be very bad joke to apply the term “aristocracy” to our Senate. Our constitutions have become dangerously unbalanced in favour of the principle of democracy.

Other than the Church, Western royalty and aristocracy were the most important patrons of high culture. It is the nature of high culture that it is produced by a symbiotic relationship between a civilization’s social/political elites and its artistic elites. It is the nature of human societies that they will always be led by elites. The nature of the elites, however, depends upon the constitution of the society. In the Modern era democracy became the dominant principle in Western constitutions. As a result, the social/political leadership in Western societies has passed from royalty and aristocracy, even in societies that retain them, to new elites of politicians and bureaucrats. Economic leadership has passed from aristocracy-emulating bourgeois businessmen to corporate managers. The spiritual leadership has passed from the clergy of the Christian Church to intellectuals. The artistic leadership has passed from skilled craftsmen, apprenticed in their art from their early youth, working within established traditions, to nihilistic, navel-gazing, narcissists.

The current state of high culture is exactly what one would predict would be the result of a wholesale transfer of leadership from people with good taste to the kind of people noted for their bad taste – or utter tastelessness. Crucifixes in jars of urine, canned feces, and cadavers on display make one wish for the days when Picasso, Matisse, and Dali were making art look bad, while the kind of contemporary classical music one finds on government-sponsored radio stations makes Schoenburg’s atonal compositions sound harmonic.

Such art and music is “high culture” in name only. It does not and cannot do what high culture is supposed to do – elevate the general culture of the society which produces it.

If we say that it is high culture’s purpose to elevate a society, its culture, and its civilization what do we mean by “elevate”?

Human beings and beasts together comprise the category of living beings called animals, from the Latin word animus denoting breath or spirit. Human beings share many characteristics with other animals. We eat, we drink, we breathe, we sleep, we copulate, etc. We also have traits which set us apart from other animals and enable us to live on a higher plane than other animals. Yes, we can abuse those traits and in so doing arguably place ourselves at a level lower than the other animals. When used properly, however, they can create civilization.

Human culture involves all human activities, those we share with the beasts, and those which belong to us alone. Culture includes rules which dictate that some of the activities we share with the beasts be done completely in private and only discussed in public if absolutely necessary, other of the activities we share with the beasts are also to be done in private but can be discussed in public in a polite manner, whereas other activities we share with the beasts – such as eating and drinking - can be done in public, even communally, provided we follow customs which minimize our resemblance to our bestial cousins. These rules are called manners or etiquette and they differ from culture to culture.

High culture elevates a society’s culture, by drawing its attention upwards, away from the aspects of our existence which are merely animal, and focusing it on higher values. It is our attempt to live according to these values which produces the human achievement we call civilization.

Music, as mentioned earlier, is a kind of language which speaks to the emotions. It moves our passions within us. Beethoven’s choral setting of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in the final movement of his 9th Symphony, for example, inspires within us the feeling to which it alludes. Music can communicate feelings of happiness and of sadness – and of lust, rage, and a host of other kinds as well.

Which is why music can be degrading as well as elevating. This brings us to the topic of “low culture”. There are two very different meanings to the expression “low culture”. One is non-pejorative. In this sense “low culture” is simply the necessary complement of “high culture”. Within the culture of a civilization, high culture is deliberately produced to maintain a high level of civilization, and is oriented towards higher values which transcend the boundaries of the society. Low culture is the rest of the civilization’s culture and tends to be oriented towards expressing the particular identity of the society to which it belongs rather than towards universal higher values. Each draws from the other and complements the other. Such flow, T. S. Eliot has pointed out, must exist for if they are isolated from each other they become separate cultures rather than parts of a single culture.

The other sense of “low culture” refers to culture which has the opposite effect to that which high culture is supposed to have – rather than elevating it degrades. Both kinds of “low culture” are more commonly referred to as “popular culture”. The abbreviated version of this label, “pop culture” refers only to the degrading kind. The musical element of popular culture is called “popular music” and here too “popular music” does service for both non-classical Western music in general and degrading music in particular.

Whereas classical music involves many forms – fugue, sonata, concerto, symphony, opera, to name just a few – composed in styles that tend to coincide with long historical periods, popular music generally is limited to a single form – the song – composed in a multitude of genres such as folk, country and western, jazz, rhythm and blues, blues, rock and so forth. This is true of popular music in both senses of the term. The overwhelming predominance of the song form, however, can be regarded as a step towards the music of degradation. Songs are easier to follow than instrumental pieces and are usually considerably shorter. Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 1 – the shortest of his four horn concertos being only two movements long rather than three, runs slightly over 10 minutes in length. There are a handful of popular songs that are of comparable length – folk rock singer Don McLean’s ballad “American Pie” was just under 9 minutes long – and these tend to be among the most enduring of popular songs, but most are well under the length of the average concerto movement, to say nothing of the average symphony movement. Popular songs are well suited for the age of fast food and junk food , TV channel surfing, and interac transactions.

