An ongoing (and interesting) discussion in the thymos post, below, makes me want to revisit the concept of "natural law." What is it? How do you know if something is or is not according to the law of nature? Is it important that things should be?
Here is the wikipedia article, which explains a number of versions of the concept that have existed over the years. Which is your favorite?
Lex Naturalis
Lex Naturalis:
Bumped:
1 in custody, 3 overboard.
Heh. Now I know that supposedly merchantmen are not supposed to be carrying weapons these days, but something tells me that the guys in the water have extra holes in them.
Still, compliments to the crew.
UPDATE:
Finally.
I was wondering how long this farce was going to go on. Now. Start bombing the pirate ports until they get the idea that this is not a healthy occupation.
1 in custody, 3 overboard.
"Defense Department officials confirmed that one pirate is in custody. A U.S. official said the status of the other pirates is unknown but they were reported to "be in the water."
Heh. Now I know that supposedly merchantmen are not supposed to be carrying weapons these days, but something tells me that the guys in the water have extra holes in them.
Still, compliments to the crew.
UPDATE:
Finally.
An American ship captain was freed unharmed Sunday in a U.S. Navy operation that killed three of the four Somali pirates who had been holding him for days in a lifeboat off the coast of Africa, a senior U.S. intelligence official said.
I was wondering how long this farce was going to go on. Now. Start bombing the pirate ports until they get the idea that this is not a healthy occupation.
Happy Easter
Easter MMIX
This is the second Easter in a row I've spent in Iraq. This morning's service at sunrise was nice, and it is good to spend part of the day in reflection. Just as at Christmas, there is a positive sense that we are doing good works here, and that faith is in harmony with those works.
For those who would like to spend a moment in reflection, a brief piece on the joys of monasticism. (H/t: Southern Appeal.) Life in Iraq is not dissimilar -- there is hard work and good work from rising to the end of the day, clean living, plenty of exercise, and the sins of the world are suppressed by a stern rule (the UCMJ and General Order #1). I have to admit that there is real happiness that comes from such a life, though for me the permanent sacrifice of family and home is not what I desire.
Of course, some prefer the life that the Holy Clerk of Compmanhurst was so ready to witness. As for me, I am glad to have done what I have done; but I don't wish to do it forever. I'd like to spend next Easter in Hungary. Or at home, with such fare and such friends as Richard found at St. Dunstan's well.
Ruthless
Ruthless:
"U.S. warships and helicopters stalked a lifeboat holding an American sea captain and his four Somali captors Sunday, while his crew briefed FBI agents about how they fought off the pirates who boarded their ship."
In 1986, this was a joke.
UPDATE: Now we're talking.
Art and Literature
Art and Literature:
From Arts & Letters Daily, two pieces:
Is Grand Theft Auto IV a kind of art?
Is the Bible a kind of literature?
To the first, it is worth nothing that The Godfather exploited the "old v. new world" concept in gangsterism to a much higher degree; and so, rather than the innovative work that the author imagines, it is derivitive and lesser (if it is art, as such, at all). Yet it may still be a step forward, if it means that games are beginning to engage the audience in moral thinking as well as mass violence. Many early movies were similarly derivitive and lesser of stage drama, particularly the black-hat-white-hat Westerns of the 1920s and earlier; but it evolved into a form that could handle High Noon or Unforgiven. Or The Godfather, for that matter.
To the second, it is a critically important question because the only avenue for students to encounter the Bible in public schools before college is in "the Bible as literature" studies. So is the Bible literature? Or is it really something else entirely? Does treating it as literature damage its nature? The author here does so; judge the result for yourself.
Judges
Judging Stephens:
New theory: Stephens is still guilty as hell; the Federal prosecutors are even worse. Fortunately, we know we can still rely on judges to uphold... um....
Well, back to the drawing board.
The Honorable Ted Stephens has been vindicated! The judge today overturned his conviction entirely, and ordered an investigation into the prosecutors. Now we know that Stephens was in the right, for example when he said:
A $2,700 massage chair, for instance, remained in his house for seven years but Stevens said it was a loan. He said he assumed a $3,200 stained-glass window was paid for, since his wife takes care of such things. A $29,000 fish statue was a donation to his foundation, he said, and only remained on his front porch because that's where the donors shipped it.Oh. Ahem.
