When We Are Faced With Beauty, We Are Faced With Fear
“Art, as the escape from individuation and desire, is thus the very negative of fiction. Beauty is an experience of truth” - Nick Land.
When we are faced with beauty, we are faced with fear. We fight to preserve temporary structures that bind us to awe. We are afraid that the structures that inspire us will erode and return us to dust. These structures are simultaneously formless and timeless. Whether we place them in glass cases, spend billions on restoring and perfecting their original form, or gather in the thousands to listen to them, beauty is, in some sense, the ultimate ideal that we strive to protect. It is the measure of our taste and our philosophy. It can apply to every discipline or niche. There is an inherent beauty in a Fourier series as opposed to a painting, as there is magnificent architecture to a song. We raise the most beautiful structures to house the most beautiful ideals.
The paradox of beauty is that it strives towards an ideal but can never complete it. In the same sense that an ascetic priest will never reach the divine light of God because finite reason cannot capture infinite divinity, nothing can be perfectly beautiful. It is an infinitely recursive loop in which the object strives to encompass the full meaning of the attribute but never arrives at the ideal form. The ideal form is pervasive in the human condition, seeping into every crack and crevice of creation, with each creator striving for idealism within their discrete context. Desire to take finite form and transmute it to the infinite transcendental ideal is deadly. This becomes thanatropic when reframing this process of optimization introspectively. To conceive of ourselves as a vessel for the aesthetic (not in totality, but this is absolutely perceived) is to accept that we are not and will never be the ideal form of beauty.
Such a conception is inherent to self-awareness. You recognize yourself as an actor that contains attributes, both physical and illusory. If the self is a container for attribution, attribution exists at the root of thought. The problem is only the self can actually see what is inside the container, and others can only observe the container itself. This promotes behavior that optimizes for the perception of the container, or attributable characteristics, rather than an exploration of the unnamed. In this crucible of perception, the paramount attribute exalted is the 'aesthetic process' – a facade of observable manifestations, a simulacrum discerned at mere face value. This poses a profound conundrum, as it predicates a precedence of aesthetic prioritization, an external fixation, before one can venture introspectively. What this reveals, at the highest level of cerebration, is that the human process is characterized by a Sysphean struggle to maximize personal aesthetics within your means.
The obvious retort to this unified human endeavor toward the aesthetic is the common idiom, ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’ I assert this as a fallacy. To posit that our perceptions of beauty are completely individualized is to posit that there exists no objective ground on which aesthetics are based. The heretic would argue that beauty is based on structures of culture, and those serve as positive feedback loops where structure becomes hyperstition, and thus beauty is a falsehood in itself. However, we universally recognize some structures of beauty as objective, such as symmetry, harmony, and fractals. In the case that one should, uninitiated and naive, find themselves ensconced within St. Peter's Basilica, they would inevitably be compelled to prostrate in awe, subdued by an overpowering beauty that pierces consciousness. This overwhelming force, whether it be a catalyst for a biochemical cascade of beauty-inducing neurotransmitters or a manifestation of a divinely imbued virtue, resonates with a primal pleasure derived from the immersion in these fundamental edicts of the aesthetic realm. But to supersede the foundation, beauty needs to inspire sublimity.
If you accept the ‘aesthetic ideal’ as the highest ideal of human cognition, permanent beauty is something that strikes us so deeply it transcends the basic categories of knowing, and permanence can only be captured in the process of the natural. When we recognize something as beautiful, we idolize that beauty because we recognize it as a symbol of the humiliation of our existence before a transcendent. All of theistic thought is based on this premise. The theist posits that God is an extension of infinite aestheticism, and that is why his creation is what strikes us as the most beautiful. The atheist would argue for relativism here, but I argue that the transcendent is not necessarily divine, merely an objective ground of reality. The atheist would argue that even assuming a transcendent ideal, beauty is still subjective. The simple answer lies in whether or not beauty exists as a redemptive force.
Every creation that civilization makes will be eroded. Think about where you are reading now. What will that space look like a hundred years from now? A thousand? A million? In so far as the outcomes of human creation are temporary, permanent beauty can only be encapsulated in the process that creates those outcomes: the natural. All of the temporary structures that we idolize are inspired by the divine spark of the processes of the natural world. This means that the outcomes of this process are where we should look for the most permanent beauty. Ad extremum, this would imply that the forces resulting from this process also embody some permanence, but the metaphysical inspires a fraction of the sublimity that the physical does. We look to these divine sparks as redemptive because, for us humans, we are entranced by the root cause of infinite beauty, so divinity must be more innate in the objects that encapsulate that principle holistically.
This effect is easily observable by anyone who has had the privilege to be witness to a natural wonder. Standing at the base of vast mountainscapes, observing a chaotic jungle, or simply looking at a flower are all experiences that induce the transcendental sublime. In fact, you have to look no further than other people to experience participation in the aesthetic ideal.
Under the presupposition that beauty is an all-encompassing ethic that we involuntarily participate in and, more importantly, something that we inadvertently yet wholeheartedly strive towards, how do we reconcile our imperfections? Our natural beauty, similar to our mortality, is something that is endowed to us. We can wrestle and fight against this endowment as much as we want, but if we want to be true rationalists, true critical adherents to a worldview governed by truth, if you extend the argument for an ideal beauty to its limits, we arrive at the conclusion that there is a scalar approach to that ideal. That is to say, some people are endowed with a state of being more beautiful than others. The heretic would again argue that a scalar, linear approach to the beautiful is limiting, and that it precludes the psyche from being able to participate in all forms of beauty. This is exactly the point. The heretic embodies the necessary human reflex of neuroticism to be able to coexist with this ideal. This seems to be an incorrigible offense to our psyche, a truth that is unacceptable because, in the contemporary condition, we live in comparatives.
