This is a talk I gave to the Graduate Christian Fellowship at Cornell University on the subject of beauty.
Just and Sinner Podcast
The Mystery of Beauty
[ Music ] >> Well, I was asked to talk about the subject of beauty. And I've given talks on beauty in the past, including here in this room. And when I've given talks on the subject of beauty, there are a lot of different ways to approach it. So I was thinking about what do I want to do to approach beauty? It's a big topic, and it's one that can be approached in a number of different ways. By, you know, trade, I'm really a theologian. But my area of expertise is kind of the interplay between classical philosophy and theology. So as I thought about this, I thought I could go to the philosophical route, or I could go that kind of walk through scripture and examine text of scripture on this issue. And I decided to kind of go a more apologetic route. So what I'm going to do is do a little bit of a philosophical exploration of beauty, and then see how it is that this points us to the need for a savior to take our ugliness and grant us beauty in a world of ugliness. So I want to start by introducing what are kind of the three transcendentals. If you've heard this, the transcendentals, the things in the Western world, that a lot of the great philosophical traditions talk about, it's usually listed as truth, goodness, and beauty. You've probably heard those three together before. That's actually, that division is actually not that ancient. It's pretty new. But nonetheless, it helps to, I think, categorize what a lot of the kind of primary classical philosophical and current, still philosophical discussions are. Now, if we think about truths and goodness and beauty, I want to, you know, ask you the question of what, which of those do you think guides your decisions most of the time? Like, are your decisions guided, you make a lot of decisions during the day, but are they, by and large, just guided by questions of truth? I think that this is something that we like to think of ourselves, like, we like to think of ourselves as rational creatures. And we are often not rational creatures. But we like to think that we could just, like, look around and observe things objectively as they are, hands like analyze things and use rational inquiry to figure out exactly what is real and what is true. Now, there are times, of course, when you're using that kind of reasoning, especially if you're in the sciences, you kind of have to use or should use that kind of reasoning in your work. But the majority of our daily decisions, I submit, are really not made on that basis. Well, we can think about the other goodness. If you think about something like ethical decisions. Certainly, we make a lot of decisions based on, like, ethical questions. And those are just daily decisions of, what do I say to this person when I communicate with them? Or how do I respond? You know, do I respond if somebody insults me by doing the same back? You know, we do, I think, probably more than questions of kind of rational inquiry. We deal with those ethical questions. But oftentimes, I think in our kind of day-to-day lives, we tend to neglect the third of these, which is beauty. And I contend that a lot of the decisions we make on a daily basis, on a regular basis, are really guided by questions of beauty, saying what is more beautiful, you know, what is more beautiful than something else? And just, you know, think about every day decisions, all right? Question of, like, what am I going to watch? What am I going to watch at night? You're thinking about the beauty and the art. Like, what am I going to put on something on TV that is, you know, going to be, you know, terribly active? Maybe you do that, like, I do, like, watching bad movies just because it's kind of fun for other reasons. But we often make decisions based on questions of beauty, even if we're not thinking in those categories. Or think about even the beauty of taste. Like, what are you going to eat when you go out to a restaurant? In some way, you are asking a question about the beauty within that object and the experience that you are going to have. I mean, think about what music you're going to listen to, all right? And you get in the car, or maybe a question of, like, what building do I go to study in, right? Sometimes you make those decisions based on beauty. I remember when I first came to Cornell, it was like the first, I think it was about the first conversation I had with the students was about, what I was told, was the Harry Potter Library on campus. And you've got to study there because it's beautiful, right? People do make regular decisions based on, based on questions of beauty. So why is it that if we really do experience beauty in our everyday lives, and we just look at the room here, it's a perfect place to be talking about this particular subject. Why is it that if it's part of our regular lives, we don't really talk about it as much as we do the other two, about truth and goodness. Well, I think that one of the reasons why we don't is that beauty is more elusive. It's not always easy to grasp what is beautiful. It's not something that you can just easily capture, or explain, or measure, or objectively analyze. In the same way that maybe an ethical dilemma would be. And yes, there are principles of aesthetics that we can look at to some degree to give us some kind of explanation of why it is that we find certain things to be beautiful and other things not to be. But I