It is the second meaning of “popular music” that we will focus on. What do we mean by degradation? How can music be degrading?

Degradation is the opposite of elevation. We defined the elevation which is the purpose of high culture as lifting human existence as far above the level of the beast as possible and orienting it towards higher truths and values to be reflected in the accomplishments of civilization. The opposite of that would be to attempt to reduce human existence to as close to the level of the beasts as possible. There are at least two other ways in which music can be degrading. It can be morally degrading – which is very close to the previous meaning of degrading. It can also be aesthetically degrading which refers to a drop in artistic quality.

The well-being of a community or society and of its members requires rules which forbid behavior in which a person pursues his personal interests in such a way or to such an extent that other members or even the community itself are harmed. Such rules require the individual person to limit and control his desires and passions. The connection between the two – rules governing society and people governing their own passions – and between the both and civilization is foundational to morality. Plato discussed this at length in his dialogue The Republic.

That which encourages people to unleash their passions and to rebel against legitimate authority is morally degrading. This is pretty much the defining characteristic of rock music.

Rock music began as “rock ‘n’ roll” shortly after the end of World War II. The original rock ‘n’ roll groups combined elements of country music and rhythm and blues to create catchy, songs that were fun to listen and dance to. Teenagers were the target audience and the lyrics of these songs typically expressed an adolescent perspective on topics of interest to teenagers. Some fundamentalist preachers denounced rock ‘n’ roll from the pulpit but their warnings were largely ignored because the rock of that era was relatively innocent and was, above all other things, fun. The preachers succeeded only in convincing most people that they were a bunch of wet blankets preaching the message that it is wrong to have fun.

This was the first step in the moral degradation of rock music. The relatively – but not completely – innocent and fun rock ‘n’ roll immunized all subsequent rock music from the criticism the first generation faced. “It’s just kids having fun. What’s wrong with that?” became the standard reply to all criticism of rock music. Implicit within that response is the intellectually indefensible assertion that “what is fun must therefore also be innocent”.

The subsequent development of rock music has shown the fundamentalist critics of the earliest rock stars to have been speaking with the prophetic voice of Cassandra. In the 1960’s the mask of innocence was dropped. Rock became the music of the sexual revolution, telling young people to follow wherever their urges led them rather than to control their urges and behave responsibly and well. While some might argue that the increasing corruption of the political establishment lent a degree of credibility and merit to rock’s message of rebellion that message was directed as much against parents, teachers, the Church and its clergy, policemen and indeed all legitimate authorities at all levels of society. Rock eventually developed into countless numbers of subgenres, some of which were relatively benign, while others promoted drug abuse and other self-destructive behavior, and preached evil messages like nihilism and even Satan worship. At one time there were rumors going around about “backwards masking” – that rock musicians would hide objectionable material in their songs which could only be heard by playing them backwards. One wonders why they would bother since the lyrics played straight forwards are bad enough.

A similar downward trend over the same period in time can be seen in pop music. “Pop music” is not, as one might think, just a shorthand way of saying “popular music”. It is a genre of its own – although perhaps it should be called the anti-genre because of its tendency to absorb and assimilate other genres of popular music. To borrow an image from another element of pop culture it is the Borg of popular music. Pop music is similar to rock – they are generally categorized together in record stores – and it is difficult to say where the line between the two should be drawn. Perhaps the best way of describing pop music is to say that it is assembly line rock music. It is music manufactured for sale to the general public like any factory produced product.

This makes pop music a better gauge of the decay of morality than rock music since it is supposed to reflect the mainstream of popular culture. Fifty years ago, a pop star would have been a cleaner, slightly more polished, version of a rock star. If we look at the pop music of the last two decades, however, two trends have come increasingly to stand out among the leading acts – a) the prostitute and b) the effeminate pretty boy. Both trends are examples of moral degradation.

That the first trend is morally degrading should be fairly obvious. Progressively younger female pop stars performing to progressively younger audiences, dress increasingly provocatively and sing increasingly sexually charged lyrics in performances that would seem to be more appropriate for a burlesque stage or a strip club.

What about the second trend? Male pop stars are being made to look and sound more and more like girls every day. Yes, “made” is the right word, because the performers of pop music are as factory assembled as the music they sing. For they are as much the product as their music. Probably even more so.

Roger Scruton, in an insightful article about youth culture for City Journal 13 years ago, commented about how in pop music the traditional relationship between music and those who perform it has been inverted:

In effect, we witness a reversal of the old order of performance. Instead of the performer being the means to present the music, which exists independently in the tradition of song, the music has become the means to present the performer. The music is part of the process whereby a human individual or group is totemized. (Roger Scruton, “Youth Culture’s Lament”, City Journal, Autumn 1998)

This is why one cannot defend the pretty boy trend in pop music by pointing to the historical use of castrati in traditional music. However barbaric the custom may have been, castrati were made to serve the needs of the music rather than to be idols for worship.

