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We Live For Beauty

We Live For Beauty

Last updated on: August 28, 2015 at 10:52 am by Tom Swiss

We Live For Beauty 2015-08-28T10:52:02-04:00 Tom Swiss

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(This post is meant as a bit of philosophical play, but it talks about what can be a very serious and immediate conundrum for some people at some points in their lives. I hope that the conclusion is clear that suicide is bogus, but just in case let me state it explicitly: suicide is bogus. If you somehow trip across this post during a time of personal crisis, please, get help. Don’t make a permanent and irrevocable choice, one that destroys your future ability to be yourself, on the basis of a temporary feeling. If you need help please reach out and get it. In the U.S. you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), 24 hours a day, seven days a week.)

Why do we live?

We go to work to pay the bills to provide food and shelter to keep the body going. We go to the doctor and submit to their sometimes brutal ministrations to preserve our lives. We give high praise to those who prevent the deaths of others.

Why? Why bother?

“Dive In”. Digital photographic art by the author.

Albert Camus famously wrote that the only significant philosophical question is whether or not to commit suicide. That makes him sound like a real downer, doesn’t it? But he also wrote, in his earlier work:

In a moment, when I throw myself down among the absinthe plants to bring their scent into my body, I shall know, appearances to the contrary, that I am fulfilling a truth which is the sun’s and which will also be my death’s. In a sense, it is indeed my life that I am staking here, a life that tastes of warm stone, that is full of the signs of the sea and the rising song of the crickets. The breeze is cool and the sky blue. I love this life with abandon and wish to speak of it boldly: it makes me proud of my human condition. Yet people have often told me: there’s nothing to be proud of. Yes, there is: this sun, this sea, my heart leaping with youth, the salt taste of my body and this vast landscape in which tenderness and glory merge in blue and yellow.

And more succinctly: “The world is beautiful, and outside there is no salvation.”[Aronson]

If one rejects the fantasy that this thing I call “I’ will somehow survive the inevitable end of this body, if one rejects the idea that some supernatural being will punish or reward some ghostly continuation of me based on whether I live a life pleasing or displeasing to it — and if one realizes that an infinitely prolonged personal existence would be an infinite meaninglessness if personal existence has no justification, what is left? What can we live for?

Beauty is left.

And dead people have no further experiences; while they can no longer experience pain they can also no longer experience beauty. So the answer to Camus’s question is a big no to suicide.

Camus’s later work seems to get away from this idea of beauty and focuses on the notion of “heroic defiance”. But it strikes me that it may actually be a form of beauty as applied to ethics.

This beauty that justifies our continued living is something that appears in many forms and levels. There is the simple immediate sensory pleasure that Camus talks about in the quotation above, the warm rock, the cool breeze.

There is the beauty that we perceive intellectually, the beauty of mathematics and science, the feeling of understanding the Pythagorean theorem or that we are made of exploded stars.

There is the ethical beauty of how we choose to act, how we relate to other human beings and other sentient beings — and how we relate to ourselves, how we fulfill our duties to our own potential highest selves.

There is the beauty of the arts, of the arrangement of raw material of experience in a way which invokes a response in the viewer or listener or reader.

And there is the beauty of the mystical experience, of the direct perception of an ineffable relationship between our immediate subjective experience and the broader world.

This world can be terrible, but it is also beautiful. And the more we practice finding and experiencing that beauty, the more we will find it, the more we will find living to be justified.

Aronson, Ronald, “Albert Camus”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2012/entries/camus/>.

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I will be reading poetry at the Gathering for Everything that’s Left (Jay Houston Marx Memorial Peace Demonstration) on Saturday September 12 in DC.

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