think it's the wonder of the alusiveness of the mystery that is in beauty that is, that's the benefit of it. Beauty in the midst of rational analysis really is undefined. It's something that brings us outside of ourselves into something else, which is why often you can't quite say why it is that you find something to be beautiful. I mean, go to the many, you know, gorges that Ithaca is known for. Why are they beautiful? It's hard to point your finger at it, right? But yet you experience something that feels as real in that moment experiencing beauty as any ethical decision may be. So what is it that accounts for that experience of the mystery of beauty and the grandeur of the beautiful? Well, there are different explanations for beauty and certainly there are some, you know, materialist biologists who have explanations for beauty. And the foundation of this is what is probably the most obvious is, well, beauty exists for the sake of reproduction. That's, you know, beauty is some conception that humans develop solely for the purpose of finding a mate or being attractive so that you can find a mate and then have children. Now, certainly that's an element to the beauty that we experience in our regular lives. Oftentimes a relationship does begin with physical attraction in some way that then leads towards something deeper. And we do think about the way that we look in terms of beauty, you make decisions about what clothing you are going to make, you're going to wear. And hopefully if you're, you know, going on a date with somebody you care a little bit about what you look like, you probably should because you want to display something about yourself within the clothing choices that you make. So there is an element to that, of course, of beauty in that it does help us to find a mate. But does that explain all of our experiences of beauty? And does that even explain most of our experiences of beauty? What about the uselessness of beautiful things? Oftentimes beauty is completely useless. It's not utilitarian. It doesn't serve us any benefit. No, there, of course, are beautiful things that have a purpose. There's a purpose in their beauty. As we said, you know, you may dress up well to look good for a date because you want to endear somebody to yourself. So you, in that instance, are using beauty or what is attractive in order to accomplish a goal. But there are plenty of other things that just don't work that way. Look around us in this room. Now, if you were to, you know, take away these busts that we have here, the ornamentation in the wood here, this painting, if you were to take away these carpets and replace them with ones that were just kind of maybe just plain gray. If this entire room was just a bunch of gray walls with nothing else, it would serve the same function. You could come in here and listen to talks and you could talk to each other and eat here. It'd have all the same experiences. It would serve the same purpose. But that's not the case. We don't build buildings like that. And when we do build buildings like that, we see it as dehumanizing because it is dehumanizing. We decorate things that are purely functional. That there is no benefit in decorating at all. Why do you purchase art for your walls? I mean, if anything, that really is kind of maybe a waste of time. You could be doing something more productive with that money and that time that you use to go buy art for your walls because it's not gonna do anything. It's just gonna sit there. Think about music. Now, I suppose there's a sense in which music has maybe a benefit to us beyond our enjoyment of it in that if you have making music with your family or if you engage in some kind of musical performance or go to a concert with a community, yeah. Sure, it starts to strengthen those kind of social bonds. So perhaps that's really the benefits in beautiful music. But don't you listen to music when you're by yourself too? Don't you listen to music just because you enjoy the music. If it's not really accomplishing anything, it's not growing you in your career or your relationship with somebody or financially or in any other way, you just listen because you delight in the sound of what that music is. Let's take another example that I already mentioned here and that is food. I'm not just thinking about food in general because, sure, of course, food is needed in order to survive but we could imagine a world in which we just all eat like bland food capsules that give us the nutrients that we need and none of us want that world doing. Why do we use spices in our food? We just had Indian food which has a lot of spices. It's a lot of flavor. Well, those aren't really adding to the nutritional benefits of the food that you're eating, are they? You could just eat some dry, bland chicken and you get the same benefit. But when we encounter food, we don't just look at it as like a utilitarian, I am giving my body the nutrients that need but it's something that we delight in some way. Now, not only do we have this question of why we find beauty in areas where it's useless but also we often find things that are dangerous to be beautiful. So sometimes we look for the things that are beautiful in a way that actually is more likely to arm us than benefit us, kind of the opposite of what we would expect. Why do we delight in the dangerous? Well, of course there's a kind of material explanation for the uselessness of beauty, I suppose, that it's just kind of a happenstance that yes, beauty was just something