For thousands of years societies have regarded manliness as a praiseworthy trait to be encouraged among males. The Greek word for courage – the first virtue mentioned in Aristotle’s Ethics – was andreia, a word derived from the Greek word aner, which means “man, husband”. The very word “virtue” which we use to describe praiseworthy characteristics is derived from vir, the Latin equivalent of aner. This usage reflects the high premium Western societies have historically and traditionally placed upon manliness. In the kind of male pop stars it is now churning out the pop music industry appears to be promoting epicenity, the exact opposite of manliness, as a trait to be emulated by males. This too is a form of moral decay.

The degradation that is most obvious in pop music, however, is the aesthetic kind. Music, like architecture, painting, sculpture and literature is a form of art, the quality of which can be judged by aesthetic standards. There are different ways in which art can be aesthetically poor. On the one hand art can become clichéd, i.e, it can lose its aesthetical value by being pointlessly repetitive. On the other hand, artists may out of fear of the cliché, produce art that has no merit other than originality. The latter is the pitfall into which avant garde artists – musical and otherwise – are prone to fall. The former is the pitfall into which pop culture – including pop music – falls.

It is in the very nature of pop music to be kitsch. Pop music is music that is manufactured like any other assembly-line product to be sold cheaply in large quantities for mass consumption. Without Thomas Edison’s invention of the technology for recording and replaying sound and broadcasting and receiving sound in the late 19th Century there could have been no pop music. These technologies made it possible for music to be mass produced. Mass production, i.e., the fast production of a good so that it can be sold in large quantities at a low unit price, can be both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing in that a wide variety of goods are available and affordable to more people than ever before. It is a curse in that quality of that which is produced inevitably suffers. Some things should never be mass produced and culture is one of them.

Whereas other forms of popular music and classical music are the creations of artists whose music may or may not be recorded and sold pop music is the creation of record companies. The companies create both the pop star and the music the pop star performs. One group of specialized technicians comes up with the image for the pop star, another group comes up with the music, and the final product is assembled by yet another group of technicians in the recording studio.

The result is the most clichéd form of music ever made. There is novelty – pop music rises and falls with the waves of fashion like no other – but no originality.

Unfortunately pop music seems to be a black hole which sucks in other forms of popular music. Before World War II a number of distinct popular music genres developed – country and western, jazz, rhythm and blues, etc. In recent decades most of these genres have tended to develop a “pop” feel to them. Take country music for example. Compare country music made today, with the music of Hank Williams Sr., Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, George Jones and Waylon Jennings. Then compare it with music currently being released under the label pop. Which does it more resemble?

Is there a solution to any of these downward trends?

Not that I am aware of, but there is at least a consolation. The same advancements in musical recording technology that have made pop music possible, have also made possible high quality recordings by superb orchestras of the music of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Shubert, Brahms, Grieg, Wagner, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, and Mahler. There is over a lifetime’s worth of good listening in these recordings, and these works continue to be performed in the standard repertoire of concert halls and opera houses around the world.

What is Beauty?

Beauty is the only finality here below. – Simone Weil

Art is the production of things which are beautiful. Beauty is what the artist strives to create. Beauty is what we seek to enjoy and contemplate in works of art. But what is beauty?

If asked to define beauty we might start by saying something like “the property of being pleasing to the eye”.

This definition is insufficient, however, because it is not only visible objects that are beautiful. Sound can be beautiful too. Bach’s Brandenburg concertos, Haydn’s Creation, Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, and Beethoven’s 9th symphony are all works of tremendous beauty. Yet none of them can be seen.

We could solve this problem by expanding our definition to “the property of being pleasing to the eye and/or the ear”? This then begs the question of why the other senses are not included as well. We have other words to describe what is pleasing to our senses of taste, smell, and touch. Why do we conceive of that which is audibly and visually appealing as a single category?

That is a difficult question to answer but that is what we do.

There is another question which our expanded definition of beauty raises. Is beauty “the property of being pleasing to the eye and/or the ear” or is it “the state of being considered pleasing to the eye and/or the ear”?

Note the importance of this distinction. If beauty is the former, then it has tangible existence as a quality of things which are beautiful. If it is the latter, it is a projection of our own minds.

The saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” would seem to suggest the second understanding of beauty. People do differ in what they consider beautiful. Yet they also agree.

In some circumstances, two people will disagree over whether a particular person or a particular painting is beautiful. In other circumstances, there is virtually unanimous agreement that someone or something is beautiful or is not beautiful. Sometimes, disagreements about beauty appear to be entirely subjective. They are matters of personal taste. On other occasions, the disagreement indicates that something is wrong with one person’s perception.

