Beauty As A Core Value Wes Cecil

Thanks to our Patreon members for helping to make this episode possible and we’re now available on all the major podcasting platforms. You can find more information at the links below. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to values beauty. Now, in the first episode we talked about the possibility of of using health as one of your core values and tonight I wanted to think about and reflect on the notion of having beauty as being one of your core values. And significantly, beauty is like with health, I’m kind of starting with intrinsic values, beauty has been considered an intrinsic good in many Western philosophies for thousands of years. However, in our contemporary world, I think it has fallen off a little bit. And so tonight I want to take a reflection on what does it mean, how do we think about it, and how do we reflect on the possible environments in which beauty becomes a core value for everyone. Now, Esfahan Isfahan ast. Isfahan is half the world. Sorry for my incredibly bad Persian pronunciation there, but it’s a famous saying from Persia that Isfahan is half the world. And I was thinking of this because unfortunately Isfahan is being bombed as we speak. Um and the notion here it reminded me very much of Proust. Um during World War I, Proust came out of his apartment, his very strange apartments which were cork-lined and filled with smoke and um and was looking out at Paris because he could hear the German artillery firing in the distance. That’s how close the war got to Paris during World War I. And he said he And he and he broke down weeping. And he said, “Ah.” He was weeping for all of the useless beauty that was about to be destroyed. Paris, a famously beautiful city. Isfahan, similarly, a famous globally beautiful city for centuries and centuries. And when you ponder this, you go, “Oh, how is it? Why is it? What is it that causes us to so undervalue beauty and human achievement and human capacity that we’ll just needlessly and wantonly blow it up or shell it from a distance and kill the people and the places that give our lives joy and provide meaning. And part of this, not the only part, but part of this is simply the modern age, the mechanical age has come to find beauty basically incomprehensible, I would argue. And it’s one of these bizarre developments that you would think, you know, progress and advancement and, you know, scientific, you know, goodness and all the economic growth, everything we’ve told is so wonderful about the modern world has at the same time and often necessarily meant that we just can’t seem to get beauty into our minds, into our lives, into our souls the way we used to uh historically speaking. And so that’s really what I want to reflect on here because it is, you know, all this {quote} useless beauty that gets so either ignored or destroyed or simply is no longer even considered a value. So if you listen to political speeches, if you listen to um read the newspapers or anything, you can go a long, long time without having anybody go, “Hey, is it beautiful? Is it lovely? Is it life-enriching? Does it uh provide inspiration? Is it uh does it have uh proportions that are elegant, right?” All the language of beauty, it just vanishes. It’s just not there. Um but if you go back and you read a newspaper or a magazine or something from a hundred or or publications from even longer ago, 200 years ago, it’s shocking how much time, how much reflection is is spent talking about just specifically these issues. Um and you even further than that, you also have the notion of the form in which things are presented was often more carefully uh produced. You know, if you’re in a little bit of calligraphic culture, the the just writing itself was an art form. If you live in a print culture, just the beauty of things that were printed often were very, very much more beautifully printed a hundred years ago than they are today. And it’s not that we couldn’t print beautiful things, we can and sometimes people do. It’s that we simply don’t value it the way we used to. So, what is beauty? You know, you always have to start there. And this, of course, beauty having been around for several thousand years as a philosophical concept, as I mentioned, along with justice, is simply put one of the most vexed subjects in philosophical history. It’s argued from any number of places, any number of directions. What is beauty? Is it intrinsic? Is it something that’s factually in the extrinsic world? Is it learned? Is it a set of proportions? Is it an experience? Is it mostly culturally determined? You know, all of these questions and they’re all valuable and interesting, but I want to take this from a slightly different level that I I think will hopefully be more helpful when we ponder it from values looking out from the modern world where we find ourselves. And when you ponder this, what you find out is what has happened contemporaneously, and I’ve run into this many times, is anytime you raise a question of beauty or particularly aesthetics in general, beauty in particular, aesthetics in general, is people’s response is often, not invariably, but so often that it’s painful, is like, well, everybody has taste, there’s no determining taste, there’s no true value, so, you know, whatever, there’s no actual real beauty, it’s all just a, you know, assumption. Now we can move along. And I’m like, “Ah.” So, rather than asking a question, an honest question, what is beauty? Where do I find it? How does it influences me? It is important to me. We have a ready-made answer that prevents us from actually ever having to ask the question. And it’s a defensive answer that not only says, “I don’t have to think about this, it’s pointless or meaningless to think about it. And so we’re not even going to bother meditating upon what it might mean.” And this is this is the form of uh you know, I don’t I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like kinds of things. And you’re like, “Well, see, if you if you don’t know much about art, you actually don’t know what you like by definition, right? Knowing what you like requires exposure, reflection, uh you know, experience, you know, understanding, all these things that you’ve just said that you’re not going to have. Or many times I’ve talked to people, it’s my sort of my go-to example of this, is, you know, we’re talking about music or something. I say, “Oh, do you like opera?” I’m like, “No, I don’t like opera.” And I’m like, “Oh, have you been to opera?” “No.” “Have you Have you listened to opera?” “No, I don’t like it.” And I’m like, see, here’s the >> [laughter] >> here’s the thing, right? You actually don’t know whether or not you like something if you’ve never tried it. I mean, you can kind of intuit some things, but a lot of things you just can’t intuit. For instance, for myself, I’m not a big