that was beneficial for the human race in finding a mate and it just kind of just so happens like a vestigial organ or something to have uses in other places for us but it doesn't really have a functional purpose. It's kind of leftovers. Even if you're going to view it as kind of a happenstance it still doesn't explain the beauty that we find in the dangerous. Emmanuel Kant describes this as the sublime. Kant speaks about our experience with things that are greater than us as this kind of sublimity that we recognize that it is both beautiful but also terrifying at the same time. We see beauty in immensity and in the uncontrollable. I think that there's a great painting that's very famous and you may know it. I don't have an image of it to show you here but Casper David Frederick, if you're familiar with him, a Swedish painter in the Romantic era 1808 to 1810, somewhere, sometime in there. He paints this painting called "The Monk by the Sea" and this painting, there's another one that's more famous than this that I'll mention but this painting, "The Monk by the Sea," it's what it sounds like, it's a monk by the sea but if you look at this canvas, you have this tiny, tiny, tiny little monk in this just massive sea outside of him. It's a very powerful image when you look at it and much of his painting does exactly this in different ways but he chose the monk purposefully as the figure he chose to show here because when we see the immensity of nature in this experience of sublimity, we recognize our finitude, but in doing that, we also delight in some way. It's more famous painting, it's a painting called "Wonderer Above the Sea of Fog" in 1818. This was painted and that painting, you've probably seen it somewhere. It's a man who is well dressed, basically, standing kind of on a mountain, looking over the land that is in front of him, it's vast, and it brings about this feeling of the vastness of nature and in that, the man in the picture, both at the same time, feels deeply connected to nature as part of nature but also one who also observes nature and is apart from nature at the same time. It's a strange paradox here, and this painting is meant to represent to us both the immensity of God in nature, in the power of God in nature, as well as this kind of conquering of nature by man or this attempted conquering of nature by man. He writes at a time where, or paints at a time where there is a lot of hope in human progress and the romantics often thought that that progress was not always good because it divorced us from that connection to the natural world, and we see ourselves as conquerors of nature, standing over and above it to just manipulate it and control it, and sometimes we have these powerful experiences just being out in the vastness of nature. Reminds us, again, of our finitude, in the sense, it's like we study nature in no it, but it doesn't know us at the same time. Thinking about this notion of the sublime, think about storm chasers. That's the greatest example of this. And a lot of people love storms. They love to chase storms to the extent that a lot of people die doing that. Think about people who love to go find dangerous animals and risk their lives even to the point of dying. Do you remember Steve Irwin, the crocodile hunter, who died doing just that? But he got excitement out of the dangerous. There's something about it that thrills us. Think about being here. Whereas I said, you have so many powerful instances of seeing nature, like the great waterfalls, the gorgeous that we have here, where you think of the dangerous cliffs. People often love to see cliffs. We love to go to beautiful places where if you fall off, you're dead. Why on earth do the humans do yet? It doesn't seem to make any sense. It's not logical. Wouldn't you just want to be somewhere safe and boring? But we seek these things out. Because in these experiences, we are brought beyond ourselves and we are brought into this knowledge, this experience, that there is something that is greater than us, so much greater than us. And something that we cannot control. The more the technology grows, the more that we feel as people. Like we have control over the things around us. And oftentimes, the most beautiful things are exactly the opposite. The reminders that that's actually not the case. So we talk about how we experience this beautiful. So in light of this, what exactly is the role of beauty? What role does beauty play in light of all of this in our daily lives? Now, I want to be clear about this, because I think people misunderstand this with the questions of beauty. Beauty is not pleasure only. Beauty can bring pleasure, but beauty is not identical with pleasure. They are distinct. For example, there are things that demonstrate this in that we have certain things that we may find pleasurable that we recognize are not beautiful in the other way around as well. Some things are pleasurable that aren't beautiful. Let me give you some examples. Michael Bay's movies back in the 2000s, like those Transformers movies, they were really popular. People saw them. They're terrible. No offense if you like those movies. But they give you stimulation. There's tons of explosions all the time and a lot of action. Everything is very fast-paced, because it stimulates you, so it makes you feel a kind of pleasure. It's not really beautiful. Kind of like what scrolling on TikTok does. You may feel some kind of pleasure, or I gave an example earlier. I like to watch bad movies. When I