As civilization has progressed, our baseline welfare has reached a point where natural selection by death and capacity will be phased out (as it already has been in North America, Western Europe, and most of Southeast Asia) and replaced by a natural selection-guided by the aesthetic ideal. Utility in partners is no longer represented by their utility to your welfare but rather in the validation of completing inward journeys of the aesthetic. Herein exists the torture of being a youth in contemporary times. In so far as the previous generation who existed in this new paradigm was also driven to select spouses in congruence with the aesthetic ideal, my generation is all the more victim to this phenomenon with the advent of the internet. Because sex and partnership are, at face value, driven by this process on account of both parties in a relationship, we select based on the available pool of partners that are visible to us. For the previous generation, this was generally limited by locality, but for us, we have access to visibility and evaluation of every conceivable partner. Even worse, the vast majority of people that are shown to us are the ones that are closest to said ideal. If we accept the ideal as a scalar, the proposition drives us mad because we draw comparatives to our competitors.
Having a partner, erotic or romantic, is a measure of both self-validity in the psyche and part of the inherent human eros to have someone who is inextricably dedicated to you. How depressing it is then that by virtue of our endowed beauty, our happiness and self-validity are limited. How abusive it is to the human condition to be shown the promise of greater satisfaction but with the knowledge that it is unattainable. This deleterious phenomenon mirrors the existential angst of death. Just as death is insurmountable, so is your endowed beauty. Death is the source of uncertainty, and the aesthetic is what drives us to it.
The good news is that you can supersede this uncertainty if you are extremely talented or rich. We are quick to abandon aesthetic ideals when a tangible incentive is laid before us. In fact, most superstructure crumbles at the feet of envy. But this is also neurotic because it is observable. We are able to see when the transcendent is violated by other endowments, and we take note. The common trope is the Russian Oligarch with a twenty-year-old model wife. We snicker and sneer at the oligarch for unfairly superseding the hierarchy, and therefore the hierarchy is made null in our minds. But because we are able to recognize that hierarchy, and we know we aren’t Mikhail Prokhorov or Andrey Melnichenko (at least I am not), we know we are still condemned to participate in it.
To come to terms with the idea that the transcendent has placed on you intrinsic limits and, conversely, intrinsic value, you must stare it in the eye. You can decorate yourself as much as you want, with identity, with fashion, with creativity, but it is all reducible. The only true way to escape the horror is to abandon desire.
Desire sows roots of envy in the mind and, once planted, spreads like an ergot in a wheat field. Once the infection spreads to the core of your mind, to the generative factors that constitute the helm of your existence, the self is erased. But how is one able to participate in any function of society without engaging in desire? Desire is what grounds us in who we are. Desire represents the fuel that drives us to accomplishment, to any greater purpose. To even conceive of ‘wants’ is to have a desire, and even more troubling is the fact that most of our wants are the fruits of synthetic forces.
In the shadow of these propositions lurks an inexorable despair, a dark sentinel reminding us that from this visceral experience, there exists no sanctuary, no retreat. When first we collide with this formidable dread, we instinctively entomb it within the labyrinthine recesses of our psyche, an attempt to shield ourselves from the stark glare of our own shortcomings. Yet, the mind, in its enigmatic complexity, harbors a subliminal rebellion, inexorably dredging the suppressed into the glaring light of consciousness, culminating in a cataclysmic rupture, a divine catharsis that incinerates the synthetic ‘want’ we've so fervently clung to.
To live in this paradox is a type of hell. The meaning of the word itself means that the phenomenon cannot be explained by our natural reality. Its very nature is meant to be irreconcilable. This principle should be liberating for you. You must recognize your own agency in these constructs. You must recognize that even your most driving desires are synthetic. You must recognize your own agency in navigating this allegorical minotaur’s labyrinth.
But the bigger moral concern is not one of recognition but rather one of obligation. The self has an obligation to its existence. You have an obligation to your lived experience not to be held captive by your mind but to use this newfound framing in the pursuit of more fruitful fulfillment. Instead of recognizing superstructure and pulling away from it because it is so unfathomable, you need to lean into it, accept its reality, and use that as a guidepost to mold your worldview. Once you are free from the shackles of construction, use it to your advantage. Embolden those around you to go on the offensive, not wallow in pity. Beauty isn’t arbitrarily placed in our world. It is universal. Everyone has some relative amount of it, even if you don’t have the most.
We now arrive at the larger conundrum of whether or not aestheticism and transcendental reality are placed with meaning. We can recognize that these concepts do truly exist because they are observable, but are they divine? Whether or not you believe in Abrahamic theology, every person necessarily believes in some ‘God.’ If you possess a hierarchy of values (which I hope you do), the value that trumps all others and stands at the top of this cognitive pyramid is what pragmatically serves as God for you. It is the ultimate redemptive force, the natural unity of reality. Does your conception of this preeminent principle promote beauty? Is it the root of beauty? If the answer is no, you have transcended the natural process, and I am ready to concede that can be enlightening itself. But if yes, you must look at the rules-based system we live in, preserve it, and believe that it exists with intention, striving for something it will never achieve.