listener to opera um when it’s recorded, but I love going to the opera. I think I live I love opera. Recording, I don’t know, generally it doesn’t with a few exceptions, it generally doesn’t really grip me in that way. And so I’m I’m a person who just enjoys live opera, which is, you know, because it’s a visual and dramatic spectacle as well as just a musical spectacle. So, but this defensive notion, it’s it’s like aggressive ignorance. It’s an aggressive desire not to have to think about aesthetics. And this extends all over, I mean, it extends everywhere. It’s a value that it just doesn’t exist. If you look at um social housing that was social housing, by the way, has been being constructed for over well over 150 years, you know, in in large scale, much longer than that. And you can even go back to say, you know, early hospitals were generally built by either religious organizations or kings. Um and they there is it’s shocking how beautiful many of these buildings are. Like they it’s not mistakenly built beautiful. It’s not like an uh oops, we made it beautiful by accident. No, they said, “We want to make a public medical facility to help people and and we’re going to make it beautiful because of course we are.” And then you fast forward to a societies that are theoretically vastly wealthier um and much more {quote} advanced and you look at social housing or you look at hospitals or you look at some many public buildings, um particularly the United States is particularly horrible about this, but it’s true much of the world, and you go, clearly beauty was never even a conception. Like it’s it was not a value that they took in. They’re like, “Oh, you know, efficiency, however defined, cost, you know, legal structures, safety, um materials, whatever, like all these other conceptions, all of these other values were put up to the fore and then beauty not only was a minor value, it is just a non-existent value. And you go, like, “Oh my gosh, like how >> how have we gone so far wrong that we’ll take I mean, these buildings are expensive, by the way, so that we’ll spend hundreds of millions of dollars, billion dollars, more, depending on the facilities, depending where we’re building them, and what we’ll say is, “No, we just don’t have the time. We don’t have the energy. We don’t have the money. We don’t have the resources.” But what it really is is we just don’t care. We just don’t think it’s important. And when you just have when you come from a culture or societies that consistently enact this as a belief everywhere. You know, Walmart’s are famously ugly and horrible. It’s not a mistake. It’s not like they don’t know they’re ugly and horrible. They just don’t care. And the people who go to them will say they do these surveys. You can look them up and they say, “Oh yeah, the parking lot is horrible, the store is horrible, everything horrible, horrible, horrible. But why do you go?” Oh, because the prices are cheap. And you go, “Right. So you you have So beauty is so far down on your list of values that you will suffer, you will accept. It’s not that you’re being told that they’re ugly, it’s that you tell people that it’s a horrible experience and that they’re ugly and they’re unpleasant to be in. And yet you go. Because any aesthetic sensibility you might have is being overwhelmed by the message of in this case, “Oh, it’s cheap. They have a lot of things and it’s cheap.” So cheap and convenient, vastly more important than beautiful and soul-enriching. And this is such a powerful motive force in so many cultures in the United States cultures in particular, but all over the place. You see this everywhere. I’m sure I’m not telling people anything they don’t know. That I mean, I would love to spend, you know, many hours reflecting on the long philosophical history of different theories of beauty, but I think more importantly and hence in the in much in keeping in the idea of the series is to just say, “Hey, let’s stop. What would it mean to just stop and begin to ponder it?” Forget all the different answers that have been argued about and presented and rejected and explored for a thousand years by very brilliant people. No, let’s just stop for a moment and say, “Why don’t we make it a value? And what do we lose and what do we gain when we do make it a value?” And so clearly one of the I mean, as I articulated, we don’t make it a value. I don’t even think that’s arguable. But we’re trained to not think of it as important. In fact, more more devastatingly, I would argue, is that we’re trained to think that beauty is something that rich people get or lucky people get or you know, that it is it is a value that that is attributable to wealth or status and that you shouldn’t have it. To the point where there’s this critique of beautiful things that oh, well, they’re bougie or they’re exploitative. By by definition, if it’s beautiful, that means it must be associated with wealth and extraction of wealth from poor people. Therefore, beauty itself begins to look like a sin. By the way, hello Calvinism. This is pure I not doing a side track on Calvinism, but this is pure like Calvinist doctrine. It’s just shocking how it how how powerful that doctrine is, how much it survives to try and convince people that they should live awful awful lives. Okay, sorry. Little side tangent there. But yeah, but we hear this consistently like, “Oh, if you’re doing fancy things, you’re a fancy person.” And by fancy, we just mean take any care at all for bringing aesthetics and beauty and joy and subtlety and elegance and form and concern with these things into your life. So, that strong, powerful cultural resistance, again, is not one just to say that you don’t get it. It’s one to say that only certain people should have access to it. By the way, the history of all archaeological archaeology of the world suggests this is just silly. There people as far back as we can track, the people have been making art, have been making jewelry. Jewelry, hugely popular. It seems like a second we have 10 minutes to spare and we are we, you know, are in thousands and tens of thousands of years ago, we we made jewelry. We’re just hanging out around the fire, what are you going to do? Let’s make some jewelry. And sophisticated jewelry. Like people go, “Oh, they’re stringing shells together.” Oh, no. They’re polishing them, they’re drilling them, they’re creating I mean, some beautiful, beautiful, like really highly skilled work from tens of thousands of years ago. Working in ivory, working in bone, working in jewel, all the, you know, classic jewels, metalwork if they had access to it when they became available. Like shockingly beautiful work was being done, carving carvings of all kinds of stonework. You know, for again, tens tens of thousands of years, not thousands of years, tens of thousands of years. So, this notion that beauty and aesthetics