was in college, my roommate and I, on Friday nights, we would watch the worst kung fu movies we could find. Back when Wal-Mart had-- Ellen's looking at me like a singer here. But at Wal-Mart, they would have this big bin of like $1 DVDs, and it was terrible. So we would go buy the worst-looking movie, usually kung fu movie, but not always. And then we'd all watch it, and we'd laugh about it, and it has to be really late when you watch it, or it's not fun, because when you get tired enough, it's hilarious. Why did we do that? Nobody would say there were good movies. They're terrible movies. But we really-- those are some of the best times I had in college. Because we recognize that's not exactly the same. On the other hand, we can also recognize that there are things that are beautiful that we may not get pleasure from. And there are different reasons for this. But the example that I sometimes give, it's like I could go to a three Michelin star restaurant. You go to one of the best chefs in the world and he could make a wonderful dish of mushrooms. I don't like mushrooms, right? And I could taste that and say, I think this is spiced really well. The chef's technique is amazing, but I don't really enjoy eating it, just because I don't like mushrooms. So we recognize that there is this beauty pleasure distinction, very important here. Another example could simply be something that's-- a song that may be is beautiful, but you have memories that are negative attached to that. And maybe you recognize the beauty in the song, but you don't really want to listen to it because of that. So beauty is something beyond pure subjectivity. There's something else going on when we encounter something beautiful. Well, Immanuel Kant says this about the beautiful. He says that when we encounter something that is beautiful, we encounter it in a way that is disinterested, meaning that when we encounter a beautiful thing, we are not always using it for something else. A lot of the things around us we enjoy because of what they get us or what they do. You may buy a beautiful looking car for the purpose of showing off your status. You could use something that perhaps is beautiful, and some says for the purpose of doing something else. But the things that we remember-- I want you to look back on what are some of the most beautiful things that you have experienced in your life. Think about something in nature, something out of music, whatever it might be, a piece of music, whatever it is. If you think about that, just ask yourself that question. Did I use that for something? Was there something that I needed that for to accomplish some other goal? We just had a great example of this with the eclipse. Now, the eclipse is something that-- it's just a very fast moment, some kind of interesting thing that occurs in nature, but going to see the eclipse is not going to benefit your life in any other way, other than seeing the eclipse itself. Worst case scenario, you can't see anything because you look at it without glasses on. Why is everybody excited about the eclipse? Why do people drive hours away from their homes? I have a student-- I teach online courses at a theological seminary. And we had a student who lives in North Carolina and finally drove to Texas to go see the eclipse. It's not close. Why? Because you see the beauty in that. And you are experiencing the beauty for its own sake, not for the sake of something else, to the saying with a lot of natural beauty, your beautiful sunset. You ever just busy doing something else and you're not paying attention? And all of a sudden, you see this pink in the sky and all of a sudden, you just kind of stop. And you're captivated by it that you're not really thinking about whatever you were thinking about because you're just taking in the beauty of what that is and kind of soaking it in, enjoying it, concert. I've had those moments hearing a beautiful piece of music or being in a concert where you're kind of brought outside of yourself to just the delight in the music for what it is. Why do people go to concerts? To get that kind of experience. I think Kant's recognized the truth of these experiences. However, Kant never really went beyond those things to their true source. And I think that understanding beauty is something that we experience in this disinterested way points us not just to the beautiful object, but to something beyond that. To show that there is something that we're getting in the beautiful thing that makes us stop and look and experience. Something that is missing from our everyday experience in some way. We delight in beauty because in beauty, we see the very purpose for which we have been created. Beauty gives us this glimpse beyond the temporal world, beyond the physical things that we encounter regularly in our lives, and gives us a glimpse of one who transcends the world, is apart from the world, but also in the world. Because the experiences that we have in this world never truly satisfy that longing that we have. We have this kind of unfulfilled longing in our hearts. As Augustine describes it, this restlessness in our hearts that only stops when we reach the understanding of the one who placed that desire within us, which is why we delight in those little glimpses. But never get the full picture. Maybe that desire that is in us to see things as beautiful and that delight that we feel is pointing toward an actual fulfillment of those desires that we have that shape so much of our lives day to day, even if