steepholm | May one be pardon'd and retain the offence?

For various reasons I’ve been looking back at Four British Fantasists over the last couple of days, and I found myself reading the discussion of James Lovelock’s defence of hedgerows in Ages of Gaia. Lovelock describes the appearance of the English countryside, with its small enclosed fields, as “as much as a sacrament as the cathedrals, music and poetry.” In my book I take issue with this for a number of reasons, but today one particular objection gave me pause. This is what I wrote:

“It is difficult to privilege a particular and historically very specific form of man-made landscape without also implicitly defending the social system for whose purposes that landscape was created and maintained.” (134)

Well, I can see what I meant here. Many of those hedgerows, eco-friendly mouse and vole condominia as they may be today, were built not for wildlife or aesthetics but to enable landgrabbers to deprive the poor of their historic right to common land. They are not a sacrament, but evidence of a historic class crime – and a crime for which redress has never been made.

But should that stop us finding them beautiful? And if so, what are the implications? To take another, perhaps still starker example, can we admire the pyramids without at some level endorsing slave labour? (This is assuming for the sake of argument that slaves were used in their building.) In a very basic and abstract way we might admire their triangularity; we might get a vulgar thrill from thinking that “These Things are Very Old”; but if we’re the kind of people for whom the human history and purpose of such objects is an important part of our response, then how are we meant to reconcile ourselves to that admiration? How can we even be impressed by their size without also quailing a little at the thought of the power that decreed it and what that meant in human terms? Should we, in short, wish that the pyramids had never been made? And is that wish compatible with admiring them now, or does present admiration make us retrospectively complicit?

Am I worrying too much?

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I think that your artistic/aesthetic distinction is a useful one for many purposes, and is probably a good way of staying sane about this whole issue! But of course it's not an absolute distinction, especially when aesthetics and artistic intent combine, as in the case of rhetoric, for example. Thus I think it would be quite difficult to separate an aesthetic appreciation of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will as a piece of cinematography from an acknowledgement of its rhetorical intent and effect. It works through an aesthetics of the viscera. The beauty of a sword can be quite abstract by comparison.

I think in most intentionally artistic enterprise the one obviously affects the other but it is interesting to consider if your response would differ if you were ignorant of the context and intent or if the the two are actually indivisible. What is aesthetically beautiful is also to some degree culturally determined so it is probably impossible to lose the impact of context altogether. However, I still think that it is a useful distinction with that rider - I think you can appreciate that something is well shot and composed, cut, edited and organised and has a kind of integrity. The degree to which these things are used to further a rhetorical purpose is a separate issue I think. I agree that in this case the definition of beauty is defined by ideology but it is possible to appreciate what something looks like, the artifice necessary to achieve it as well as appeciating how effectively both serve a particular purpose and acknowledging that achievement may also be morally repugnant; I do think those as distinct ways of apprehending an artistic endeavour.

Yes, I think this gets it pretty much right, in an area where absolute rightness is probably not to be had. One can even find a kind of beauty in 'the perfect murder' if it's carried out with sufficient ingenuity and flair. Agatha Christie made a living out of it.

I'd love to be able to pin down a bit further the extent of "some degree" in your "What is aesthetically beautiful is also to some degree culturally determined". I believe there's some evidence that aesthetics has at least in part a biological/evolutionary component, inasmuch as sexual selection teaches us to find beauty in symmetrical people who are also the most likely to be healthy breeders - and the way in which the Golden Section (by way of the Fibonacci series) turn up in many natural contexts, for example the branching of veins and branches. So, to some extent, aesthetics may be hard-wired - and this could account for some of the response to the elegant proportions of the pyramids, too. At the same time, ideally I'd like to have an integrated response that involves the whole of my being, rather than some parts of my mind being offended, while other parts are going "Cool!"

I'm shallow so I usually respond first to what is aesthetically beautiful but on the rare occasions where I think about it, I am perfectly happy with holding conflcting views about the same thing simultaneously; it is how I respond to most things : )

May one be pardon'd and retain the offence?

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