Naomi Wolf, in her best-selling book The Beauty Myth, (1) took the position that beauty is an artificial construction. The concept of beauty, Wolf wrote, was created to support the male power structure of society and keep women in a subservient position. The emphasis upon beauty in advertising, the cosmetics and fashion industries, and surgery, she argued, is that male power structure’s response to the blow it received from the triumphs of feminism earlier in the century. Wolf’s book helped launch what is called “Third Wave feminism”.

It is undoubtedly true that many young women have been led into unhealthy behavior patterns by an obsession with beauty that magazines, television, and movies have in part contributed to. In this Wolf was correct, although the statistics in her book appear to have been greatly exaggerated. Is there merit then to her idea that beauty is a social construct the purpose of which is to maintain male dominance?

Not really. Beauty is far too universal a value for it to be explained as an idea invented to serve as a political tool. The fact that differences of opinion as to what can be considered to be beautiful exist from individual to individual, society to society, and at different eras in a society’s history, does not negate the universality of beauty. As Matt Ridley has pointed out:

And yet this flexibility stays within limits. It is impossible to name a time when women of ten or forty years were considered “sexier” than women of twenty. It is inconceivable that male paunches where ever actually attractive to women or that tall men were thought uglier than short ones. It is hard to imagine that weak chins were ever thought beautiful on either sex. If beauty is a matter of fashion, how is it that wrinkled skin, gray hair, hairy backs, and very long noses have never been “in fashion”? The more things change, the more they stay the same. (2)

How then does Ridley explain the phenomenon of beauty? He says that it is in our genes.

There is a reason that beautiful people are attractive. They are attractive because others have genes that cause them to find beautiful people attractive. People have such genes because those that employed criteria of beauty left more descendants than those that did not. (3)

This is the explanation of evolutionary psychology. (4) The concept of sexual selection goes back to Charles Darwin. The basic gist of it is that among species that reproduce sexually, genes which produce traits which are considered attractive by the opposite sex are more likely to be passed on to subsequent generations than genes which do not, which also ensures that the genes which cause someone to consider those particular traits to be attractive are more likely to be handed down than others. Thus, a particular image of beauty is reinforced and refined through evolutionary selection over a long period of time. Evolutionary psychology attempts to explain why these traits would have been considered attractive in the first place in terms of reproductive fitness. Since females are by biological necessity the sex which bears, gives birth to, and nurtures the young, it has been the role of the male to provide for and protect women and children. This, the evolutionary psychologist says is reflected in our concept of beauty. The physical traits men find attractive in women are indicators of fertility (5) and the physical traits women find attractive in men are indicators of strength.

This explanation of beauty, arising as it does out of evolutionary theory, displays the strengths and weaknesses of that theory. Materialistic science is good at discovering and explaining how things work. The connections which evolutionary psychologists have found between physical beauty and reproductive function are real. When treated as the final and complete explanation of why people are beautiful – or why we find them beautiful – it seems to be extremely reductionist, however. Long ago the Socratic school of philosophy reacted against the materialistic reductionism of the earlier Milesian school, rejecting its early scientific emphasis on questions about the makeup of the physical universe in favour of an emphasis upon questions about the higher truths of goodness, virtue, truth, and beauty. The result was a golden age for philosophy and culture in Greek civilization that would be foundational to the later Roman and Christian civilizations.

In his book Beauty, (6) English aesthetician and philosopher Roger Scruton argues that evolutionary psychology provides us with an insufficient and unsatisfactory explanation of beauty. He reasons that because sexual selection could have occurred in a different way that “we cannot use the fact of sexual selection as a conclusive explanation of the sentiment of beauty, still less as a way of deciphering what that sentiment means.” (7) This does not mean that beauty and sex are unconnected. Indeed, Scruton suggests, they may be “more intimately connected” than the causal relationship proposed by evolutionary psychology implies.

What does he mean by this?

Scruton contrasts the theories of the evolutionary psychologists with the ideas of Plato. Beauty was an important topic of discussion in a number of Plato’s dialogues. Plato considered beauty to be the object of eros. According to Plato, eros (love) exists on a higher and a lower plane. The lower eros is sexual desire – the wish to sexually possess the person whose beauty has inspired one’s eros. The higher eros seeks to contemplate beauty itself, i.e., beauty in the abstract, the idea or “form” of beauty.

There are problems with Plato’s theory too. Scruton writes:

[I]t requires only a normal dose of skepticism to feel that there is more wishful thinking than truth in the Platonic vision. How can one and the same state of mind be both sexual love for a boy and (after a bit of self-discipline) delighted contemplation of an abstract idea? That is like saying that the desire for a steak could be satisfied (after a bit of mental exertion) by staring at a picture of a cow. (8)

That is a good point, and Scruton expands upon it by questioning whether it is proper to speak of beauty as the object of desire. Beauty leads us to desire another person, but our desire is not fulfilled by our coming into possession of that beauty. “What prompts us, in sexual attraction, is something that can be contemplated but never possessed”. (9) This observation separates eros from other forms of desire and links the beauty which leads to sexual attraction with other kinds of beauty, such as the beauty of art. A thirsty person, has a desire for water which can be quenched by any glass of water. Eros is not like that. You fall in love with a particular person and your desire for that person cannot be fulfilled by another person. It is a particular person you want and not a generic member of a class for whom any other can be substituted.