and this sort of sensibility is somehow extra or an add-on is is completely disproven by the archaeological record. Give us a chance and we’re going to make jewelry. First thing out of the gate. And then the nice thing with jewelry is it just survives, but it strongly suggests that if we were doing that, we then we were doing crazy stuff with beadwork and and clothing and music and dance. Like probably the entire panoply was there. But what survived? It’s like the cave paintings near where I live, 22,000 years old. Lascaux. Right? Everyone’s like, “Wow.” They don’t know, but there’s a lot of caves around here, not just Lascaux, but there’s a lot of them that have cave paintings in them. And so they don’t know whether painting was super rare and only done in caves or my personal theory, for which I have no evidence, by the everything. They were probably just defacing all of nature. >> This is my theory. Like they were just they were going hog wild with the painting, but it’s only in these very unique circumstances, like you know, caves that got sealed for some reason and then were discovered that they that all the paintings survived because, you know, weather and stuff over, by the way, 10, 20,000 years tends to wear. And yet we still have some of it, which is a miracle in itself. But it does tell us that 20,000 years ago, right where I live, people were painting unnecessarily, just just for the joy, the beauty, the representational power of this. And so first, I would say, is to recognize that it is an innate, necessary, and I would say health and then now we’re making the intrinsic value of health a value, but we’ll just say, “Okay, we’ll skip over that philosophical trouble right there.” Where you know, it is a core element of human existence. And to be denied access to environments which are and the expressibility of our own sense of beauty is a poison. It’s it’s devastating to people. This is true today. It’s been true throughout history where we have refugee camps. Unfortunately, they love to grow flowers. You would think they would be growing food. They do this, too. But they love to grow flowers. And you think about it, of course they do. They want to have some beauty. They want to have the the joy of something lovely and thriving in their environment, even if their environment is tiny and temporary and it’s a refugee camp and they’re suffering. What do they want? They want beauty. They want that that spark of joy. And this the sensibility of the humanity that expresses itself over and over again in every culture all throughout the world. And then you see in great sign of totalitarian dictatorships is when they try to eliminate beauty. Like they attack aggressively art. Cultural Revolution in China. The the, you know, Nazis making basically all art illegal. The, you know, you see this over Russia, right? The Russia like, “We got to make all art illegal.” Why? Why do Why is this like this totalitarian impulse to attack art? I mean, sure, you if someone prints a pamphlet that says Stalin is is awful and we should get rid of him, sure, you know, you understand why they would want to ban this and seize this. Great. But impressionism? Like what do they have against impressionism? Like why are they Why you know, like how does this bother you? Ah. But they know either explicitly or implicitly. I think it’s mostly an intuitive that the expressive capacity of beauty, the creative capacity of humanity, the development of the imagination and the bringing imagination to life in the world for sharing, that is the core thing that threat that’s not controlled. We don’t control it. We don’t understand it. We can’t direct it. It’s powerful. It gives people joy. That cannot exist. That is the threat to us. The only things that can exist, the only powers that we allow are our powers. And if I let somebody else create something beautiful and other people like it, that’s their power. And and that undermines me as the dictator, as the as the forces that are trying to control. And so early on, they all do it. It’s a relentless assault on all the arts. And it’s just bizarre. But but you understand why they have to do it because they cannot allow for humanity to exist. That’s what totalitarian is. It’s just anti-human. It’s to destroy the human in the idea of some better abstraction. And in destroying the human, the first thing you have to destroy is the arts because it’s the most human thing. And so this is why I think it’s such a weird world we inhabit because while the Nazis used, you know, death camps and censors and machine guns and Mao starved people to death and burnt books and did this and Stalin, you know, had the camps and the reprogramming centers and everything else, in much of the Western world, but particularly in the United States, we’ve achieved something similar through cultural application of simply consistent and repetitive devaluing. Right? It’s It’s not with a gun. It’s with a just a brutal, relentless drip, drip, drip, drip, drip of a society and a culture that tells you this is important, this doesn’t matter, and [clears throat] it’s not for you. This isn’t important, this doesn’t matter. And it’s not for you. Just say that, say that, say that, say that, say that to the point where theoretically, like I said, theoretically liberal people theoretically people who are like, “Oh, we’re pro civil rights or pro the human.” Will attack art as an expression of repression. And it’s not that there isn’t art that isn’t associated with child terrorism. Absolutely, you can do that. Art can do all kinds of things. But the whole notion of like, “Oh, well, this isn’t an elitist pastime, and so we need to fight against all elitism, and we have nothing to do with this.” And you’re like, “Wait, no.” Like painting, poetry, uh music, these are not elitist. These are These are there for everyone. They’re available to everyone. You only feel they’re elitist because you become convinced that they aren’t available for you, and therefore you can either say, “Oh, they are available to me, that’s great.” Or you can attack them and try and destroy them and say, “No, no, no, no one should do this.” And it’s it’s bizarre, you know, you expect the totalitarian, regressive, uh right or left, doesn’t matter, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini. But then you get the sort of like hippie left sometime goes so left, goes so totalitarian in its own direction that it wants to attack art as well, and attack even the concept of beauty. And saying, “Well, this is an oppressive Western ideal.” Which is just It’s just silly. It just shows a complete ignorance of all world history, by the way. So, you know, it’s it’s it’s so laughably wrong, and yet you encounter it, and you don’t know what to do. You’re like, “Oh my god, like that’s You’re just like What are you like 22,000 years ago, whoever was painting