it's unrecognized. Beauty is not just a physical phenomenon. Neither is beauty something that's totally apart from the world because we get these glimpses of it. You get these tastes of it. Ultimately, we experience beauty because we see the truth of what St. Paul says, quoting the Greek philosopher Aratus. He says, "In him, in God, we live and move and have our being." There are glimpses of the eternal within our everyday lives. There are glimpses of the eternal in nature, in our interactions with one another, in that beautiful painting we see at a museum and the concerts that you would do. The world that we inhabit is beautiful because it participates in divine beauty. And it's through that participation in divine beauty that we see the sacredness of ordinary life. When we see those little glimpses in the midst of just our regular day to day walks. St. Augustine again speaks about beauty in his confessions, and he talks about how when we see the beauty in this world, there is a recognition that we should have that there is a piece of something that is not there in its fullness, and that causes us then to look toward the source of that beauty. And so beauty should lead us away from ourselves and towards the God who is beauty himself. God does not just have beauty, but he is beauty. Beauty is an expression of who God is, and that's why it speaks to us so powerfully. We're created for beauty. Recreated for beauty, I would say, in a way, even more than that kind of rational inquiry that we tend to think that defines our lives. Where God is truth as well, and he is goodness in the technical sense, they're all identical because God is identical with his attributes. But we see something beyond ourselves in that experience of beauty which reveals God to us. And in that beauty also reveals ugliness. And we see beauty, we see ugliness. And oftentimes we know the beautiful through the ugly. OK, if you don't think that there is any kind of standard of beauty in any way, and under the question of the objectivity of beauty in standards is a very loaded question. But if you don't think that there is any kind of objectivity of beauty or ugliness, it seems to me that it is much easier to identify something that's ugly than beautiful. It's something that someone may say there's no objectivity in beauty. But they're much more willing. I think to say there's kind of an objectivity in ugliness because it's something that we know when we see it that it's not beautiful. There is a reason why we watch those really bad kung fu movies with terrible lip syncing and acting and everything. Nobody would watch that movie and say, that is a beautiful movie. That's a very well made movie. Even if you can't totally agree on the standards of what is really truly good or beautiful in some kind of art form, there is this kind of inherent, I don't know, like a revulsion at the thing that is bad because we tend to see ugliness. And so we know beauty in contrast with ugliness because our lives don't just reflect that encounter with beauty, but they also reflect encounters with things that are not beauty. And that's not just true in an aesthetic sense. I think we can speak beyond that toward, like what people use, like a beautiful soul. It also means they're ugly souls. And ugliness shows us that there is a distortion of that true and greater reality. And if we're honest with ourselves, there is ugliness in our hearts. There are things within us in the way that we live and act and think that are me thing, but beautiful. And so we see this transcendent divine beauty. We recognize that there is ugliness and that is an ugliness that we share in as well. And I think that shows us that if there is ugliness, there must be some reality that is greater than that, some kind of end to the ugliness. In death, the incarnate Son of God, Jesus Christ, took upon himself the ugliness of death. Death is the ultimate ugliness, the opposite of beauty, the opposite of life. He took the ugliness of death upon himself, became ugliness for us in some way. In order to take that ugliness upon himself and put it to death and Jesus rose again in doing that, transformed humanity. Into its proper end, its telos, participation in divine beauty. And so we see perfect beauty reflected in the face of the resurrected Christ, who conquered ugliness through taking death upon himself. Why is it that so many paintings of Jesus on the cross are beautiful? And sometimes I hear people say, well, they're kind of sanitizing the death of Jesus. And maybe there's some truth in that, but I think there's something much more profound in it. It's that on the cross, there is this paradoxical thing going on in Jesus. And then we have this profound ugliness of death, but the beauty of what he brings to us into the world. And so I think it's quite appropriate, and that's part of the role of art, is to bring forth that kind of transcendent beauty in places that we don't see it physically. So ultimately for us, where do we end here with this question of beauty? The resurrection of Jesus brings humanity into divine beauty. And this is the consummation of all that our desire for beauty is what it leads to, the beatific vision, that being immediately in the presence of the divine glory. It in that vision of God that we have in eternity, we don't just get the little glimpse of beauty here and there. We're absorbed by it in some way. We're surrounded by it. We bathe in the beauty of God in its fullness. It brings us a fullness of joy and delight. And