There is another way in which eros is different from other desires. If you fall in love with someone, and that person reciprocates your love, the two of you may give yourselves completely to each other, but this will not cause the desire to go away, the way drinking water causes thirst to go away. Scruton writes:

And maybe this has something to do with the place of beauty in sexual desire. Beauty invites us to focus on the individual object, so as to relish his or her presence. And this focusing on the individual fills the mind and perceptions of the lover. (10)

This elevates human eros above the level of the merely biological sex drive we share will all other sexual animals. Eros is further elevated when we understand the beauty of the loved one to reside not in body only, but in the soul as well. (11) We would do well to ponder what this says about the powerful trends in contemporary culture towards the dragging of eros back down to the level of mere animal instinct. That is a subject for another essay however.

It is the contemplative element which the beauty which inspires eros shares with the beauty we find in nature and the beauty we create in art. Beauty inspires us to ponder and reflect, and this leads us back to look at it, or listen to it again. Perhaps here we have at least a partial explanation of why we conceive of that which appeals to sight and sound as a single category distinct from that which appeals to smell, taste, and touch.

Philosophy takes us further in our understanding of beauty than science does or can. Philosophy can only take us so far, however. After that we must rely upon theology.

In her essay “Forms of the Implicit Love of God” published in the posthumous collection Waiting for God, Simone Weil wrote that before the soul is visited by God and can give or refuse Him direct love the soul can only love God indirectly through other objects. This is what she calls the “implicit love of God” which she says:

[C]an have only three immediate objects, the only three things here below in which God is really though secretly present. These are religious ceremonies, the beauty of the world, and our neighbor. Accordingly there are three loves. (12)

Immediately before expanding upon each of these in reverse order, she writes of this “veiled form of love” that:

At the moment when it touches the soul, each of the forms that such love may take has the virtue of a sacrament. (13)

That is strong language. A sacrament is an event in which something ordinary, everyday, and earthly is transformed by the presence of God so that His love, mercy, and grace are communicated to the soul through it. Weil repeats the comparison a number of times in her discussion of how the soul can love God through the beauty of the world. Man, she writes, has been an “imaginary likeness” of the power of God, to empty himself of in imitation of the kenosis of Christ. This emptying consists of renouncing our claim to be the centre of the universe. This the love whereby we love the true centre of the universe, God, through our neighbor and “the order of the world” which is the same thing as the “beauty of the world”. The beauty of the world is the “commonest, easiest, and most natural way of approach” of the soul to God, for God “descends in all haste to love and admire the tangible beauty of his own creation through the soul that opens to him” and uses “the soul’s natural inclination to love beauty” as a trap to win the soul for Himself. (14)

The idea that through beauty the soul connects with God is the next step beyond the Platonic notion that we progress from love of beauty on earth to contemplation of the higher beauty which exists in the realm of the forms. Weil goes on to say that the beauty she is talking about belongs to the universe itself, which is the only thing other than God which can properly be called beautiful, all other things being called beautiful in a derivative sense because they are part of the beautiful world or imitate its beauty. “All these secondary kinds of beauty are of infinite value as openings to universal beauty” she writes “But, if we stop short at them, they are, on the contrary, veils; then they corrupt.” (15) This is similar to Plato’s view of those who are satisfied with the consummation of the lower eros and do not go on the higher eros which is the contemplation of beauty itself.

It is here that Weil makes the observation that forms the epigram to this essay. “Beauty is the only finality here below”. (16) What she means by this, is that beauty exists for its own sake rather than as a means to another end and that it is the only thing in this world of which that can be said. This, she contrasts to all other things, saying that “all the things that we take for ends are means” and that beauty “seems itself to be a promise…but it only gives itself; it never gives anything else”. It is because of this, she argues, that beauty “is present in all human pursuits”. It is present in the pursuit of power, for example, and it is present in art, science, physical work, and carnal love. (17)

Of art she writes:

Art is an attempt to transport into a limited quantity of matter, modeled by man, an image of the infinite beauty of the entire universe. If the attempt succeeds, this portion of matter should not hide the universe, but on the contrary it should reveal its reality to all around. (18)

Weil does not hesitate to take this to its logical conclusion:

Works of art that are neither pure and true reflections of the beauty of the world nor openings onto this beauty are not strictly speaking beautiful; their authors may be very talented but they lack real genius. That is true of a great many works of art which are among the most celebrated and the most highly praised. Every true artist has had real, direct, and immediate contact with the beauty of the world, contact that is of the nature of a sacrament. God has inspired every first-rate work of art, though its subject may be utterly and entirely secular; he has not inspired any of the others. Indeed the luster of beauty that distinguishes some of those others may quite well be a diabolic luster. (19)

It is interesting, upon reading these words about art, to reflect upon the familiar verse from the Book of Genesis which tells us that God created man in His own image. We are God’s workmanship, His art. What does it mean that we are created “in His image”? Theologians have puzzled over that question for centuries. Where is the “imago Deo” to be found? Is it in our rational faculties as many have proposed?