the caves in Lascaux were like oppressive Western What? What are you talking about, right? We don’t even know what they were doing. So, we Yeah, or the Egyptians were doing all of their jewelry work, which they were just mad for jewelry. Like all I mean, Egypt has lots of archaeological things, by the way, obviously. But apparently, it’s just solid jewelry. Like they’re aren’t sand, there’s no deserts. It’s just a jewelry piled on jewelry because they just loved it so much that if you dig anywhere, this is what you find. Uh from the cheapest, you know, tins and uh copper and very simple things to the most elaborate and expensive uh for thousands of years again. And so, that notion of attacking beauty is somehow a necessarily oppressive and elitist thing. I’m like, “Wow, how far wrong have we gone?” And so again, I think part of it is is the capitalist notion, part of it is the Calvinist you know, integration with that. But mostly, I think it is a cultural attempt to tell to to wall beauty off and say, “It’s not for you unless you pay a premium. We’re going to charge you for beauty.” And so, if we make lots and lots of ugly things, and then wall the beauty off, wow, you know what looks like? It looks like that’s true, right? It looks like they’re kind of achieving that. But the only way you can achieve that is to tell people that only certain things are beautiful. So, this becomes the second stage here. It’s to say, “Not only are we going to say it’s not for you, we’re also going to define what is and is not beautiful. And this is not for you to do.” Again, it’s not We’ll tell you what’s acceptable, what’s beautiful, what is what is the right way to do things. Uh and this gets to the argument, one of the main lines of argument is there uh absolute theories of beauty, like you know, Plato’s idea of absolute forms, or is it innate in this you know, in the beings? Is it innate in the material objects? Is it simply a cultural prescription? You know, it’s it’s you start filling this in. But there’s a clear attempt to control the narrative and say, “Oh, this is what beauty is.” So, when everybody wants to see the Impressionists, love the Impressionists, no problem with the Impressionists. But the narrative of the Impressionists is just so overwhelming because we’re told relentlessly, “Oh, well, this is what great art is.” And you go, “Well, it’s certainly amongst great art, but there’s a lot of other great art.” Right? That’s it. They’re not the only great art that’s out there. Great art is still being made, by the way. It’s not It’s not the It’s not the purview of any period of history. And you’ll hear this, people go, “Oh, no, you know, great music isn’t being made anymore. Great art isn’t being made anymore. Great movies aren’t being” Whatever the art form people like, they like to bemoan this. And I’m saying, “There’s no There’s basically no historical evidence this is ever true.” I mean, cultures go through periods of lesser and greater, and but but if you look around, it turns out that generally speaking, people have been doing pretty well for in all the fields for forever. Right? Like this is a It’s a lot there. There’s a lot to find, a lot to discover. But we But again, only if we value it. This is the key. And so, now we move to what is beauty, right? We’ve been using it loosely, but again, but it once you’ve defined it, you’ve made an argument within the fields of all these different philosophical schools, and so a bit of a minefield. But generally, it is the idea of aesthetic pleasure. By the way, in philosophically speaking, this is the the theory of aesthetics. Um and there are philosophical schools, serious ones, that argue that aesthetics are is the only school of philosophy. That really all we’re arguing about is uh preference preferences of pleasure is one way to think about this. And so, it is the idea of uh the the world giving us pleasure by the nature of its form, whether it’s a form of flavor or scent or vision. Of course, we often think of it in terms of vision. But music, of course, we we speak of music as being beautiful, and we speak of a landscape as being beautiful, which is strange to think about. Or a painting of a landscape can also be beautiful. And so, this Is this really even the same subject? And the argument is yes, that it is an external force, again, music sensible force, that gives us joy, inspiration, uh a sense of meaning, a sense of power, a sense of movement uh that that creates uh a space and response in us, generally pleasurable. Now, one of the questions is, does it have to be pleasurable? And again, uh a lot of argument, particularly in more modern times, is that no, it just has to be powerfully moving. Right? And so, you can have a painting that makes you very sad, but in its power, or music that makes you very sad, but in the power of that is the aesthetic experience. So, it’s not just joy or pleasure or um inspiration in the sense of all positive feelings, but it can be an emotional catharsis, a release of emotional power. Hello, Aristotle. Um By the way, this is how long this has been being talked about in the Western world, you know, we’ll talk about other traditions in a second. You know, that that cathartic release of emotional uh capacity in the human is the core of artistic greatness, is the core of beauty. So, not necessarily lovely and pleasing, but cathartic and emotionally and intellectually powerful. So, if we just go with that as a loose loose uh definition. And again, we could spend many episodes doing that. So, I apologize for sort of leaving it that vague and open. But I think it’s more important, again, as I said, to say, “Well, don’t Who cares what I think beauty is?” Like I think it’s much more important, given the context that I’ve just placed us within, to stop and ponder and go, “Okay, what are those things that give me inspiration? That make me feel like I’m in a beautiful space. That make me feel like I’m hearing beautiful things or reading lovely prose or seeing beautiful calligraphy.” Right? That question is like the question of health, I think it’s just very rarely asked. Much I would say even more rarely asked than the question of health is the question of beauty. And yet, as I mentioned, it is all the archaeological record and you know, contemporary social stuff suggests quite powerfully that this is an innate human capacity. And it’s as if we tell people don’t breathe, don’t move, don’t listen, don’t hear, don’t see. Right? It It is a destructive of the human being. It makes us unhappy. It makes us nervous. It makes us psychologically unwell. And yet, we just don’t seem to care. And so, to make it a value, the key first step, and maybe the most important step, is to stop. And stopping is of course the key. To stop and say, “Well, what is beauty to me?” And that moment, that pause, will open an entire world. And I