as long as we are here on this earth, we just get those little tastes of it. But as you get those little tastes of beauty in this life, recognize that that's not just the pleasure or centers of your brain going off. There's something beyond that that you're experiencing, the beauty of God shining through into this world. All right, well, thank you. And at the end of the talk, I think we've got some time for questions here. I've got some time. Okay, try to leave some time. Thank you. Yeah, sure, I think the first part of that is the question of ugliness. Does ugliness, is it more than just that kind of paradox that I talked about, so even the mosquito? I guess there would be kind of a challenge to the question of like, is there actually ugliness in a mosquito in the fullest sense or not? Obviously, they are kind of ugly to us. I don't really want to see a giant mosquito, particularly as you said, doesn't sound too, it doesn't sound particularly pleasant. But I think in the fullest sense and we're talking about ugliness, what is actually like really, really ugly, we're talking about what is a distortion of the good. And I think anything that we're talking about that is, that is say, evil is really a, in some way it's a good that's been twisted more than having an essence in and of itself. So you may say there are things, perhaps about the mosquito that are ugly that may be explainable in that way. I don't know, I don't know if I would say there is an objective ugliness to the mosquito. Yeah, I don't know. The second question, now remind me of what the second question was, 'cause I'm thinking about this, that. Oh, if you lose a sense of beauty, it moved toward indifference to something. Yeah, yeah, I know when I, so when I presented, I presented to the political union in this room about the objectivity of beauty, and I was asked to defend the objectivity of beauty, which is a hard thing to do, and not always that easy to quantify. But one of the critiques that I got from a student was, it's like, well, I lived near Niagara Falls, and everybody thinks it's beautiful, but I think it's kind of boring, because there is this kind of, like, if you're used to it, you kind of become indifferent to, and that's true about all sorts of things in life. But I would say that that doesn't necessarily, that doesn't really nearly think about the beauty of the thing itself. Look, you can be indifferent to things that are beautiful. It doesn't make them less beautiful. I'd say that the beauty is something that goes beyond just our experience of the thing. So this two one I was aligned. Yes. Yeah, I would say ugliness really is a distortion. So I don't think we want to say that ugliness is divinely created. I don't think God created the ugly. And there's a, there's a significant difference between the creation account that's recorded in Genesis, and all other ancient Near Eastern creation accounts. And that, if you look at like the Anuma Alisha, you look at these other ancient documents that contain these other creation narratives. Pretty much every creation story, or everyone at least that I'm aware of, is some kind of battle. Like there's a fight between God's, you have like with Marduk fighting Tiamah, and Tiamah's like cut in half, and half of that God becomes, becomes the earth right in the sky. There's always this kind of cosmic battle. So there is a kind of disorderliness that has to be corrected. So the God's like out of ugliness or disorder makes something beautiful. But in the creation narrative in Genesis, what you have is this orderliness. You have this, look it for example, the days, right? The days, you have the six days in the text, and they're structured in parallels. So if you take day one, two, three, and then four, five, six, and you line them up next to each other, what you see is parallels. What you see is a location basically being created here on these days, and then something to fill that. You have the skies, then you have the sun and the moon, or then you have the sky above the earth, where it's filled with birds, and then you have the land, which is filled with animals. They parallel each other. What that means is that in the construction of this creation narrative, it's very clear that what is being said is that unlike those other narratives of the surrounding peoples, where chaos is kind of the foundation of reality in some way, order is the foundation, and that is beauty. We have balance, order. Everything's kind of put in its place. Didn't have to like get there. God makes sure every little thing gets where it's supposed to be. So I would say that in the way that the creation narrative is described in a way that God's relationship to the world is described throughout the text of Scripture, that's... Yeah, that beauty is the fundamental reality, so any ugliness must be a distortion from that, not a direct creation. Yes. 100%. Yes. We commercialize and cheapen everything. We do. We take things that are created for beauty and just make them products. In our society, that's just what we do. We make everything into a product. And so take music, for example. Music is something that is actually supposed to be enjoyed. Like for most of history, if there is music, it's not background noise. If there is music, it's people making music like live right there, and you're a part of it. You're experiencing it. Whether you're there making the music or you're dancing to the music, or you're at a concert where you're listening to the music with other