Restoring Our Sensitivity to Beauty

Feed your soul

I was recently reading The Broken Center: Studies in the Theological Horizon of Modern Literature by Nathan A. Scott, Jr. In the introductory chapter, the author discusses the ideas of Karl Mannheim, who wrote The Diagnosis of Our Time. I have not yet read Mannheim, but his ideas as presented by Scott seem particularly relevant to my exploration at The Turtledove; namely, that our objective aesthetic sense has deteriorated, and so have our appearances and our relationships.

Scott outlines Mannheim’s concept of the “paradigmatic experience,” which are “basic experiences that carry more weight than others, and which are unforgettable in comparison with others that are merely passing sensations.”¹ Within the psyche, paradigmatic experiences form a fundamentally sacramental and ontological understanding of the world, because they allow us to grasp that some things are radically more significant than others. This, in turn, fashions our collective sense of virtue and taste. In a culture devoid of paradigmatic experience, “no consistent conduct, no character formation and no real human coexistence and co-operation are possible,”² resulting ultimately in the collapse of cohesive, functional communities. Everything surrounds us with equal and disassociated significance, writes Scott, resulting in a “kaleidoscopic concept of life.”³ Within the kaleidoscope, we are “condemned to the awful prison of his own individuality, since nothing means the same thing to any broad segment of people.”⁴

The image of the kaleidoscope recalls the word Daniel Bell chose in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism to describe the aesthetic and intellectual culture of the American majority: “shattered.”⁵ He identifies the axial principle of our modern American culture as the “expression and remaking of the self in order to achieve self-realization and self-fulfillment.”⁶ And indeed, we are all caught in the vicious cycle of disassociating any tiny part of ourselves that fits a certain consumer identity in order to assuage our desire for beauty, ritual and meaning. This is the path to self-realization that we are sold— and the market exploits our desperation for true communion with others. As we hurtle towards a complete collapse of the American way of life, it is our lack of universal, paradigmatic experiences that drives us to continually subvert, transgress, and shatter. What we have left to share are mass-produced, machine-made sensations of pleasure.

Our technocratic culture has reduced singular and particular persons to productive, abstract, and functional identities, identities that we are encouraged to purchase or market. Our singularity is something God-given and innate, it is personal; it engenders relationships. Individuality as the American knows it is anti-personal; it uses relationship as a means to self-realization and self-fulfillment. As a result, in the race to express and remake ourselves, we become isolated, naked, and anonymous.⁷ Note that here Scott makes the same association that John Paul II does between nudity and anonymity, that the tendency to cover the nakedness of the human body reveals the universal experience of nakedness rendering us both object and anonymous.⁸ If a healthy culture eschews anonymity and nudity in favor of the singularly unique person, it would logically also reject anything that degrades and subverts personhood.

It is apparent that our culture is not healthy in this sense. Most of the clothes marketed to young women embrace nudity in some form or another. Most of the objects—useful or otherwise— we buy are identical, machine-made items. Even our “interests” now fall into strict, shallow, sub-categories driven by streams of short, schizophrenic videos, so many of them that the human faces in them become one conglomerate stock-image. Our disordered relationship with technology cons us all into buying our very own isolation and anonymity. Scott rightly laments that “we live in a world from which all gracious marks of ‘presence’ have been banished.”⁹ In part, this is why we are so quick to buy, to buy in to the machine. We long for beauty, ritual, and meaning, even in our clothes and our household, in everyday objects. Form and Function should have never been divorced. But since we are trapped in a kaleidoscope of shattered sameness, the only option available to us is to be consumers. The personal touch of presence has deliberately been stripped out of our human environments because it recalls to us our imago Dei status as creators.

We no longer allow for paradigmatic experiences. We have allowed everything that was once human and personal to be taken over by the machine. Thanks to machines, we don’t have to make anything anymore! We don’t have to do anything. Creativity is no longer tied to necessity, and necessity is formed out of a particular environment and a particular community. When this happens, human creativity becomes a slave conscripted to build the prison of self-fulfillment, it becomes, as Daniel Bell says, “human nature unchecked.”¹⁰ Human nature unchecked drives us to constantly shatter, subvert, and transgress. Sin renders us all naked and ashamed. But is the antidote “human nature checked?” I believe that here again we would veer into excess, stifling singularity and suffocating community. It is in the practice of virtue that human creativity flourishes, and in order to practice virtue, we need a formed sense of taste that arises from collective paradigmatic experience. It is practice in virtue that brings forth our true, God-given personhood that allows for the formation of strong, cohesive communities.

Aside from the fact that our formerly Christian population is now starved of the sacraments, which would be our primary and formative paradigmatic experiences, we also lack the gracious marks of human presence. As the sacraments imbue everyday objects with God’s presence, so do the hand-made and decorative nods recall to mind our own human communities: dainty flowers engraved on butter knives, gingerbread millwork on a front porch, hand-stitched clothes, hand-carved toys. These flourishes, these nods to craftsmanship and taste are paramount to a healthy ontological understanding of the world. This understanding is innate, but it can be starved to death. When we are starved, we are unable to recognize the needs of our fellow man. True creativity dies, and with it, true beauty. We live in anonymous buildings, we dress ourselves in anonymous clothing, our objects are soulless. The “gracious marks of presence” are necessary on everything that surrounds us in order for these things to become real to us, real to us in the sense that they become an integral part of the fabric and foundation of our relationships and our communities, of our memories. They also point us to shared sensibilities and tastes that are almost pre-conscious. The marks of presence are symbolic of our own marking by paradigmatic experiences. This is the paramount importance of eschewing the mass-produced in favor of human hands.

In part, this explains the meteoric popularity of second-hand and thrift. Many will claim that to thrift is to find unique pieces that better showcase their individuality, but to buy second-hand is actually a search for presence in objects, a search for a genuine community. We sense this community, this procession of human hands and human care, in already-worn or handmade things, because the objects are a testament to those around you who have had the same paradigmatic experiences, who can say WITH you “this is good, this is bad, this is ugly.” Anytime that you can choose an object that has a mark of presence, you are restoring some of your sensitivity to Beauty. You are feeding your soul. A community centered on beauty acknowledges its transcendental nature— beauty draws us towards one another and draws us up. A person inspired by beauty sees the need of his neighbor and feels the love of his God. Only with our sensitivity to beauty restored can we begin to escape the kaleidoscope.

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I would love to hear your practical ideas of how to infuse our daily lives with those “gracious marks of presence” again in the comments!

1. Scott, Jr., Nathan A. (1965). The Broken Center: Studies in the Theological Horizon of Modern Literature. Yale University Press. pg. 5

2. Ibid., pg. 5

3. Ibid., pg. 6

4. Ibid., pg. 6

5. Bell, Daniel. (1976) The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Basic Books, Inc., pg. 41

6. Ibid., pg. 13

7. Scott, Jr., Nathan A. (1965). The Broken Center: Studies in the Theological Horizon of Modern Literature. Yale University Press. pg. 16-17

8. See my last essay, “Sacramental Clothing”

9. Scott, Jr., Nathan A. (1965). The Broken Center: Studies in the Theological Horizon of Modern Literature. Yale University Press. pg. 16-17

10. Bell, Daniel. (1976) The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Basic Books, Inc., pg. 19