mentioned it earlier, I said haste is this is this just soul-killing element of the modern world. And I think it is not inadvertent that we emphasize haste so much, inconvenience being associated with haste. Because it is hard to experience beauty, maybe even impossible, when we’re in a hurry, when we’re distracted. Because to have that meaningful experience, to have that encounter, to have that moment, requires attention and requires a depth of attention that we’re generally not only not asked to provide but actively distracted from experiencing. So, a friend of mine was at this famous uh monastery in Japan. Japan is horrible for this, but the famous I’ve not been, so this is but all the things I’ve read and people I’ve talked to say the same thing. Is that, you know and he goes, he is I forget I wish I could remember the name of one of the monasteries, but it’s a famous monastery and they have a famous beautiful raked you know, uh sand garden with the moss-covered stones. It’s been there for, you know, a thousand years. And he says, you sit there and he said, you’re you are transformed. He says, just being in that space is so still and so perfect. And he said, and then this loudspeaker kicks in and it starts in in Japanese and he didn’t know Japanese, but he’s translating he says, this This is the 11th century ba da da da da da da just really loud and aggressively and it’s on a loop. It’s like every 2 minutes it gives you this 1-minute history telling you well how calm and meditative and and I was like, oh my god, it’s so brutal. And I’ve had these kinds of experiences so many time where you know, what would be an amazing and instead of experience is somehow they’re pushing you or rushing you or there’s a crowd or there’s extraneous noise that keeps you from having the depth of experience that you could have, that is available if you remove the haste. So, I’d say step one is to take the pause to slow down and to just to ask seriously what are the things that make me feel the presence of beauty? What are those moments, events, people, environments inspire that sensibility in me. And this will be different for different people, by the way. It’s again back to this notion what people you know, the first well, nobody can know what it is. I’m like, well, yeah, but we can talk about it. We can disagree about what we think beauty is, but even spending the time to ponder and reflect brings it up as a value. So, for instance I have friends uh used to have a friends who who are were grateful dead dead heads. Like they they wanted to travel, they saw, you know they could tell you how many concerts they’d been to. Now, I’m not a big fan of the Grateful Dead’s music, but they were clearly committed. And there other people who saved up and saved up and saved up to see Wagner’s The Ring Cycle. And I mean, that’s a lot. It’s like several days of Wagnerian music. I’m not sure I want to do that either. But now, they don’t agree on what music they care about. But they do agree that music is very important to them. And so, that conversation can take place. And that commitment in their lives to this gives me joy, this gives me inspiration, this gives me those moments of beauty and transport that I find valuable and I’m going to commit to them. So we you know, we get all caught up in the content. We get all caught up in the forms. And I think it’s it’s great to think about and reflect on and to talk about with people who are committed. But I just think it’s um you know, our our our knee-jerk reaction culturally, maybe not for us individually, but culturally is to dismiss it and say, oh, well, we can’t decide. Like which is better? Is Wagner better than the Grateful Dead? No, what’s better is to know what you like, why and how it brings joy and beauty and meaning into your life. That’s the key element of it, cuz then you can have the conversation. And this is what pausing allows you to begin to do is to take a moment and go, oh you know what do I find beautiful? Also, you can say what do I find unbeautiful? So, if if I I’ve I get um often Le Monde, the newspaper on their weekend edition has a magazine in there. And it’s a it’s kind of high fashion, you know, very uh highbrow stuff from Le Monde. And I’ve gotten this habit now. I get it about every other week. So, I’ve done this let’s say maybe eight times now. I look for a TV. And you look at all their interior design ads, all their fashion ads, all these people visiting beautiful places advertisements and articles and you know, artists and writers in their homes or people trying out recipes or fine restaurants, right? All the all this expensive world of amazing beautiful things you you just not never, but it’s 99% no TVs. And I think, oh like they the designers, the photographers, these highly aesthetically dedicated people at least want to present themselves. They find them ugly. I find them ugly as just objects, not what’s on them. Just have the material object. Having rooms with all the furniture facing a thing as opposed to being set up for people, I find aesthetically off-putting. But I think again, these are questions that are rarely asked. But one question you could say is like it’s so obviously I don’t have a TV. Haven’t had one for whatever, I don’t know, decades and decades and decades. But again, it’s that’s fine. People like movies and all that, so I’m not even like saying again, but for me aesthetically, I just don’t like them. And so, for you other people, it could be other things. Right? And you could ask yourself like, what do I find aesthetically unappealing? Maybe it’s clutter. A lot of people turns out there’s evidence for this that for many people we’re humans are hugely variable, so I don’t want to say everybody. For most people clutter, piles um disorganization is slightly unsettling. It makes us unhappy. It makes us displeased with our environments. And yet, of course, we often inhabit highly cluttered highly uh elaborate, stuff-filled environments which in indeed do cause us to feel nervous, un- unhealthy and unwell. And it’s like, oh, but if you stop and ask people, the sort of the Marie Kondo world of saying, hey like, why don’t we just keep the things that give us joy and get rid of everything else and see how we feel and go from there. And the idea in theory is great. In practice we’re very very we we value stuff to an incredible degree. Years ago I was in the Chinese Garden. It’s a very traditional Chinese Garden in Portland. Um and there was a calligraphy studio in there that was based on a calligraphy studio from some Chinese master and the [clears throat] beauty and refinement of that small space brought me to tears. It was so perfectly fit for purpose. And it was not there was nothing fancy about it. It was just it was just right. It had this rightness and the you could see there was nobody in there, but you could see the person