people, you're enjoying it for what it is. The way that most people experience music today is background noise. We hear it when you go out to eat, you just have music on. You go out to a store, there's music on. And while, on the one hand, it may seem like, oh, well, that's great. We get to experience music so much more than people did in the past, but you've really cheapened the entire experience of music because you've taken it away from that experience of really actually listening and enjoying and delighting and to making it a product that stimulates you and that you can buy and sell. And I think it's a huge problem. But we do it in all sorts of ways. I think music, to me, is probably the most obvious. Yeah, I love things that are useless. It's why we're ties. No, really, the tie and the pocket square are the most useless things. I love it, right? 'Cause all other clothing, it's like, okay, well, you gotta have pants and you gotta have shoes and you gotta have a shirt and jacket if it's cold. It doesn't benefit me to have a tie, but I wanna wear it because it has no purpose. Right, that's what I wear most of the time. To me, it's a statement or something. I don't know. But yeah, yeah, I think we've unfortunately commercialized beauty and in doing that have distanced ourselves from it. Like, we're surrounded by so much visual in audio stimuli, but it doesn't mean anything to us. Yes. Yeah, sure, so I mean, like, it's a question of what is the method of inquiry that we are using to respond to answer this question? And if you comment things with the assumption that I think is a totally unproven one, that we can use the scientific method to basically explain all of our experiences, then of course you're going to find, there's always going to be a way to explain everything in that way. If you start with the assumption of methodological naturalism, you've said, "Everything is naturally explainable." There's always something that you can do to try to explain it away. And so to some extent, I think that what you have to recognize about beauty is that what we experience in the internal life is something that is significantly different from observing things like biological phenomena. So I would point, for example, to arguments from like the philosophy of mind and consciousness. And what is not, cannot be explainable via scientific, I say cannot, because it's not possible to explain it that way. Not just, we haven't yet found an explanation for this, is the internal conscious experience that we have. So which is something different from scientific knowledge inherently. So this would take a long time to explain in depth. Let me just give you a quick, quick argument. So there's an argument that is made, Sermon Essay by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, who has an essay about what it is to be a bat. And he says, "Imagine a situation where you," not a Christian philosopher by the way, to be clear. And imagine a situation where you spend your entire life studying bats. And you learn about everything about the bats' biological processes. You can pinpoint every little firing that goes off in the little bat brain. And you know comprehensively everything you could possibly know about the bat from the scientific method. He says, "There's one thing you could not know. That is what it is to be a bat." Because internal conscious experience, it's simply not derived that way. We can't know that. And so I think that when we're talking about beauty, what we are talking about, what I'm talking about, is that internal and immediate conscious experience of the beautiful. That I think is something that is distinctively different from the biological questions. No, I don't think it is. I don't think it is. But it also is, there are certain things that I think we intuitively know. I think there are those, what we call ideas that are properly basic, things that we can't really prove. But it's rational to assume then. We would never say it was irrational to assume those things to be true. So for example, I can't prove the existence of any of your minds to myself. Maybe you're all a bunch of what they call philosophical zombies, which means that you're like a robot walking around. You act like a human, but you've got no internal experience. That's true of me. There's no way to prove that, right? But you wouldn't deny that that's the case. So there are certain things that are properly basic to our experience. Things that we are rationally justified in assuming to be the case that I think we bring into the experiences that we have. And in beauty, I think serves that function. You can make a rational, say biological argument about how this could have arisen. But ultimately, I just don't think of the chords with your own experience and what people actually think. I think it's a suppression of what you actually believe or how you actually function. And I think there is something to looking at that internal experience and saying, how do people actually operate and think about the world? I mean, really, the existence of internal conscious experience should be epistemologically primary. We know that before we know anything else. I have to have a conscious experience to read an article in a scientific journal. Because I have to actually have an experience of looking at the words and knowing what they meet. That shouldn't really have to be proven. And we're talking about that internal conscious experience when we're talking about beauty. [MUSIC PLAYING] (gentle music) You