Consider the following quotations from the book entitled Beauty (Oxford University Press, 2009) by the prolific English philosopher Roger Scruton.

“When, on some wild moor, the sky fills with scudding clouds, the shadows race across the heather, and you hear the curlew’s liquid cry from hilltop to hilltop, the thrill you feel is an endorsement of the things you observe and of you, the observer… A world that makes room for such things makes room for you.”

“Works of art stand as the eternal receptacles of intensely intended messages… Nature, by contrast, is generous, content to mean only herself, uncontained, without an external frame, and changing from day to day.”

“… the search for aesthetic solutions in everyday life is also a kind of pursuit of consensus… when people think aesthetically, they are, as Kant said, ‘suitors for agreement’ with their kind.”

“Art moves us because it is beautiful, and it is beautiful in part because it means something.”

”Works of art are forbidden to moralize, only because moralizing destroys their true moral value.”

“Beauty is therefore as firmly rooted in the scheme of things as goodness. It speaks to us, as virtue speaks to us, of human fulfillment: not of things that we want, but of things that we ought to want, because human nature requires them.”

I quote these passages, and I could have chosen others, not only because I am so wholly in agreement with their content, but also because they are so beautifully stated. Just some of the aesthetic concepts in Beauty that Scruton develops especially well: disinterested pleasure; “the heresy of paraphrase” (a locution about poetry of Cleanth Brooks—a leading American literary scholar of the 20^th century); representation vs. expression in art; the distinction between imagination and fantasy; and the relation of beauty to truth, to goodness, to meaning and value. (I have read his Music as an Art also and found it equally admirable—though much less formidable if you’ve some college-level music theory under your belt.)

For art-lovers, then, Beauty is an essential, a chance to sit at the foot of a terrific mentor. Which is not to say that I find its arguments and opinions flawless. The sceptical flavor Scruton introduces into his treatment of evolution’s role in creating the human’s capacity for experiencing beauty arises, it seems to me, from an incomplete and somewhat dated view of evolution itself. His discussion of beauty as a thing necessarily apprehended as experience becomes confused when he insists that it at the same time resides within the object of that experience, somehow external to its subject. I much prefer Santayana’s straight-on definition that beauty is pleasure objectified, i.e., the affect (feeling) of pleasure located within the object provoking it by the subject of the affect herself. To my mind, Scruton’s argument conjures a sort of ontological fallacy, an effortful reification of the subjective experience, one more muddling than clarifying. The attention given to a tradition originating with Plato (and extending to Freud), which sees a relation of beauty to eros, I believe ill-spent for the same reason. My view is this: beauty relates more obviously to the empathic capacity of humans than it does to the erotic one. And it thereby shares with grief and with awe a pro-social “fellow-feeling,” one promoting community and culture; it has as much to do with the pro-survival force of human cooperative action as with the individual’s joie de vivre.

But I have one complaint above the others. Scruton is deeply offended by our modern works of outrage, those most especially in the visual arts, but in 20^th century music and poetry, too—meaning works that defy an expectation of prettiness in a confrontational way. Some of the works of Marcel Duchamp, of Andy Warhol, and of many since Warhol, are examples. He locates the artistic intention in such works in part as one of desecration, namely of unchecked hostility, and, in part, as one of insistence that art is not about beauty at all—millennia of wonderstruck admirers and critics have all been deluded. And about some postmodernist critics, such as Arthur Danto, and other cultural pundits, Scruton is surely correct. But it is quite another thing to presume the same of the artists who created the works. I have a different view. True, some or many of such works do not now, and possibly will not ever, inspire premium grade aesthetic response, the sense of the sublime, within the hearts of those who look upon them. Fate appears to assign varying artistic purpose to various epochs. The Greek 5^th century BCE and the Italo-Euro-Anglo 15^th-17^th centuries CE were epochs in which Western artistic realization of the sublime becomes consolidated. Other epochs are, it seems, assigned either artistic ennui or a purpose of exploration and experimentation, that of extending beauty’s range.

Science must live with the eternally provisional character of its conclusions—a new observation may forever revise or even undo what till then has appeared solidified, incontrovertible. I believe the art lover, too, should hold onto just a bit of that same provisional clause in her judgment, especially when it inclines to the negative pole, of any work. Taste, both in its individual and its collective incarnations, changes. Which does not invalidate beauty, only confirm that it is forever discoverable in places it could not be seen before. Duchamp’s placement of a mustache on a caricature of the Mona Lisadoes not desecrate the beauty of Leonardo’s masterpiece; it asks that we not cling to a rigid sense of what can be beautiful. Andy Warhol is known to have said something to this effect, in the context of Pop art, explicitly. We should listen. Scruton on occasion is unable, and I believe the cause is too much appetite for the idealization of art. Could he only believe more securely that which he helps me to understand—art and beauty are real, they are things of eternal worth. They require no idealization. It can, in fact, do harm because it confines the taste of its subscribers. I am disturbed, grieved even, that a teacher so wonderful as Roger Scruton could take on, even for brief moments, the role of an old man shaking his finger at younger generations.