New theory: Stephens is still guilty as hell; the Federal prosecutors are even worse. Fortunately, we know we can still rely on judges to uphold... um....
Well, back to the drawing board.
Headline contest
Headline Contest:
For this article.
"Women Smell More Than Men."
"Proof: Women Are Better Than Men, But Dogs Are Still Better Than Women."
Your entries, below.
Thymos
Thymos
And yet the author raises a good point about America, at least, which is that the thymos was slumbering or suppressed rather than absent. The Iraq and Afghan wars show that America had plenty of it ready to export, even if it remains unwelcome as a virtue within American society itself.
It may be that these extraordinarily violent movies that we produce today are a treasury of the virtue (which, as with all human qualities, ceases to be a virtue when there is either too much or too little of it). Having suppressed masculine virtue in other parts of society, a hyper-violent form of it explodes out in unrealistic characters like those portrayed by Vin Diesel and others.
The Homeric epics are marked by a full-throated celebration of the virtues of warriors and their courage in war, combined with a balancing full-throated sorrow of the horrors of war and the destruction of those warriors. It is what raises the Greek epics so far above most other human art; many have done one or the other well, but few have managed to combine the two and show them both to their full effect.
From World Affairs Journal, an article that puts the right name to the issue we've been discussing lately. Having largely (and perhaps unfairly) ignored Fukuyama's writings, I missed the point at which he correctly connected the modern problem to the ancient writings.
The danger he foresees is not simply that bourgeois democracy will cause human beings to degenerate, but that degenerate human beings will be unable to preserve democracy. Without the sense of pride and the love of struggle that Fukuyama, following Plato, calls thymos, men — and there is always an implication that thymos is a specifically masculine virtue — cannot establish freedom or protect it[.]Maybe not "specifically" but "mostly" would be better here; perhaps some women feel the same way about the society that men seem to feel about it.
And yet the author raises a good point about America, at least, which is that the thymos was slumbering or suppressed rather than absent. The Iraq and Afghan wars show that America had plenty of it ready to export, even if it remains unwelcome as a virtue within American society itself.
It may be that these extraordinarily violent movies that we produce today are a treasury of the virtue (which, as with all human qualities, ceases to be a virtue when there is either too much or too little of it). Having suppressed masculine virtue in other parts of society, a hyper-violent form of it explodes out in unrealistic characters like those portrayed by Vin Diesel and others.
The Homeric epics are marked by a full-throated celebration of the virtues of warriors and their courage in war, combined with a balancing full-throated sorrow of the horrors of war and the destruction of those warriors. It is what raises the Greek epics so far above most other human art; many have done one or the other well, but few have managed to combine the two and show them both to their full effect.
"The Song of the Cid"
I'm in Kuwait awaiting the resolution of a visa issue, which bedevils travel through this country. In the meanwhile, let me refer you to a review of a new translation of one of Spain's great epic poems. I will have to find time to read it when this deployment is at an end.
His evil opponents in the poem are not really the Muslims (who are more prey than enemies) but rather the arrogant Castilian princes of Carrión in northern Spain. They are contemptuous of the Cid's modest origins and embarrassed by their own cowardice in battle. When the Cid is received back into favor by King Alfonso, the ruler arranges for the knight's daughters to marry the princes of Carrión. Their enmity toward the heroic knight is exacerbated by incidents where their lack of courage is obvious and a source of mirth for the Cid's followers. At one point, a pet lion escapes in the Cid's palace and the princes hide themselves in fear, one behind a wine press and the other under the couch on which the Cid is sleeping. ("O! the giggling and chuckling around the court!")I know from experience that there won't be time or attention for such a project over here; but I return in July, and hope then to have a moment for study.
The princes' revenge is a horrific attack on their wives, while traveling from Valencia back to Castile. They strip, beat and flog the Cid's daughters, leaving them for dead in a forest. The women are rescued and the rest of the poem is the unfolding of revenge. The Cid is a courteous and loyal vassal but relentless when provoked. It's pretty clear by the end that, in the words of the narrator: "Whoever beats a good woman, and then abandons her, should be in great trouble -- or worse!"
