Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder?

We have a society that says we have truths, but no truth. We have beauties, but no beauty.

Purposes, but no purpose. What is beauty? Can we know if something is beautiful? Can someone objectively know that something is a beautiful piece of music or a beautiful painting?

To put it another way, today on Renewing Your Mind, R.C. Sproul will answer the question, is beauty in the eye of the beholder? We live in a subjective age. Truth and goodness have been redefined or left up to the individual, and the same is true for beauty. Today's message is from Dr. Sproul's series titled Rediscovering the Beauty of the Arts. Today is also the final day that you can request this nine-message series for your donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. So are there principles, normative standards that can help a Christian recognize a beautiful painting or sculpture, a beautiful piece of literature or dance?

Well, here's Dr. Sproul to answer. As we continue now with our study of the Christian and the arts, we're going to turn our attention today to the age-old debate over the nature of aesthetics, which is this. Is beauty something that is discerned purely subjectively, or are there, in fact, external objective standards or criteria by which something may be judged to be beautiful? Now, we are living in a period in Western history where the dominant motif tends to be in favor of subjectivism. You've heard the cliché so often that makes it a cliché that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And more and more we have people arguing that there are no ultimate standards for beauty. But this is not something that should surprise us because at the same time in contemporary culture and in contemporary philosophy, we've seen a denial of objectivity across the boards. We've seen a denial of objective truth, of objective goodness, and philosophies that have centered themselves on the core belief that truth itself is subjectivity and that there are no absolutes except the absolute, that there are absolutely no absolutes.

And so we have a society that says we have truths but no truth. We have beauties but no beauty, purposes but no purpose, which creates quite a bit of confusion when we come to this question of the nature of beauty. Now obviously, in every aesthetic experience of a person, of a human being, there is a subjective response. And certainly it is clear that each one of us has his or her preferences subjectively with respect to the art that we admire or embrace or otherwise enjoy. Some of us like one type of music while others like a different kind, one style of painting and another style for you and so on.

So no one, I think, would want to argue that there's no involvement of the responding subject to the realm of art. But we're still asking the question, is there anything beyond our subjective feelings and personal preferences and individual responses to that which we consider beautiful that can be seen as some kind of objective basis for beauty? And again, the battle is not only between the subjective and the objective but also between the normative and the relative. On other courses I've made mention of the way our language shifts in the culture and the way we hear people complaining about the loss of traditional values, where the term value has become the new word that substitutes for the classic word ethic. What people mean when they say we have lost a sense of values, they mean that we're engaged in some kind of an ethical crisis because the norms that determine right conduct and proper behavior in the past have been set aside and been replaced by this principle of relativism. And yet the irony of that is that historically value has been sharply distinguished from ethics and has been almost universally acknowledged to be subjective. The so-called subjective theory of value says the way you value your car will not be exactly the same the way in which your neighbor values your car or even the way your neighbor values his car or cars. We all have different sets of values in terms of the worth or importance that we assign to certain elements of our experience. Now it could be argued that from the Christian perspective there is such a thing as a normative value. The worth that God attaches to certain things would be the supreme standard of value and that the Christians should try to get his or her personal values to be in line with God's values. But again we have this problem of this conflict between that which is normative and the normative says ought.

When we talk about norms we're talking about standards that impose some kind of imperative, some kind of obligation ethically upon us. And so we ask again, the plot thickens when you bring this to the arts, is there a kind of art that so corresponds to norms found in the character of God that we ought to appreciate it even though we presently may not appreciate it? This is one of the reasons in the historic college curriculum people studied what was called art appreciation. And the idea was to develop a higher sense of appreciation of deeper forms of art because these forms of art were considered to be more in harmony with classical norms and standards for beauty.

Now again let's just put this in shorthand. If indeed God is the foundation of beauty and if there are norms for beauty that are grounded in the character of God himself then that would impose upon us an obligation to seek to understand the elements of those norms and to embrace those norms for ourselves. Rather than simply depend upon our own private preferences or our own private experiences to determine in the final analysis what is beautiful and what isn't. Now also there is in this issue of norms for aesthetics the debate over the difference between chaos and cosmos. Remember Carl Sagan who became famous with his TV program called Cosmos and the best-selling book by the same title. In the beginning of that book on Cosmos, Sagan who was a physicist, an astronomer, an astrophysicist makes the point on the very first page that as a scientist he comes at questions of reality from the perspective of one who believes that scientific knowledge is indeed possible. And that which makes scientific knowledge possible is because the universe in which we live is cosmos. That is it is a place where there is an inherent built-in systemic order which order is knowable by the careful observer. He's following again the principle of epistemology that undergirded the Enlightenment which sought by use of the scientific method to discover quote the logic of the facts. In other words the Enlightenment thinkers were saying we're bombarded every day by myriads and myriads of details, a little data bits of our experience and we ask the question how do they relate to one another?