sitting there writing and like all of the brushes are there, the inkwells are there, the table is beautiful, the paper is there and in and not much else. Like two desks, one cabinet the brushes, the ink and it was just it was aw- it was just awe-inspiring. Uh two of my friends were painters. I spent much of my life in the company of paintings painters, which is great. And both of their studios I loved to be in. I spent hours and hours and hours and hours in their studios. And they were just pleasures to be in even though they both worked in different ways. And they worked in different kind of paintings and they used, you know, different materials. Like it was a very different painters. But you could feel their sensibility and their rightness of the place in which they wanted to work for them. And to be in spaces that were that elegantly organized for them. And neither of these were like you you know, you would never say like, oh, these are opulent. One one was a converted garage and one was an old I don’t even know what it was before. Just an empty space on a street, right? So you know, neither were like, oh, fabulous in that sense, but there when they got in there it gives the beauty of people with an aesthetic sensibility. You know, it was it was amazing. My one friend Jim Ball, he mixed all his own paint, so he had all the color powders and he mixed them from powders. And so, he had a table in which he had old tea tins filled with I don’t know, I’m going to say 16 or 24 different powders for mixing. They they were the bases of the colors, I guess. And there was just something I just and they were all laid out in a grid-ish and I just just a grid of tins filled with color. It’s like, wow, I [laughter] just like this is so great. It’s the most beautiful thing ever. And I was like, wow, but you could just feel their sensibilities, their environment for them working. And it’s so pleasing. And then and then it makes me think like, well why don’t I create those sorts of environments for me? Like why do I put myself in environments where I’m like, oh, have a horrible capacity for getting rid of paper. I’m all paper always stacks up around me cuz I print things and I read it and I take notes and I and then for some reason I just put it somewhere that’s inconvenient for me. And then eventually I go, god damn it, there’s so much paper around. What am I doing? And I think of that calligraphy studio and I’m like, that’s what I want. I never quite get there somehow. My mind, you know, I’m at war with myself, I guess. But to ask that question and say aesthetically, how do I want my environment? Is one important question. Like really important question. What can I add, but also what can I subtract? What can I take away? What can I How can I eliminate noise? How can I eliminate background noise? How can I unnecessary things, unnecessarily ugly things? And a lot of, you know, this is no news to people, but a lot of the modern world is just really, really hideously ugly. I mean, just cuz it’s cheap and in plastic, I don’t think we should buy it, right? Like it’s It’s I can And you see it all the time where you see something and you go, “Well, that only exists because it was 99 cents. If it were $2, I don’t think anybody would have ever bought it, but somehow it becomes convincing at 99 cents.” And so, people have purchased it. It’s It’s just shocking. It’s just shocking how easy it is to fall into those traps. in your environment, what can you eliminate? What can you add? Then there’s the notion of creating beauty. This is an active component of it. And I think I don’t think I mean, the other again, the evidence the research here is clear. It’s not that confusing, but people who can produce creatively things that they consider beautifully to share, it it it makes them incredibly happy. It really making beautiful things that people are moved to receive is is shockingly pleasing and healthy for the humans. Like it’s really a great thing for most people. And And so, the cultivating the capacity to express yourself and to create in some modality, of which, you know, there’s an infinite range, you know, from from metalwork to to painting to dancing to singing to, you know, baking. Like it’s There’s There’s no I know the human ability to be creative and to create joy and inspiration for other people is just virtually limitless. And yet again, we’re rarely taught or encouraged to cultivate that unless it’s for exploitative reasons. Right? We’re taught that oh, if I’m going to be a painter, then I should sell my paintings for a lot of money because the money is what matters, not the painting. Or if if I was with one of my friends who I say I spent that all the time in his studio, I I he did a I saw him at a not really a museum, but a big art forum. And I just loved his stuff and somebody I knew knew him and he said, “Oh, I’ll get you an introduction. You can go buy.” And so, you know, it’s one of those awkward things. You’re in the studio, which immediately I loved and I’m like, “Oh, you know, this work that’s that he was working on.” I’m like, “Oh, well, that’s kind of interesting.” But it I didn’t like it nearly as much as the stuff that I had seen at the big show. And then over in the corner, I saw this other series, which he called the lunar series. And I said, “Oh, Jim, you know, this is This is kind of nice, you know, you know, good for you and big and I get it and colorful.” But I said, “That I love.” Like that. And he’s like, “Oh, well, let’s go look at that.” So, we started flipping through his lunar series and this was a series that he painted just for himself. He said the other stuff he liked painting like working on, but it was partly for the market. And he says, you know, he called it his rice bowl, right? He says, “That’s my rice bowl. This is what sells in the Seattle market. You know, you you you’ve got certain scale, you’ve got a certain, you know, dynamics that they want.” And he says, “I like painting that way.” So, it’s not like he was you literally boring himself, but he had to but he did have to say, “Well, I do have to think about that, right? I have to keep it in impression.” But when I’m just painting for me, I’m over here. And so, then we then then we were That’s sort of the moment we became, I think, really fast friends is because I was like, “Oh, no, I love this.” He’s like, “Oh, that’s the stuff I love, too.” And then we were off and running. And but that sense of going, “Oh, like how many compromises do you make? How much do you have to do? Like where do you draw the lines?” Like that sort of tension only enters when your primary goal is commercial. When you’re told that oh, whatever you do, you must be commercial. Like that and that notion of of commercializing beauty and aesthetics and production of and experience of is, I think, poisonous and deadly. I mean, just like uh It’s a