April Fools
April Fools:
I'm flying back to Iraq, so I won't be around for a few days. It's been an interesting and eventful leave, if not a restful one. I'd hoped to have more time to think and write, but I have at least had time to do.
I was having a farewell dinner with my father tonight, and he told me about the new title-holder of "Greatest April Fools Prank Of All Time." Car and Driver magazine appears to have captured the flag.
It was a perfect prank, coming as it does the same week that the President was firing corporate (but not UAW!) officers and undertaking to explain the new GM warranty. One suspects that the only reason it wasn't true was that he didn't think of it!
Alternatively, someone leaked to C&D that he was planning the announcement for next week, and they decided to do a pre-emptive strike. Either way, good stuff.
Jingle Bombs.
So the working dogs are being treated 10x better than Marines? Heh. I'd be tempted to say that all is right with the world, but Grim would probably come a-huntin'.
Still, heh.
Go and give the doggy a cooling jacket!
(via Instapundit)
(Not that anyone complains, but it is humorous for everyone to see that the dogs get treated even better than Air Force personnel, who are treated 2x better than soldiers, who are treated 5x better than Marines. That means bomb dogs are treated at least 10x better than Marines.)
So the working dogs are being treated 10x better than Marines? Heh. I'd be tempted to say that all is right with the world, but Grim would probably come a-huntin'.
Still, heh.
Go and give the doggy a cooling jacket!
(via Instapundit)
Ruining Your Life
Ruining Your Life:
It is clear from the pleasure-oriented passages that she lives in a remarkable garden of ease. Further, it is clear that the world has treated her so gently that she has come to believe that human consent is of fundamental importance. She objects to parenthood, for example, in part on the grounds that the child isn't asked if he wants to be born. That suggests that she simply expects that her consent will be asked for anything that has an effect on her. She lives in a world in which her consent matters.
What is probably invisible to her is the degree to which the world-of-consent is a temporary bubble. There will come a time when disease invades the body in spite of all attempts at prolonging health; the world does not ask if you are ready to die. There is nothing in the structure of the world that suggests that human consent matters at all.
It has come to do so only through a great deal of human will, which has implied a great deal of sacrifice. This bubble of safety is a house built by strong hands and long work. If it cannot last forever, the fact that it exists at all is a remarkable human achievement. It is a gift from previous generations, who found the world worth fighting for, and who made this place in which all the good parts of the world can be had -- and the bad ones held at bay, for a time.
To sacrifice some of those pleasures, for some of that time, is necessary to give the next generation a chance to be born. She points out that no one has asked the child if he wants to be born. She forgets that no one has asked him if he doesn't!
It is true that childrearing the end of a life of consent; you are, from that moment, required rather than asked. Many soft pleasures go away, and you cease to be the center of your universe.
Does that ruin your life, or begin it? It is the point at which you begin to experience life on its terms rather than yours. You can no longer hide your face from death, as you must fear it every day -- not for yourself, but for your child. You can not hide from time, and an awareness that every day is numbered and spent.
This points to the "vigor" of life that we have been discussing of late. It is also the part where you begin to pay back your ancestors for the garden they gave you, by tending its walls for the next generation.
* The Murray quote, since it was a longer piece:
Salon has a piece they've linked from their front page that wonders, "Does Having Children Ruin Your Life?" (There is also a reply from a male reader.) It enters very nicely into the discussion we were having below.
The list of reasons why it appears to the young lady that children might ruin her life includes:
· The thought of pregnancy and birth is literally horrifying (and I don’t understand why most women don’t feel this way – a HUMAN BEING grows IN YOUR GUTS and then tears its way out of the most sensitive part of your body!!! Aaiiieee!!! I got goose-bumps just typing that -- shudder).Most of this is the leisure-first principle that Charles Murray was talking about in his essay of a few days ago.* On the occasions that the young lady considers the issue beyond the question of what pleasures she would have to yield, however, she says something more interesting.
· It’s much too risky to make a lifelong commitment to a human being I’ve never even met, who could very well be someone I wouldn’t like at all, or who wouldn’t like me at all.
· I deeply value and enjoy my romantic/sexual relationship and don’t want to ruin it.
