Of course, nothing in the first two parts of this series is an argument for the existence of Beauty, but before turning to this task, it is important to note what does not have to be done. We do not need to define Beauty before seeing that it exists. Many things humans believe are real are also hard to define. Most people cannot give very good definitions for things in which they have strong belief.
If a philosopher were to walk down the street and ask for a precise definition of “street,” most people would struggle to give an adequate answer containing only the necessary and sufficient conditions for a thing to be a “street.” In fact, it is the very habit of philosophers to ask for this sort of definition which rightly irritates most people with philosophers. After all, we walk down the street, know when we are “in the street” as opposed to our homes very successfully without ever knowing exactly how to define “street.” People can generally successfully separate sheep from wolves without being infallible or having perfect definitions of “sheep” and “wolf.”
As we shall see, there are good reasons to think beauty exists even if philosophers find it hard to define with perfect precision. Thinking about beauty eventually will lead to a working definition of beauty, but it is not the place to start.
I discovered part of my sense of emptiness, even as a Christian, came from making my own decisions about beauty. As Christian college students thought about their own sense of emptiness and feelings about the ugliness of the modern world, the eye-rolling stopped. Just as I had experienced, they began to consider the power of recognizing beauty as it is, but first we all need some positive reasons for thinking beauty is not just in our heads. These initial reasons, really suggestive facts, will not prove that beauty is real beyond a doubt, but will give hope to further investigation.
First Suggestive Fact: Our Reaction to Extreme Beauty or Ugliness Around Us
The first reason to believe that beauty might be real is the quick, predictable horror we feel about certain things and the immediate attraction almost everyone has to others.
If beauty is real, like goodness and truth, then it would be powerful. We would anticipate common reactions to images of great ugliness or beauty. We would anticipate nearly universal desire for life in some beautiful environments with nearly universal rejection of others. Powerful images of ugliness would hurt our minds, but soothing images of beauty would heal.
This is exactly what appears to be true as can be demonstrated by thinking about life in two different houses: one beautiful and one ugly. Just as would be anticipated if beauty was not just in our heads, I can predict the nearly universal rejection of one house, life in it, and my story about it as ugly. I can also assume the common (cross culture, ages, and times) acceptance of the other as better, not just in terms of comfort, but in terms of aesthetics. One hundred years from now readers will share this reaction as will readers today in North America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Mongolia, or Western Europe.
The Tale of the First House: Rat House
In one of the shrewdest real estate deals in history, I bought a house from people whose idea of garbage disposal was their garage. It turns out garbage attracts tenants, but not the sort I had hoped to gain. When we began to clean up, my wife watched roof rats running in and out of the garage. As we began to tear down the dry wall in the garage we discovered that the insulation and studs were all rank with rat waste.
We called an exterminator and he placed traps and poison. Our neighbors found rats on their lawns, near their pools, and on the street. We found more in the traps, but as we pulled down one bit of the ceiling in the garage I saw an amazing sight whirling slowly around and around in the dust of the falling wallboard.
Rats are tough and one of them had all the poison he could take. As he staggered around the attic of the garage, he went by another rat stuck in a trap . . . one was hungry and the other dying of poison. The result was inevitable communion.
Southern California is a hot place. In the summer any standing water gets mosquitoes and the flies multiply with orc-like fecundity. Imagine standing in a Southern California ranch-house garage and seeing swirling through the dust . . .in front of the plastic reindeer that the previous owners left as decoration:
Two dead rats locked together in a trap with maggots.
I walked away. It was too much ugliness to stand.
Where was that ugliness? Was it my mind? Would anyone root out their roses and place dead rats in traps in front of their house?
While reading this account does any normal person hope for accompanying illustrations?
Overwhelmingly my students don’t like the image . . . and don’t wish to see it. Who would? Anybody attracted to such ugliness for more than scientific reasons would be disqualified from dating my daughter!
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then so is ugliness. Experiences like this one make me doubt that this could be true. As I got the shovel . . . or looked at the entire house and what they had done to it . . . it felt like a reaction and not an internal problem.
Tomorrow: A Very Different House