drip, drip, drip. And if it overwhelms you, it will kill you. Right? Because you think all of the If you know, if you think just like famous rock bands, they all you know, how what breaks them up? Success breaks them up. Because then the pressure is on like, “Oh, you know, we had a successful album. We got to do another a successful album.” Now all of a sudden they’re all nervous because oh, well, there’s millions of dollars on the line. Don’t listen to that guy, he’s an idiot. Do this. No, no, don’t do that. I want to do this. Oh, no, no. Like ah, if we don’t do the right thing, then, you know, it’s like as opposed to like who who the cares? Do whatever you want. Like just do do what you did before and then hope for the best. But now now the pressure is on and then So, now the lawyers are involved. Anytime lawyers are involved, things go downhill, right? Like >> It’s unfortunate, but true. And that notion of uh the interference with, so that that even the the simple act of believing in and wanting to pursue the creation of beauty is is um interfered with in our culture because we’re told instantly the first or the next moment is monetized, like make money from it. We’re also told that we are insufficient to this. So, on one hand they say, “Well, it’s all just a personal choice.” But then we say, “But your choice is no good.” >> Right? It’s It’s a completely bizarre double message, double bind, if you will. It’s all personal preference. There’s no wrong. However, whatever you do will certainly be wrong. And so, people go, “Oh, you know, I want to redecorate or redo my room.” Just something as simple as that. And they go, “I They don’t know I don’t know what to do. I want it to come out well.” Which is probably reasonable is to relax and reflect and ponder that. Like to say, “Well, how do I want to come out with? What do But we don’t allow ourselves to say, “You know, you you you got to try.” Like, you know, back to the impressionists, they painted a lot. Oh my god, they painted so much. And part of the reason they painted so much is cuz they’re experimenting. Miles Davis, whom I love, he made a lot of music. And the reason he did is because he was just trying out all the time. And some of it worked, some of it didn’t. He didn’t He wasn’t worried about that. He was worried about discovery and uh and keeping himself interested in in expansion and all these other ideas. But, you know, if it didn’t work out, that’s fine. We’ll just try something else that does. But we’re told like I said, the message is clear. The it’s all preference and there’s all kinds of beauty, but don’t make a mistake and probably you’re going to do it wrong. As opposed to like, “Hey, there’s lots of ways to go right. You’re not going to know until you try. Just start iterating.” Right? Just give yourself the opportunity to try and see what feels really good to you. And see what actually when you sit with and listen to it or or look at it or inhabit the space or um visit the the museum, whatever it is the where you’re looking for beauty, where you’re trying to create it or construct it, you go, “Oh.” Like this works. That part didn’t quite work so well. Like this needs to be changed. Maybe I’ll alter that.” And now what you’re doing is you’re not making an output. You’re not making a product that is beautiful. Although you might be. What you’re focusing on is beauty and the experience of beauty itself. And it’s this process, this belief that we can live in the process of beauty that has been absolutely stripped mind from us. Beauty is something you purchase. Beauty is something you experience momentarily. Beauty is behind a wall over there. Beauty is not for me. Right? All of these messages. Beauty is something I create for sell for for for for the market. As opposed to beauty is a process I inhabit that I try to create an experience continually. It’s a cultivation. It’s a It’s much more like a garden. Right? Where you’re you’re continually working the soil, planting. The seasons change, things grow. It alters. It’s a It’s It’s an ongoing evolution. It does not cease. That you don’t reach a moment where it’s beautiful. I mean, you do reach moments of beauty, but that shouldn’t mean you stop the process of beautification in yourself and in your world. And to me, that is the fundamental way we’ve gone wrong. It’s not the definitions, it’s not the schools of philosophy, it’s not, you know, uh the Taoist feng shui. People say it doesn’t make sense, but it’s a theory of beauty, right? Like it doesn’t have to make sense? No, it doesn’t. It just has to produce beautiful things that sometimes absolutely, if you’ve been in these spaces. But it is the notion that it is um intermittent. It’s uh that beauty is rare, intermittent, only for occasional things, maybe not for me at all. I’ll get around to it later. As opposed to a continual, even permanent process that you inhabit as a value to inform every aspect of your life. And that you reflect on it, participate on, expect to experience, and expect to create as an ongoing vital part of your of your experience, like breathing or like eating. Right there. This is when you fundamentally alter your sense of beauty and it becomes a value because it’s innate to what you’re seeking and reflecting on you know, just moment by moment by moment. That’s what it means for it to be a value. And so so it’s a So you can see how far we are from this because I can’t remember ever ever being told this as something that might be important as a way to think about this. It was something I had to develop very slowly. I got talking to many painters, my buddy Milo the painter, my friend Jim the painter. Um you know, that that it is not a it’s not a something you do. It’s just something you live. >> [snorts] >> It’s it’s an outcome. It’s It’s like I said I about the Renaissance. I love the Renaissance because this notion is just make fabulous people and then everything they do will be fabulous, right? So they’re always interested in the fabulousness of beauty because they’re fabulous. And so this is what fabulous people do. It wasn’t a an outcome, a product, a moment, a distraction uh behind a museum wall. It was It was air and light and breathing and spaces that you occupied and how you occupied them and how you presented to yourself in those spaces. It was a continual reflection, refinement, and meditation on beauty. And then when you do that ipso facto, beauty becomes like very much more present in your life. Like how could it not, right? Like it’s What an extraordinary revelation, right? If you spend all your time focusing on it, you know what you get? You get the thing you focus on. And that is the value of beauty. And some places to look for this and I and I wanted to um just take a moment and go as I mentioned last time and go some some biographies, some historical works, some philosophical works. And