· I strive to minimize my financial obligations in all manners possible and a child is the biggest financial obligation I can think of.
· While dogs and cats bring a smile to my face and make me want to touch and interact with them, I’m indifferent to children.
· I’m philosophically uncomfortable with the lack of consent inherent in parent-child relationships – children don’t ask to be born and certainly don’t ask to be born to their particular parents or raised in a particular household. I still sympathize with the teenager’s outrage at being forced to live by rules they never agreed to.
· When I think back to my own childhood I feel quite bad for my parents and all the sacrifices they made, and certainly would not want to live with my adolescent self.
· I cherish sleep and the idea of not sleeping in on weekends makes me want to cry.
· Human society could very well be worse in the future, and there are too many humans.
· I prefer peace and quiet, I’m a low-energy person, and I’m an introverted type who needs to spend lots of time in my own head.
It is clear from the pleasure-oriented passages that she lives in a remarkable garden of ease. Further, it is clear that the world has treated her so gently that she has come to believe that human consent is of fundamental importance. She objects to parenthood, for example, in part on the grounds that the child isn't asked if he wants to be born. That suggests that she simply expects that her consent will be asked for anything that has an effect on her. She lives in a world in which her consent matters.
What is probably invisible to her is the degree to which the world-of-consent is a temporary bubble. There will come a time when disease invades the body in spite of all attempts at prolonging health; the world does not ask if you are ready to die. There is nothing in the structure of the world that suggests that human consent matters at all.
It has come to do so only through a great deal of human will, which has implied a great deal of sacrifice. This bubble of safety is a house built by strong hands and long work. If it cannot last forever, the fact that it exists at all is a remarkable human achievement. It is a gift from previous generations, who found the world worth fighting for, and who made this place in which all the good parts of the world can be had -- and the bad ones held at bay, for a time.
To sacrifice some of those pleasures, for some of that time, is necessary to give the next generation a chance to be born. She points out that no one has asked the child if he wants to be born. She forgets that no one has asked him if he doesn't!
It is true that childrearing the end of a life of consent; you are, from that moment, required rather than asked. Many soft pleasures go away, and you cease to be the center of your universe.
Does that ruin your life, or begin it? It is the point at which you begin to experience life on its terms rather than yours. You can no longer hide your face from death, as you must fear it every day -- not for yourself, but for your child. You can not hide from time, and an awareness that every day is numbered and spent.
This points to the "vigor" of life that we have been discussing of late. It is also the part where you begin to pay back your ancestors for the garden they gave you, by tending its walls for the next generation.
* The Murray quote, since it was a longer piece:
Last April I had occasion to speak in Zurich, where I made some of these same points. After the speech, a few of the twenty-something members of the audience approached and said plainly that the phrase “a life well-lived” did not have meaning for them. They were having a great time with their current sex partner and new BMW and the vacation home in Majorca, and saw no voids in their lives that needed filling.
It was fascinating to hear it said to my face, but not surprising. It conformed to both journalistic and scholarly accounts of a spreading European mentality. Let me emphasize “spreading.” I’m not talking about all Europeans, by any means. That mentality goes something like this: Human beings are a collection of chemicals that activate and, after a period of time, deactivate. The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time as pleasantly as possible.
If that’s the purpose of life, then work is not a vocation, but something that interferes with the higher good of leisure. If that’s the purpose of life, why have a child, when children are so much trouble—and, after all, what good are they, really?
Keep Coming
Keep It Coming:
Are people free to quit if they don't like their new, "fair" pay? If so, how do you convince them not to quit, if not via pay? This isn't the sector where starvation is haunting the mind. Most of these folks could get another job, if they wanted one; and they are apt to have substantial savings.
The government is supposedly taking over our corporations in order to save them. Right?
Congressman Alan Grayson (FL-8) today proudly introduced the Grayson-Himes Pay For Performance Act of 2009.What are the standards for fair pay in this industry? How do you know?
"This bill is based on two simple concepts. One, no one has the right to get rich off taxpayer money. And two, no one should get rich off abject failure," Congressman Grayson said. "An economy in which a bank executive can line his own pocket by destroying his company with risky bets is an economy that will spiral downwards. And a government that hands out money to such executives is a government that fails to protect the taxpayers."
