Beauty creates desire and desire is dangerous.
Beauty can appear anywhere and at anytime. Sometimes it provokes desires that are inappropriate or dangerous to a culture. If a man sees a beautiful piece of jewelry, then he might desire it for his own. This desire, if not checked, can easily overwhelm him and lead to covetousness or worse. What can be done about this?
The educated man who understands beauty and the different manifestations of it can develop appropriate desires. He can learn that this jewelry is beautiful, but beautiful in a way that should provoke an appropriate response. His thinking it is beautiful is not wrong; he is just misapprehending it as the sort of beauty that he should own.
But what if beauty is not real? What if it is “in the eye of the beholder?”
If beauty is just “in my head” there is nothing to learn except acceptable responses according to society. Beauty is not a reasonable field of study, but an irrational opinion. The only way to deal with subjective beauty is self-discipline. Self-discipline helps the outer manifestations of the inappropriate desire, but it cannot deal with the desire itself.
If a man thinks some jewelry is beautiful and believes “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” then one way to suppress dangerous desire would be to deal with his opinion about the jewelry. Since society would frown on him stealing the jewelry, and since his desires will remain unfulfilled, he must try to repress his desire. He will try to convince himself that the “jewelry is not so hot anyway” as means to achieve this end. In this, he will either be doomed to failure (the jewelry really is beautiful) or he will succeed only by denying reality.
If an inappropriate desire is caused by subjective beauty, then people’s opinions about what is beautiful are part of the “problem.” Society tries to control certain unacceptable manifestations of desire, but the desire will keep coming back because the beauty that provokes it is really there. Ignorance of the nature of beauty and how to handle it will undercut any attempt to deal with it well.
Instead of learning about beauty, we learn about avoiding personal behaviors that can give offense. Beauty, if it is objective, never changes from culture to culture, but what gives offense (even gross offense) can change from day to day or person to person! This ends in terrifying legalism not liberty since there is no “real standard” to impose.
Aesthetic discussions regarding clothing are an example of where things have gone wrong. Instead of beauty, the focus weirdly becomes modesty . . . keeping people from “stumbling” as a result of attire.
My Nana dressed to be pleasing to God and her husband, but I dressed to please the culture and avoid scandal to American Christian sub-culture. Not only is this unhelpful in controlling vice, but it misses real beauty. The eye-rolling college students were amazingly modest for twenty-first century Americans, but all of them wore the same standard grunge that looks good on almost nobody.
Modesty is actually subjective, changing from person to person or situation to situation. Clothing can be modest and also ugly! If beauty is real, then a “modest” but ugly dress, might be very harmful.
When my daughter was small, I tried an experiment with her. We googled the phrase “modest prom dress” and took a look at the sites. Mary Kate looked at the dresses with horror, “These dresses are very modest, but they are not very beautiful.”
It was clear to her that the main goal of the dress designers had been to meet culturally subjective standards of modesty. Mary Kate wanted to be beautiful, not merely modest. Modesty is the absence of a vice while being beautiful is reflecting the Divine nature.
In my own life, I realized that I was hostile to considering objective beauty because I feared it would lead to the forced wearing of Mormon prom dresses by my date, would mandate listening to ugly but wholesome Christian music, and uplifting but hideous art. After discussing it, I realized that the eye-rolling college students thought that “objective beauty” was just a philosopher’s way of getting ready to talk about modesty or bad ideas in their music!
Nothing could have been further from reality. Objective beauty would allow modesty to shrink back to its role as part of manners . . . and make the idea of “ugly goodness” the obvious oxymoron it is.