How do they fit together? I keep looking at all of the details of my experiments, of my observation and in my inductive research and I look into that and see if I can find patterns, see if I can find forms, see if I can find a hint to the logic by which these things hang together. Now again we're living in the most anti-logical period in Western history. I understand that and people you know reject logic even though they can't really live without it. But even somebody like Sagan understands that without it, without order, without cosmos there are no patterns and if there are no patterns and no structures, if there are no standards or norms what you have is chaos. And the problem is for the scientists that chaos is unintelligible. Now some of you may be aware of the new movement in science called chaos science or chaos physics and it's kind of a misnomer because even that advance in the scientific community is an attempt to study apparent chaos by giving it the philosophy of the second glance.

And studying it more closely and studying it more deeply in order to reveal the underlying structure of it. You're on a boat, you're on an ocean liner, you stand at the edge of the rail and you look into the water and you see the water swirling around as the boat moves through the ocean. And you maybe focus your glance at one set of bubbles, one little piece of foam and try to follow it. Try to watch how it behaves. Try to predict where it's going to go next. But there are so many factors interacting here in the currents and the winds and so on of this piece of foam that to the naked eye at least it's virtually impossible to predict where it's going to go next. I used to play the game as I'm sure every child did. I'm walking home from the drug store on a summer day when it was raining hard and the water was filling the gutter and you would drop your popsicle stick in the gutter and you would stand and be mesmerized watching the progress of that popsicle stick to see what obstacles and barriers or eddies in the water would change its direction and so on.

We've all done that. Well that's one of the most difficult things to predict, yet what chaos scientists are saying is there are principles and laws at work here and in fact there is a harmony of what's taking place even in this seemingly chaotic response of gases and fluids and so on in the universe. And so again the assumption of science is cosmos, that there is order.

Now that presupposes a formal structure to things. Now if we go back in antiquity to the ancient Greeks, to the golden age of Hellenism, we go back to the academy founded by Plato. And you may recall that at the entrance to Plato's academy was an arch over the door and there was a sign displayed there and the sign read, let none but geometers enter here.

Let none but geometers enter here. Does that mean that you had to have a PhD in geometry to get into Plato's academy? I thought that Plato was a philosopher, not a mathematician, but what he meant by geometers were people who were committed to the study of form in its mathematical relationship and proportionality. Plato had been deeply influenced by the Pythagoreans who had developed a philosophy of numbers where everything in reality was explained mathematically. And we may smile at that today until we take a moment to think of how the great breakthroughs of science over the ages have been in the most part been pioneered by the forward thinking of mathematicians who found a simpler math or a more complete math and then pointed their telescopes where the empirical research followed the mathematical plotting. And that has been the case with Einstein, with Newton, with Copernicus, and a host of other scientists who have been pioneers because of their conviction of a rational, harmonious, inner structure of reality that could be communicated in terms of the law.

And that is the logic of mathematics because in one sense what mathematics is is a form of symbolic logic. But again, Plato, following the Pythagoreans, was concerned to discover the harmony not only of the heavens where the ancient astronomers believed that there was so-called harmony of the spheres, that the stars in their order spelled out a certain majestic harmony. That could be known. And the course of the planets were followed. And today we don't seem to understand how important to daily life and survival plotting the motion of planets and the stars and so on, the phases of the moon was to the ancient person.

Particularly in the agrarian society where planting and harvesting were determined not by counters because they didn't have counters, but they were determined by the movements of the stars in the sky and so on. And so ancient philosophers were very much interested in this. Now, the great student of Plato was Aristotle. And as we know, Aristotle was the supreme scientist of antiquity. In fact, his star student was Alexander the Great, and Alexander shared Aristotle's passion for unity. And so at Aristotle's behest when Alexander the Great went on his world-conquering crusades with his army, he took with him battalions after battalions of battalions of scientists to collect samples of flora and fauna along the way.