The Pay For Performance Act applies to all companies, including AIG, in which the federal government has a capital investment. The bill requires all future compensation to be performance-based. It will be up to the Secretary of the Treasury to establish the standards for fair pay and bonuses. The restriction will remain in place until the company repays all the federal money it received.
Are people free to quit if they don't like their new, "fair" pay? If so, how do you convince them not to quit, if not via pay? This isn't the sector where starvation is haunting the mind. Most of these folks could get another job, if they wanted one; and they are apt to have substantial savings.
The government is supposedly taking over our corporations in order to save them. Right?
Against Rand:
"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life..."
Money does demand virtue, and perhaps even the highest virtues: but not these. What it demands are self-sacrifice, so that you are willing to work fifteen hours a day to support a family if you must; honor in keeping promises, so that no matter how hard the job, if you give your word men know will achieve it; and being willing to bear the weight of others, so that people come to be willing to trust their weight to you.
A man who does that consistently will never lack for money long. Courage is a virtue, certainly; pride is quite often a sin; and at this point in our society's history, 'self esteem' is absolutely a sin.
These higher virtues of self-sacrifice are the true root of wealth. Those are just what Rand warns against in her work, but they are the real thing. There is plenty of money in the world: those who have it are only too eager to find good stewards, trustworthy employees, and hard workers to help them with their enterprises. When you have enough of your own, you may be the one looking for good stewards and trustworthy men. Think what you would want in an employee, and you will know how to ensure that you have work.
What is more, with those same qualities a man can find love to go with his money. Pride and 'self-esteem' will not alone bring love to him. These things will.
Then you have a reason to want money. A man without love will throw it away as fast as his hands lay on it, seeking pleasure and having no care for it. A man without love might prefer the gun to the dollar, honestly. But the man with love will want stability and safety for the people he loves, and he will work to build it. In working faithfully, he will gain the name for honor and honesty that will ensure his success. He will leave an example to his children, and a place for them.
If he fights, he will fight for those reasons. It will not be because you come to take his money. It will be because you seek to undermine his ability to defend what he loves against the storms of the world. In that cause, you will find in him a terrible foe.
Cassandra is quoting Rand at length.
"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich--will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt--and of his life, as he deserves.Rand is wrong precisely here:
"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life..."
Money does demand virtue, and perhaps even the highest virtues: but not these. What it demands are self-sacrifice, so that you are willing to work fifteen hours a day to support a family if you must; honor in keeping promises, so that no matter how hard the job, if you give your word men know will achieve it; and being willing to bear the weight of others, so that people come to be willing to trust their weight to you.
A man who does that consistently will never lack for money long. Courage is a virtue, certainly; pride is quite often a sin; and at this point in our society's history, 'self esteem' is absolutely a sin.
These higher virtues of self-sacrifice are the true root of wealth. Those are just what Rand warns against in her work, but they are the real thing. There is plenty of money in the world: those who have it are only too eager to find good stewards, trustworthy employees, and hard workers to help them with their enterprises. When you have enough of your own, you may be the one looking for good stewards and trustworthy men. Think what you would want in an employee, and you will know how to ensure that you have work.
What is more, with those same qualities a man can find love to go with his money. Pride and 'self-esteem' will not alone bring love to him. These things will.
Then you have a reason to want money. A man without love will throw it away as fast as his hands lay on it, seeking pleasure and having no care for it. A man without love might prefer the gun to the dollar, honestly. But the man with love will want stability and safety for the people he loves, and he will work to build it. In working faithfully, he will gain the name for honor and honesty that will ensure his success. He will leave an example to his children, and a place for them.
If he fights, he will fight for those reasons. It will not be because you come to take his money. It will be because you seek to undermine his ability to defend what he loves against the storms of the world. In that cause, you will find in him a terrible foe.
Something about death
Something To Do With Death:
What if that is what we really want -- given everything we might want?
We've spoken before of how that movie predicted the end of men, in a world in which only 'businessmen' would be welcome. Yet what all this points to is that something within the West has died. What we may wish to wonder about now is, what comes after?
We must ask, for we are coming to the end of this. Perhaps it is an end to us. Perhaps it is a rebirth.
Mark Steyn warns against the Obama project, and his terms are familiar.
A couple of years back Paul Krugman wrote a column asserting that, while parochial American conservatives drone on about “family values”, the Europeans live it, enacting policies that are more “family friendly”. On the Continent, claims the professor, “government regulations actually allow people to make a desirable tradeoff - to modestly lower income in return for more time with friends and family.”What was it that Charles Murray said?
As befits a distinguished economist, Professor Krugman failed to notice, that for a continent of “family friendly” policies, Europe is remarkably short of families. While America’s fertility rate is more or less at replacement level – 2.1 – seventeen European nations are at what demographers call “lowest-low” fertility - 1.3 or less - a rate from which no society in human history has ever recovered....
When the state “gives” you plenty – when it takes care of your health, takes cares of your kids, takes care of your elderly parents, takes care of every primary responsibility of adulthood – it’s not surprising that the citizenry cease to function as adults: Life becomes a kind of extended adolescence – literally so for those Germans who’ve mastered the knack of staying in education till they’re 34 and taking early retirement at 42 (which sounds a lot like where Obama’s college-for-all plans will lead).
And yet he is right to say [men] are not adequately welcome within the society. In many respects the world of Iraq is as much home as this world; for there one still puts on armor and 'rides out,' and does the kinds of things that make you feel like you are living the kind of life a man should live. This is what Murray was talking about: vital experiences, extraordinary ones, that are the reason that men exist at all.What if these experiences fade, and given the choice of anything else that they want, men choose not to exist? And women, freed to have only the children they really want, find they really want so few that the land grows empty and the people pass from memory?
What if that is what we really want -- given everything we might want?
We've spoken before of how that movie predicted the end of men, in a world in which only 'businessmen' would be welcome. Yet what all this points to is that something within the West has died. What we may wish to wonder about now is, what comes after?
We must ask, for we are coming to the end of this. Perhaps it is an end to us. Perhaps it is a rebirth.
GM
I Find This Rather Alarming:
"GM Chief to Resign at White House Behest."
I can't quite put into words why that bothers me, but it does. Teddy Roosevelt, of course, fought the big trusts and use government power to make them smaller and more amenable to pressure. Government and corporations fighting is not the problem; indeed, that's part of what the world should look like. If the two are aligned in their interests so much that there is no conflict, we're not looking at a healthy situation for the rest of us.
What I think may be alarming here is the confluence of two things: the President is plainly acting well outside of his Constitutional role in making leadership decisions for private corporations; and the corporations, though massive and powerful, are submitting without a fight.
That's too much concentration of power, and no obvious sense that there are lines that ought to be respected.
UPDATE:
Dad29 has more:
Today, the President of the United States is expected to make significant announcements about GM’s warranty policy. No, that’s not a typo....One gets a sense that there has been a loss of perspective somewhere.
Beauty and Distance
Beauty, Love, and Distance:
Such a love affair is often called "Platonic." Perhaps in comparing Scruton's work with this tale, we can obtain a sense as to why. Yet it is also the ideal that fired much of Medieval courtly love, which we have discussed here before. We also discussed it here and here. Courtly love was sometimes (not always) adulterous, but the clear implication of the tradition is that idealiziation of the distant and inviolate: the "mistress" in the sense of "master," rather than in the sense of "lover." Actual consummation leads to disaster, in the tales as in the reality. Idealization at a distance inspires the knights to the best and noblest of deeds, and the poets to their highest work.
None of this is to detract from the beauty of married love, which the medievals also occasionally celebrated (though, due to the necessity of marriages for practical alliance, it was rarer in their society than in our own). Enid and Geraint, which is a story I have often found personally inspiring, is such an example. The ancients, too, were able to do so -- surely Penelope is in the first rank of women in literature, in her character as a loyal and loving wife.
Still, we know that the hearts of both men and women are occasionally pulled aside. Here we see a way in which such love can reinforce and extend the beauty of the world, until it echoes and resounds with it. It may be the only way in which these desires -- natural, frequent, but disasterous -- can reliably do so.
Roger Scruton, perhaps the finest intellectual mind writing today, has produced a new work on Beauty. It is right to do this, because beauty is the root of aesthetics -- and aesthetics, classically, is a division of ethics. In determining what men find beautiful, you determine what they want, what they are aiming at, and what they will pursue at cost.
The reviewer says that Scruton is 'not the first' philosopher to think about this, and mentions Kant; but Kant was far from the first as well. Aristotle and Plato both wrote extensively about the subject. Yet today I want to tackle one problem that Scruton raises: the importance of distance to beauty.
But the appreciation of beauty also requires – and here we might sniff a contradiction – what Scruton calls "disinterested interest", an ability to maintain a certain distance between the self and the beautiful object. "Beauty comes," he writes, "from setting human life, sex included, at the distance from which it can be viewed without disgust or prurience. When distance is lost, and imagination swallowed up in fantasy, then beauty may remain, but it is a spoiled beauty, one that has been prised from the individuality of the person who possesses it. It has lost its value and gained a price."This is worth comparing to another piece (h/t for both to Arts & Letters Daily) on the subject of a love affair conducted by the Czech composer Leon Janacek. It was a remarkable affair in that it seems to have fired his composition:
This is stern stuff. Why the emphasis on maintaining distance, as if beauty were forever to be framed and set apart? Doesn't beauty often overwhelm us? Can't it be connected to mucking in, to forgetting oneself, to an animal immersion in the world? Scruton's answer is no. Not because he would suppress sexuality, but because he believes beauty is, above all, a function of the rational mind. It has "an irreducibly contemplative component".
Indeed, he is swayed by Plato's idea that beauty is not just an invitation to desire, but a call to renounce it.
The years from 1919 onwards, however, witnessed an outpouring: in addition to the operas and song cycle, Janácek also completed two concertante works for piano, the engaging wind sextet Mladi (Youth), a sinfonietta that combined the sounds of a military band with those of a symphony orchestra, two string quartets, and the magnificent Glagolitic Mass, so named after the proto-Cyrillic script in which the old Slavonic text was originally written. The intensity with which Janácek worked to produce these masterpieces is remarkable given the increased demands made on him as the senior composer of the newly independent Czechoslovakia, his continuing output of critical writings, and the fact that he had recently embarked on the most important and musically productive of his love affairs....There is something here, and readers may wish to discuss just what it is. The woman, beloved and distant -- involate -- produced from the composer works of great beauty in her name. It is likely that no physical affair could have done so.
Her effect on Janácek was clear enough – and yet it is difficult even for a commentator such as Tyrrell (he has translated the correspondence) to pin down how she inspired this character or that melody. Her passivity is perhaps the key to her attraction:
Making no demands and seeming quite uninterested in Janácek’s compositions, Kamila Stosslova turns out to have been his ideal muse: Janácek needed an empty canvas for his fantasies. Both the “Kamila Stosslova” that Janácek imagined and the works this imaginary person inspired were Janácek’s creation.
From the outset of the friendship, Kamila seems to have established boundaries: she would allow Janácek to visit and correspond with her, but she would behave as a respectable married woman ought, and reacted angrily when he ventured to call her “beautiful”.
Such a love affair is often called "Platonic." Perhaps in comparing Scruton's work with this tale, we can obtain a sense as to why. Yet it is also the ideal that fired much of Medieval courtly love, which we have discussed here before. We also discussed it here and here. Courtly love was sometimes (not always) adulterous, but the clear implication of the tradition is that idealiziation of the distant and inviolate: the "mistress" in the sense of "master," rather than in the sense of "lover." Actual consummation leads to disaster, in the tales as in the reality. Idealization at a distance inspires the knights to the best and noblest of deeds, and the poets to their highest work.
None of this is to detract from the beauty of married love, which the medievals also occasionally celebrated (though, due to the necessity of marriages for practical alliance, it was rarer in their society than in our own). Enid and Geraint, which is a story I have often found personally inspiring, is such an example. The ancients, too, were able to do so -- surely Penelope is in the first rank of women in literature, in her character as a loyal and loving wife.
Still, we know that the hearts of both men and women are occasionally pulled aside. Here we see a way in which such love can reinforce and extend the beauty of the world, until it echoes and resounds with it. It may be the only way in which these desires -- natural, frequent, but disasterous -- can reliably do so.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)