Dorothy Sayers did not think so. In an essay on the subject of “the image of God’ in her book The Mind of the Maker, she wrote:

It is observable that in the passage leading up to the statement about man, he has given no detailed information about God. Looking at man, he sees in him something essentially divine, but when we turn back to see what he says about the original upon which the "image" of God was modelled, we find only the single assertion, "God created". The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things. (20)

This characteristic, creativity, manifests itself in what we call art. If God’s image in man lies in his creativity this surely lends weight to the idea that there is something “of the nature of a sacrament” about true art. It is interesting that these two women, one an orthodox Anglican, the other a very unorthodox convert to Christianity who refused baptism on the grounds that God wanted her to identify with the unbeliever (21), writing at approximately the same time, would strike upon thoughts that in a strange but fitting way complement each other.

We have pursued beauty, from the scientific explanation of a trait which generates reproductive fitness by attracting sexual partners, to a philosophical view of beauty as an object of contemplation which elevates man from the level of the beast, to a spiritual view of beauty as a meeting place between the human soul and God. There is no higher ground to seek.





(1) Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women (New York: William Morrow, 1991)

(2) Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003) p. 281. The first edition of this book was published in hardcover by Penguin in 1993.

(3) Ibid, p. 280.

(4) A layman's introduction to evolutionary psychology is Robin Wright’s The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).

(5) Ridley discusses the late Devendra Singh’s research into the correlation between the “hourglass figure” and fertility, and also points to the connection between feminine beauty and youth.

(6) Roger Scruton, Beauty, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). This book was reissued this year in paperback as part of Oxford’s “Very Short Introductions” series, now bearing the subtitle “A Very Short Introduction”.

(7) Ibid, p. 32.

(8) Ibid, p. 35.

(9) Ibid, p. 36.

(10) Ibid, pp. 38-39.

(11) Ibid, pp. 39-43

(12) Simone Weil, Waiting For God, (New York: Harper Perennial Classics, 2001) p. 83. This is a reprint of the translation by Emma Craufurd first published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1951. The French edition came out in 1950, seven years after her death in England.

(13) Ibid, p. 84.

(14) Ibid, pp. 99-103, quotations taken from pages 99, 100, and 103.

(15) Ibid, p. 104.

(16) Ibid, p. 105.

(17) Ibid, pp. 105-112, quotations taken from pages 105 and 106.

(18) Ibid, p. 107

(19) Ibid.

(20) Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (London: Methuen, 1941) p. 17. http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/dlsayers/mindofmaker/mind.02.htm

(21) Simone Weil was born Jewish but converted to Christianity. Waiting for God is a collection of letters and essays that was published after her death. Most of the letters were written to her friend Dominican priest Father Joseph-Marie Perrin explaining why she was turning down his pleas for her to be baptized. These were written around the time of her flight from France in 1942.

What is Art?

Art in the singular, is a more difficult concept to grasp and to define, than that of the arts plural. We can arrive at a fairly reasonable understanding of what the arts are by simply naming them – painting, sculpture, architecture, music, literature and so on. We only run into difficulties when differences of opinion arise as to whether something should be classified as an art or not. Some people speak of every human endeavour as being, at least potentially, an art. Others restrict the term to activities which are creative. There are those who would restrict it even further by distinguishing between two kinds of creative activities. The first kind are activities in which something is created to serve a practical utilitarian function. An example would be the act of making a chair for somebody to sit in. The second kind of creative activities involve the creation of things that do not have that kind of practical use but which are rather intended to be enjoyed for themselves Those who make such a distinction would call the first kind of activities crafts and the second kind of activities arts.

However widely or narrowly we choose to draw the circle around what we include in the category of the arts we tend to agree that the arts are human activities which involve the exercising of skill and knowledge. Even the person who seems to trivialize the concept by speaking of “the art of twiddling one’s thumbs” does not, by this expression, mean to include every individual who in a moment of extreme boredom takes to distracting his attention in this manner. Rather, he is suggesting that there is a kind of skill which can be applied to thumb-twiddling , which elevates the thumb-twiddler who masters it to a degree of superiority over the amateur who merely dabbles in thumb-twiddling.