In fact, it's been said that the most expensive scientific expedition ever carried out in history, with the sole exception of the American space probe, was Alexander the Great's scientific attempt to capture samples for scientific research for Aristotle. Aristotle was one of these encyclopedic geniuses whose knowledge was not focused on one field, but who wrote in a learned way in philosophy, in biology, in physics, in drama, in ethics, and so on. And Aristotle, in examining reality, also sought to discover the transcendent norms of beauty. And he isolated certain factors that he said are common to the beautiful. And before I spell those out, I'll mention that his work was then echoed from a Christian perspective in the Middle Ages by Thomas Aquinas, who emphasized basically the same principles of beauty that Aristotle had introduced earlier. And then that was picked up and employed later on in the 18th century in the United States of America by the man that the Encyclopedia Britannica calls the most brilliant thinker America has ever produced, the Puritan Jonathan Edwards, who in his aesthetic theory incorporated most of these same principles as normative standards.

Now, the basic principles that they developed were the principles of proportionality, proportion, harmony, simplicity, and complexity so that beauty was not based on arbitrary feelings or chaos, but upon the interaction of these basic principles. Now, in the 60s, in our culture, we had the work of John Cage, who tried to compose music in a way that was completely arbitrary with no mathematical significance to it. And he was trying to make a statement that music or art is completely random. It is completely by chance. There is no form.

There is no order. And so he'd get this weird stuff that he produced. And yet the irony of Cage, as Francis Schaeffer once pointed out, was that his avocation was that he was a gourmet mushroom collector. But when he would go into the forest to collect his mushrooms, he never did it arbitrarily. So he couldn't live with the principle that he was trying to communicate with his art, that life is completely chaotic.

He retreated from that when he was careful to distinguish between poisonous mushrooms and nonpoisonous mushrooms. But anyway, these basic principles of proportion, harmony, simplicity, and complexity can be found as applied not only to painting, to sculpture, to dance, to music, to literature, to all the various art forms that we know. And if you think about proportion, you think about the difference between primitive art and advanced art, the difference between a symphony and noise, as we'll explore later. You see that when I start a drawing, I start with a little stick figure, and I try to draw something like that. Well, if I make it very simple, like a stick figure, you don't have to be a Matisse or a Chagall or anything like that in order to make a beautiful stick figure. But once I want to incorporate in my painting or in my sculpture a portrait of a human being or a painting of a whole human being, then I have to worry about the relationship of the hands to the ankles to the nose to the ears. And all of a sudden now, portraiture becomes much more difficult, much more complicated, and we recognize that there is a real skill and a talent to somebody who's able to produce works of art that are not chaotic, that are in a certain proportion.

And we'll look at that again further later on. Secondly, again, proportion is related to harmony, and harmony is where the pieces that are used in a given work of art fit together in an integrated way. And they don't clash.

They're not garish. Again, the difference between music and noise can be discerned on the basis of questions of harmony. Finally, simplicity. Something doesn't have to be complex in order to be beautiful. There is a certain beauty found in a Gregorian chant where there's not even any harmony introduced into it or in plain song and that sort of thing that's very simple, but it's not simplistic. There still is, even in the simple, there is still relationship involved, which we'll again also explore. And again, complexity is when it's one thing for me to take a tin whistle and play a little tune, and then to add to it, bassoons, oboes, violins, violas, all the way down to the trumpets and so on, and create an entire symphony when there are many, many, many, many, many different parts and instruments being involved at the same time, and yet maintaining a harmonious relationship. That doesn't happen randomly.

That was R.C. Sproul on this Tuesday edition of Renewing Your Mind, answering the question, Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder? Throughout history, the Christian church has produced some of the finest artists in the world. Why is that? And what do we communicate as we design church buildings in different styles?

And does that even matter? These are just some of the questions Dr. Sproul tackles in his nine-part series, Rediscovering the Beauty of the Arts. Today is the final day of this offer, and when you respond before midnight, we'll send you this series on DVD and we'll give you lifetime digital access to all of the messages.

So visit renewingyourmind.org or call us at 800 435 4343. Only hours remain for this offer, and I thank you for your generosity as your support fuels Renewing Your Mind and all of the outreach of Ligonier Ministries. You and I were created, or better stated as Christians, recreated to be worshippers. Jason Holopoulos joins us for the rest of the week to consider what worship should look like in the life of the Christian. That's beginning tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind.