We are odd creatures living in an odd place. One wonders if there are other such creatures in this universe; creatures who are never satisfied; creatures who suffer; creatures who are so uncomfortable with what they are that they change their appearance to deny it.
We all long to return home. We may not know what this means exactly or where it is or even what it is, but we long to be there. We even dis-cover it when we re-cognize it in something or someone beautiful: even the words I just used reflect this sense of recovered truth. That’s because the essence of what we call beauty points toward that unspeakable divine something we all long for, the blue flower of the Romantic Era.
I’ve read two interesting books recently: Venus in Exile, by Professor Wendy Steiner, and Frankenstein, by Mary Shelly. Both books relate to the relationship between “beauty” and the “beautiful.” I am not an academic, and thus have no pretensions about whether what I’m going to say is historically correct, but I think I am right that both books see a problem with the male-dominant view of beauty that arose in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century thought, and in Modernist/Post-modernist art in particular.
By male-dominant view I mean the extremely theoretical posture of artists and philosophers of art in these time-periods. The zenith of this viewpoint/philosophy is Emanuel Kant, who distinguished the “beautiful,” female-physical-material, from “beauty,” the male-theoretical-abstracted form behind the beautiful (Kant never would have thought about this way, but I think it is generally accurate nonetheless.). Thus, for Kant the “beautiful” was physical, soft, emotional; oriented toward the domestic, the physical, and the emotional. He thought art ought to be more than this; more rational, less physical and therefore more abstracted; it ought to focus on the sublime form underlying the beautiful in search of the refinements of intellectual pleasure. Modernists, taking this Kantian view of the importance of the sublime, took the Romantic idea of the “beautiful” and abstracted it into a formal study of “beauty.” In so doing, however, they could not deny the natural importance of the female to the male, and thus Modernist art tended toward fetishism and misogyny, a tendency left uncorrected by Post-Modernists.
Dr. Frankenstein was the quintessential Enlightenment man, confident in the triumph of reason over nature, the male over the female. The monster he created is the dream of abstracted beauty turned a nightmarish force against the beautiful by Mary Shelly, who feared that extracting beauty from nature would have unintended consequences, which she describes in her book. The monster is a nightmare for the express reason that he stands outside of nature. The monster is extremely rational and sensitive, but is rendered mad because he cannot have the things he longs for in his incompleteness: companionship; empathy; domestic peace; the love of a woman.
We are odd creatures and we live in an odd place. We need to be understood, appreciated and loved for what we are inside, but to do this, whether we like it or not, we need the love we seek to be physical/material, not merely theoretical; we need not only to be loved, we need to feel loved and this can only come about through an appreciation of the beautiful, not the corpse of abstracted beauty. We experience a longing for the beautiful because we are alone and inadequate by ourselves, even the monster knew that.
No. 40: The Blue Flower
We are odd creatures living in an odd place. One wonders if there are other such creatures in this universe; creatures who are never satisfied; creatures who suffer; creatures who are so uncomfortable with what they are that they change their appearance to deny it.
We all long to return home. We may not know what this means exactly or where it is or even what it is, but we long to be there. We even dis-cover it when we re-cognize it in something or someone beautiful: even the words I just used reflect this sense of recovered truth. That’s because the essence of what we call beauty points toward that unspeakable divine something we all long for, the blue flower of the Romantic Era.
I’ve read two interesting books recently: Venus in Exile, by Professor Wendy Steiner, and Frankenstein, by Mary Shelly. Both books relate to the relationship between “beauty” and the “beautiful.” I am not an academic, and thus have no pretensions about whether what I’m going to say is historically correct, but I think I am right that both books see a problem with the male-dominant view of beauty that arose in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century thought, and in Modernist/Post-modernist art in particular.
By male-dominant view I mean the extremely theoretical posture of artists and philosophers of art in these time-periods. The zenith of this viewpoint/philosophy is Emanuel Kant, who distinguished the “beautiful,” female-physical-material, from “beauty,” the male-theoretical-abstracted form behind the beautiful (Kant never would have thought about this way, but I think it is generally accurate nonetheless.). Thus, for Kant the “beautiful” was physical, soft, emotional; oriented toward the domestic, the physical, and the emotional. He thought art ought to be more than this; more rational, less physical and therefore more abstracted; it ought to focus on the sublime form underlying the beautiful in search of the refinements of intellectual pleasure. Modernists, taking this Kantian view of the importance of the sublime, took the Romantic idea of the “beautiful” and abstracted it into a formal study of “beauty.” In so doing, however, they could not deny the natural importance of the female to the male, and thus Modernist art tended toward fetishism and misogyny, a tendency left uncorrected by Post-Modernists.
Dr. Frankenstein was the quintessential Enlightenment man, confident in the triumph of reason over nature, the male over the female. The monster he created is the dream of abstracted beauty turned a nightmarish force against the beautiful by Mary Shelly, who feared that extracting beauty from nature would have unintended consequences, which she describes in her book. The monster is a nightmare for the express reason that he stands outside of nature. The monster is extremely rational and sensitive, but is rendered mad because he cannot have the things he longs for in his incompleteness: companionship; empathy; domestic peace; the love of a woman.
We are odd creatures and we live in an odd place. We need to be understood, appreciated and loved for what we are inside, but to do this, whether we like it or not, we need the love we seek to be physical/material, not merely theoretical; we need not only to be loved, we need to feel loved and this can only come about through an appreciation of the beautiful, not the corpse of abstracted beauty. We experience a longing for the beautiful because we are alone and inadequate by ourselves, even the monster knew that.