Why Does Beauty Matter?
And can it make you a better person?
This page was created to argue that beauty is important, and it has been incredibly gratifying to see how many of you agree. But sometimes, it is difficult to articulate what it is that beauty actually does to its viewer, and why it does those things.
If you are reading this, you probably agree that it is important to have a healthy relationship with beautiful things. But why? In other words, what will happen to you if you have a healthy relationship with beauty?
This is really important to get right. Fortunately, the German philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand was a phenomenal philosopher of beauty, and has some great advice to help us understand:
What sets beauty apart from merely enjoyable pleasures.
Why beauty demands a response.
Perhaps most importantly, how to introduce more beauty in your life in a way that makes a difference.
It all comes down to what beauty is, and how we ought to respond to it. Let’s begin.
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The Different Forms of Importance
When Hildebrand is discussing beauty, he first points out that many things in life have the ability to evoke an emotional, even spiritual, response in us. But those responses come in three different forms.
First, there are some things that we appreciate only for our own subjective satisfaction.
We find these experiences in music (certain dance songs), food (Doritos) and, yes, parties, all the time. They are only valuable as a matter of taste: if you do not like chocolate ice cream, no problem. There is no “right way” to respond to it, and the importance of the subjectively satisfying is based entirely on your own preference for it.
There is not necessarily anything wrong with the subjectively satisfying (I, personally, love chocolate ice cream). But the subjectively satisfying can be dangerous because it keeps us focused on ourselves and our own preferences. It is easy to slip from innocent enjoyment to overindulgence.
Second, there are some things that we appreciate because they are objectively good for us.
This is the appreciation of water when we are thirsty, or for food when we are hungry. This importance is not based solely on your own preferences, but the needs and requirements of your nature. We value bad-tasting medicine or painful surgeries because they are good for us, even though there is no enjoyment in the immediate experience for us.
The objectively good is a higher good than the subjectively satisfying, but there is still problem: anything viewed exclusively as objectively good for us is viewed primarily under the lens of ourselves; it is self-centered, even if it is not, technically, selfish in a vicious sense.
That is why Hildebrand introduces a third category of importance: the important-in-itself.
The things in this category are those which present themselves to us as important whether we would view them so or not. In fact, unlike the subjectively satisfying, those things that are important-in-themselves make demands on us. If you do not like them, it is you who are wrong. Hildebrand’s favorite example is a great act of generosity or forgiveness. If you see a man offer his meal to another person, you ought to appreciate that act whether it does anything for you or not. In fact, you should appreciate it even if it harms you in some way. A hypothetical person who says “yeah, I am just not a big fan of generosity” has made a mistake about the kind of thing that generosity is in the first place! The important-in-itself is that which we most properly call valuable, and that is the term I will use for the rest of this essay.
This schema reveals why it is so important to properly appreciate beauty…
The Value of Beauty
If beauty were only subjectively satisfying, it would not really be important at the end of the day. You could take it or leave it with little harm. And if it were merely objectively good for us, it would only be valuable insofar as it helped human beings.
Instead, beauty is properly valuable: when you come into contact with something beautiful, you are experiencing something that requires a proper response: it deserves admiration.
This means that, in experiencing and appreciating beauty, we are drawn into a world that is higher than ourselves. Rather than living only for ourselves, beauty allows us to transcend our own lives and importance and be drawn into the higher order of the world of values. This also means that you also become a better, more moral person through the appreciation of beautiful things, because you practice responding properly to things that are important (like people!)
This makes our relationship with beauty important, not just for our happiness, but for our character. It will harder to be a good person if we are not, in some sense, an aesthetically aware one. The presence and relationship of beauty in our life is of moral, even eternal, importance.
Fortunately, Hildebrand is not just giving us theory; he also has some remarkable advice on how to better appreciate beauty in our day to day…