“Art” is more difficult to grasp than “the arts” because it is a more abstract concept. Philosophy professors tend to use geometrical illustrations in explaining Plato’s concept of the Forms to their students. The Form of a triangle is an abstract three-sided figure as opposed to an actual triangle drawn out on a piece of paper. We frequently use the word art in such a way that the relationship between art and the arts is similar to that between the abstract concept of a triangle and a triangle you can see on a page before you. From this perspective art is the category to which each of the arts belongs. We also, however, use the word art to refer collectively to that which is produced by the arts. Thus, if we were in a museum filled with sculptures and paintings we could make a gesture taking in all the objects on display and say that they are art, although this second meaning would probably be more properly expressed by “works of art” or “artwork”.

Another way in which we use the word art is as a standard by which we qualitatively judge works of art. We might look at a painting that we really admire and say “Now that’s art!” Conversely, we might look at a museum exhibit that we find loathsome and say “This is supposed to be art?”

It is not always clear what exactly we mean when we use the word art this way. It is common today, to treat such judgments as being simply an expression of one’s personal likes and dislikes and therefore having little to no objective value. Now there is obviously some truth to that. There is always a subjective element in our evaluation of works of beauty. We call this element taste and arguing about matters of taste has long been considered to be a pointless exercise.

There is a difference, however, between a pointless argument about matters of taste and a discussion about the quality of a person’s sense of taste. If I say “I like this and dislike that” and you say “I like that and dislike this” we may give reasons for our likes and dislikes but by doing so we will not be able to prove the other person “wrong” or ourselves “right” in our opinions. “Right” and “wrong” are not judgments that apply to cases of “I like” and “I dislike”. This is what the person who first coined the Latin adage de gustibus non est disputandem obviously had in mind.

We do, however, speak of people having “good taste” and “bad taste”. Is this also a completely subjective judgment or can we arrive at an objective standard by which we evaluate people’s tastes?

We should not be too quick to answer no. There is another way of looking at our use of the word art as a qualitative judgment. When we look at two paintings and say that one is art and that the other is not, we may simply be saying that we like the one and dislike the other, but we might also be saying that we see indications of skill, talent, expertise, and inspiration in the one painting that are lacking in the other painting. If it is the latter we mean then our judgment is not entirely subjective but is an evaluation of specific qualities that we are looking for in the paintings and measuring against a standard.

If that is the case then when we say a person has good taste we may be saying more than just that his likes and dislikes are similar to our own. What we describe as good taste might be simply a high degree of correlation between someone’s personal likes and dislikes on the one hand and the standard of excellence by which we judge the quality of an artist’s work on the other.

Now a case can be made that the standards by which we judge such things as skill, knowledge, and talent are also subjective. If, after having spent an evening at the concert hall listening to a Bach concerto and a Haydn symphony, I come home and find that my neighbor is listening to a recording of some punk screaming obscene lyrics about sex, drugs, and violence to the accompaniment of screeching electric guitars that sound like chalkboard scratches and the heavy pounding of drums that produce an instant headache, I would not be inclined to use the word “music” to describe my neighbor’s acoustical preferences. “Cacophonous noise” or “bloody awful racket” would be the descriptive words that I would most likely use.

Is that simply a matter of taste?

Many would say yes, and on actual occasions where a situation resembling the one which I have described above has occurred I have had it pointed out to me that the band that I, with my prehistoric opinions on music was so rudely dismissing as untalented noisemakers, consisted of members who had actually studied music at a conservatory from an early age and possessed masters degrees in music.

Such arguments do not usually impress me because for someone with such training and talent (you need talent to get into a conservatory) to waste their skills in this way strikes me as being blasphemy of a similar nature to that of an ordained Christian priest celebrating at a Black Mass. There is an interesting point to be made about this kind of argument however. The person who points to the orthodox musical education of someone who has made a career out of generating noise pollution does not appeal to any intrinsic quality or value in the product of their preferred artist. They rather, appeal to the fact that he has the established capacity to produce music that meets the standards by which I have negatively assessed the music he actually does produce.

Does this argument not therefore uphold the very standards it seeks to dismiss as arbitrary, subjective, and artificial?

The idea that good art requires skill which involves a mixture of innate talent and acquired learning which can be evaluated by a set of standards points to the root meaning of the word art. It is derived ultimately from the Latin word ars. This word, like its Greek equivalent techne, refers to a productive skill that was generally passed on from father to son. There was no distinction originally between an art and a craft. The meaning of art has evolved and been refined over the centuries. It is only in the last couple of centuries however that it has been in danger of being cut off from its root meaning entirely.

Those who dismiss the idea that art can be judged as good or bad on the basis of established societal and cultural standards frequently embrace the recent idea that the primary function of art is the external expression of the artists inner feelings. This idea can produce some pretty strange ways of thinking.

My maternal grandmother is a painter, mostly of watercolour landscapes of the terrain around the farm in southwestern Manitoba where she lived most of her life. She has frequently told me that others have said that her painting is “not art”. When I asked her what the reasoning was behind this bizarre assessment she said that it was because she just painted places that she saw whereas a real artist paints what is on the inside.

