Beauty and The Goal Of Poetry and Philosophy

Exploring the relation between poetry, philosophy, beauty, and indifference.

The semester has began! Apologies if this leads me to keep to an inconsistent schedule.

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I have, for whatever reason, found myself more and more interested in beauty recently.

In her book, On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry begins by saying:

“Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Somestimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to resemblances and still other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable.”

It is a point in favor of this quote that it is, itself, beautiful. For Scarry, the characteristic way of responding to beauty is recreating it. This recreation can come in a variety of forms. The simplest (and I don’t mean this in a demeaning way) is the sustained look, the memory. We reproduce the beautiful thing in our minds as an image. We might also produce it as an actual image, describe it in prose or in verse.

Importantly, I do not think it is necessary that this reproduction is primarily visual. Poetry is a way of reproducing, of copying beauty, through the creation of lines of text. When we craft poetry, we embody the beauty of something—the emotions it inspires within us or even what it looks like—through the written word.

Reflecting on this, however, has led me to see that the study of philosophy, at least as I am interested in it, is engaged in the same sort of task. When we philosophize about something—about the nature of knowledge or about some experience of ours—we attempt to keep its beauty with us in much the same way we attempt to keep the beauty of a landscape with us by staring at it for a while in awe, trying to capture it.

c. Winter landscape, by Caspar David Friedrich - National Gallery, London, UK

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I want to try and say more about this.

Beauty seeks to reproduce itself (Scarry herself notes the innuendo here). But at the same time, it is all too well known that too much of something beautiful can make us cold to it. We experience the ‘dulling power of repetition.’ We grow tired of the movie we once loved, of the book we once couldn’t get enough of.

I wonder why this is. In a previous piece, I called it tragic, and it certainly is, but I am beginning to wonder how such an answer could be sufficient. How strikingly inelegant for beauty to strive to make copies of itself when those very copies eventually destroy our ability to appreciate it. How very shortsighted: why would it hand us the knife with which we are doomed to cut it down?

So perhaps beauty does not just strive to make copies of itself, ones that will eventually make us cold to it. Perhaps something else is going on. Maybe it is us who are somehow mistaken. If we are to be at all charitable to beauty—and if there is anything we should be charitable to, it is that—we ought to at least consider this possibility.

Alright. Let’s consider it. What is in a copy? I stand looking out at the park. The snow is falling today, and I am intent on taking it in. Am I making a copy of it? Suppose I stop, pull out my sketchbook, and begin drawing. Is that drawing a copy?

I don’t think it is a copy in the following sense: we have a book chapter which we want to share with a friend, so we put it in the copier and make a copy.

Call the first case copy-creation, and the second case—what I do when I make a Xerox—plain-old-copying. When we engage in plain-old-copying, we don’t add anything to the initial object. There is a book chapter, and suddenly, after putting it into the machine, there is a verbatim copy of it.

But when we engage in copy-creation, we are doing something more. When we stare off at a landscape, trying to take it all in, it is almost as if we are trying to pierce it, to decipher it, to find the truths about the meaning of life and the nature of happiness that it is sure to contain but hides from us. And the same is true with a sketch or a picrture. In such a case, the creation of the copy—a mental image, a picture in our sketchbook—just is the act of deciphering.

Perhaps the best example of copy-creation, then, is the fields of philosophy or poetry. Though they use remarkably different means—poetry, I think, engages the imagination more than philosophy does, which, alternatively, engages our reason—they both seek to create. But they do not create out of nothing. Philosophers create theories and analyses about things: theories of knowledge, ethics, and so on. And poets create poetry about things too—about love, about loss. But they also create in order to decipher. To say what knowledge or morality is, or to say what it is like to experience grief or love.

So both poets and philosophers take beautiful things and they add something more to them. They attempt to decipher them. In a sense, then, poets and philosophers are engaged in copy-creation.

But if we think of copying in this way, if we confine it to this sense, and exclude that sense which involves copying machines, thoughtless phone camera photos, and so on, then perhaps beauty does not aspire to its own destruction at all. The sorts of copies that lead us to grow tired and indifferent are re-runs. But when we make poetry, when we do philosophy, we engage with beautiful things in a much more active way, in a way that allows us to appreciate them more.

We learn new ways to look at it, to admire it. When you read a poem and are reminded of something beautiful, it is as if you’re experiencing that beauty for the first time.

The problem arises, rather, when we misunderstand our urge to copy. When, rather than create, decipher, or understand the beautiful, we attempt to literally copy it. We snap a photo with our phone and forget about it.

So perhaps beauty doesn’t aspire to its own destruction after all. It is we who destroy it, rather, when we misunderstand its edict: when we satisfy an urge to copy-create by engaging in plain old copying. But beauty is not so callous as to have doomed us to this. We have an alternative: we can philosophize, poeticize, draw, or even admire the beautiful. And if we do, and if we are thoughtful about it, then it will stay by our side.