so of course you you I I can’t say philosophically you have to go with um the Symposium, right? Like how can you not go with the Symposium there? Uh so you know, the Plato’s Socratic dialogue of the Symposium because this is the one of the core texts on beauty in the history of the world. Um also I mentioned this in Taoism. If you read a little bit of Taoism, um you will immediately recognize it’s a very strong, I mean really strong aesthetic sensibility. And so you have feng shui. Look at the Taoist feng shui texts. There’s There’s There’s different versions of them. Um and you’ll see like, oh well, they really had ideas. And And people do follow this and such, but I just I I don’t necessarily redecorate your room along these principles, but you know, ponder like why would they think this way? They have crazy ideas in there. They’re not Western ideas and therefore I think they’re very inspiring because like, oh, this isn’t art. This isn’t another version of Platonism. This isn’t the classical world. By the way, the Platonic ideas are very separate from classical ideas. Don’t have time to go into all that, but they had the the classical Greek ideas of beauty were not the ones that Plato was arguing for, hence why he was arguing for them. He had a very different take and we’ve received both of them and we kind of mix them together. Uh which is interesting in itself. But so you can look at the uh Taoist texts, you know, the Tao Te Ching. Uh you know, look at the um feng shui texts. You can look at the Symposium. Those are very deep philosophical works, but there’s lots of other I mean just the Western philosophy is filled with the Eastern philosophy is filled with these reflections. For um [clears throat] some non-fiction texts, Simon Schama is a art historian, so there you go. He has a book called An Embarrassment of Riches, which the book itself is an embarrassment of riches. And so it’s talking about the the wealthy the wealth that flowed into the Netherlands during the particular period and how this impacted their like world view, aesthetic sensibility, all this. And so I think both as a work itself like in the language in the exploration is this unbelievably rich uh wonderful text and it does explore all kinds of conceptions like this. He also has a biography of Rembrandt if you want to look for the pure biography uh set you know, the same time-ish. And that that’s quite amazing um there. You can look at any biography, any good biography of Van Gogh because oh my gosh, like it’s what a dedication to representation and art like phenomenal phenomenal. Um there’s lots of different ones. I I I don’t I’m not a specialist, so I don’t I don’t have enough experience to say which would be the best, but you can look around and see which one looks best for you. Um if you look for like memoirs, there’s a great Russell Page Education of a Gardener. Wow. Uh many people talk about it as an important text anyway in like the life of a creative person, but the way he talks about the experience of him learning to be a gardener and a landscape designer is quite amazing. It really is. And he just lived for landscape design and gardening. I mean he he he was that person. And there’s a certain purity of his vision. It’s very down-to-earth, very simple, very straightforward. It’s the only book he ever wrote. And it’s it’s it’s phenomenal. Um another one that you can think about is the uh Hare with the Amber Eyes. And it’s a book that’s written by a potter. And what’s phenomenal to me about that book is it it deals with aesthetic sensibilities. It deals with aesthetic things. Which is fascinating in itself, but it’s also his use of language associated with feeling things. That it’s it’s remarkable. He’s a And it turns out that he’s a potter, right? And so all of his language is on heft and form and feel and press. And it’s like, wow, it’s just a different the sensibility is so different that I felt like I expanded my appreciation of the world, like basically. It’s It’s It’s a phenomenal work for that. The Hare with the Amber Eyes. And then for fiction, again, I mean who I mean of course there’s Proust. I mean good lord, like you you you have to throw Proust out there. You also have The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which is a long amazing reflection on the nature of beauty, also on the importance of architecture. This is one of um his incredibly insightful and moving ideas that I find is for uh he argued that the world before the printing press, before widespread literacy expressed itself through architecture. And so what you get in that book is this whole long passages on architecture and the way people inhabit that architecture. And so it’s again how the aesthetic sensibility of the spaces we inhabit shape our understanding and appreciation and and and interaction with the world itself. Uh one of my architect friends, Demetri, argues that architecture is the most powerful art form because it shapes and patterns our lives to a phenomenal degree. And so how architects in our cultures build the world is much under appreciated in how it influences our experience of the world. And I think that’s probably true. Um then you can look at something by Yasunari Kawabata, one of my favorite writers. Um The Old Capital for instance, very simple, lovely lovely book uh which is a meditation on art, the changing sensibilities of uh the modern world coming to traditional Japanese craft. Um which is just a a beautiful reflection on there. a few texts to ponder, Simon Schama again, Embarrassment of Riches or his Rembrandt biography or you know, basically anything else that he’s he’s written along these veins. Um you have the Kawabata, the The Old Capital. You also have the you know, Sound of the Mountain is another one, but it’s it’s much longer and and more digressive I would say. Um then you have you know, Proust’s Recherche du Temps Perdu, which some people just think is a long aesthetic journey in itself in both what it’s contemplating and how it’s written. [clears throat] Uh and then Education of a Gardener, which is sort of an odd one to throw in there and the Hare with the Amber Eyes. a few texts to ponder. A few different ways to think about this, but fundamentally in making this a value and in resisting the values that we’ve been trained and that we’ve inherited in our culture is to understand and incorporate to take a pause, take a moment and reflect on how one can cultivate one’s own sense of beauty in one’s own life. And that process will uh draw forth from you your own concepts and experience and then it will amplify the beauty around you because that’s of course what will happen by definition. And so when we make beauty a value in that sense we really do transform the world in which we inhabit fundamentally and we transform ourselves simultaneously. So the value of beauty. Thank you very much.