Think about what that implies if taken to its logical conclusion. The landscapes of Peter Paul Rubens, Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin and Thomas Gainsborough would have to be dismissed from the category of “art”. So would Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s drawings of wooded corridors and paintings of waterfalls and beautiful gardens. That is not all. Still-life painting would be excluded by this and much portrait painting as well.

The ideas that art exists only or primarily to express the inner feelings of the artist and that art can only be judged subjectively are in major conflict with the reality of art, the function it has historically served, and how the best art has been produced through the centuries. Art is a vital part of culture, which is the product and life of a community and society. The health of a society’s culture is reflected in it’s art and art which exists for no reason other than to express the feelings of narcissistic and egotistical artists does not reflect a healthy culture. It reflects the culture of a society where social atomization has taken place and the sense of community has been terribly compromised.

Historically, the great masters created works of art depicting religious and classical themes for the palaces of the royalty and aristocracy and for the churches which were the cultural centres of traditional societies, and portraits, landscapes and still-lifes for middle class clients. It was commonly and universally understood by the artists and by their patrons and clients that the purpose of art was beauty. Beauty is what artists sought to create and beauty is what patrons and clients wished to purchase.

Beauty, it has commonly been said, is in the eye of the beholder. Undoubtedly, there is a great deal of truth to that. If beauty were entirely subjective, however, art would be impossible. If a culture did not possess a common understanding at some level of what is aesthetically pleasing artists would not know what to create and their patrons and clients would not know what to buy.

The idea of beauty has come under attack in recent decades. The attacks are generally overreactions to ways in which the concept of beauty has been misused. Beauty is a quality that we look for in people as well as in places, objects, and what we call art. Some people greatly exaggerate the importance of beauty in relation to other personal qualities. This kind of exaggeration can manifest itself in a number of negative ways. Vanity can arise out of obsession with one’s own beauty. Or, if one is obsessed with attaining beauty this can lead to self-destructive behaviour such as starving oneself. People who value physical beauty over all other desirable qualities display the trait we call “shallowness” which is a negative trait.

These tendencies have been present among human beings since the earliest times and the traditional way of dealing with them has been to encourage people to show moderation in balance in how they how they look at beauty in themselves and in other people. You are beautiful? That’s good but it doesn’t mean much if you are spoiled, arrogant, and inconsiderate of others. You do not think you are beautiful? Then look at the other good qualities you possess and maximize those. In your assessment of other people place greater value on character traits like honesty, dependability, and kindness than upon physical traits.

This has always been the sensible approach to human beauty but some now feel that the problems described above require the radical solution of challenging and overthrowing the very concept of beauty itself. This has tremendous implications for how we understand art. For we cannot separate the concept of physical human beauty from the concept of beauty in general. The depiction of human beauty has been a part of art for millennia. Moreover, the depiction of human beauty in an idealized rather than a realistic form was one of the primary goals of some of the most important artists in the history of Western art.

This was what ancient Greek and Roman sculptors sought to achieve and what the artists of the Renaissance, who looked to the Greeks and Romans for their inspiration, also sought after. When art seeks to depict beauty in a balanced, harmonious, ideal form that is a perfected version of the beauty we see in the world around us, this is called classicism, after the Classical Era in ancient Athens. Classical idealism has historically been balanced by other competing tendencies. Caravaggio introduced a kind of realism into art by depicting ordinary people in everyday situations as they look in real life, even using this style in his depiction of people in extraordinary situations, such as his paintings of the conversion of St. Paul and the crucifixion of St. Peter. The balancing of the ideal with the real itself achieved in a way the classical ideal of balance.

Whichever vision guided the artist however, of the ideal, the real, or something that was not quite either or a combination of both, his goal was to show people, places, and objects which other people like would want to look at and which would draw them back to look at them again and again. This is what defines beauty – the quality of being desirable to the senses of sight or, in the case of music, sound.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the 20th century revolution in the arts was the rejection on the part of many of the idea that art should be beautiful. Throughout history, art has been made depicting things which are not beautiful. The Last Judgment is a common theme in religious art and the damned being sent off to Hell, or dragged there by demons, is not something that can be depicted in an aesthetically pleasing way. The purpose of such paintings is to produce moral and spiritual reflection. Quentin Massys for some reason painted the portrait that has come to be known as The Ugly Duchess. The entire oeuvre of Hieronymous Bosch could not be described as beautiful in any conventional sense of the term. These kinds of painting, however, were understood to be exceptions to the rule. They depicted ugly subjects for reasons which were considered sufficient to overrule the general understanding that artwork was to be beautiful.

That is very different from the later 20th Century idea that there is no necessary connection between art and the beautiful, that the latter is entirely subjective, and that art exists as a vehicle of the artist’s self-expression which is apparently so valuable to society that it deserves to be funded from the public purse. This idea is fatal to the concept of art for the only justification for thinking of art as something unique within the general category of the application of human knowledge and skill to the making of things (the original meaning of the word “art”) is that art is the making of things which are beautiful.