Reflections on "Why Beauty Matters"

And how it helps us make sense when nothing does

It’s about 100 miles from my home in northeast Ohio to the small town on the Ohio River where my parents live and where I spent the lion’s share of my childhood. I drove there and back recently for a visit, a drive that almost coincided with the peak of the change in autumn foliage colors. Rounding every turn of the highway brought a new arrangement of red, orange, yellow, green, and brown; cresting every hill ushered into view a fresh landscape of nature’s fleeting seasonal palette.

Although in a way distracting, the natural beauty alongside Interstate 80 and the smaller highways on my route focused my attention on a few big questions, including:

• What is beauty?

• Is beauty universal or subjective?

• What is the purpose of beauty?

• Does beauty matter?

• Might beauty help us at all as we navigate life’s toughest episodes?

I’m a social scientist, not an artist, a philosopher, or a theologian. My intuition and observations, however, suggest that the answers to my questions about beauty reside in a combination of those fields and perspectives.

Social science can help us understand perceptions, behavior, and human relationships; art can uncover or reveal beauty in its subjects. As for philosophy and theology, they can help us understand what beauty is and, perhaps, what beauty communicates about our existence and place in the world.

My drive also reminded me to revisit a discussion of these topics by the poet Dana Gioia. His self-described “meditation” on why beauty matters describes a number of ideas that I’ve never heard articulated as well anywhere else.

Below the video, I offer an attempted summary of his main points, with some reflections on the idea of how beauty may assist in the making of sense and meaning amid adversity. If you’re more interested in the latter and not my clumsy summary of Gioia’s ideas, scroll down to “How Beauty Helps Us Make Sense.”

What is beauty?

Gioia suggests first that beauty is a matter of great importance, yet modern society and even art itself have neglected it. This absence, according to Gioia, is a problem.

He goes on to shape an idea of what beauty is by stating what it is not: Beauty is not prettiness. Beauty is deeper than superficial appearance, involving something more profound and perfect in its own way. He gives the examples of a sunset on an ocean or a towering forest. These certainly appeal to our senses, but they also signify something bigger: perhaps something about the majesty of nature, or about the interconnectedness of life, or the seemingly small role each of us has in the universe.

A thunderstorm or hawk swooping down on its prey, Gioia suggests, are examples of beauty that aren’t necessarily pretty. Going further, some have argued that even the repugnant—sickness, disease, evil itself—have a certain type of beauty (see Gioia’s analysis of Charles Baudelaire and “The Poetics of Evil” for more).

Beauty according to Gioia is something that affects us, often deeply, and how we experience it matters.

How do we experience beauty?

Gioia lists four stages that characterize our experience of beauty. These are:

1. The arresting of attention.

Beauty grabs us, drawing our mental focus to some object. Despite having lived through the changing of seasons dozens of times, I found it impossible to ignore the colors lining the interstate, and my attempts to not notice the clouds at sunset, brushed with a stroke of pinkish purple above those trees and rolling hills of farmland, were equally hopeless.

2. A thrill of pleasure.

From one perspective, the scenes I described were nothing more than a predictable combination of the effects of changes in temperature and moisture levels on leaf pigmentation. But my reaction was, as Gioia described, unusual and disproportionate. It was a sense beyond pleasure and one of “mysterious joy.”

3. A heightened perception of the shape or meaning of things.

This stage suggests the power of beauty to create or encourage insight or help us make sense. Gioia suggests that beauty can alter how we normally perceive the world, giving us a sense of bigger, universal ideas such as unity and truth. He posits that beauty can create “a vision of redemptive order in a fallen world.”

4. The moment vanishes.

Beauty is fleeting. We can remember it, but the actual experience is gone—and we cannot control that.  

Postmodern versus Classical and Christian Notions of Beauty

With those notions of what beauty is in mind, Gioia then contrasts the postmodern view of beauty with a classical and Christian notion of beauty. The postmodernists, he states, don’t see beauty as something universal or objective. Instead, that view holds that beauty is something we manufacture, it is something shaped by who we are and our cultural influences. It is something different for you than it is for me. From this perspective, beauty can be an instrument of power, reinforcing social structures and hierarchies, with those in control deciding what it constitutes.

But the postmodern idea of beauty, Gioia argues, doesn’t really fit how we experience it. Additionally, we might say that there is something universally or objectively beautiful about some things, for example, the Grand Canyon. When standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, which I did once when I was 4 years old, one witnesses something that is objectively awesome; as Gioia puts it, it “makes us feel—properly—with awe and wonder.”

For Gioia, a postmodern view of beauty dismisses the objective and the universal; it is a unique way to understand reality. A classical and Christian notion of beauty, Gioia argues, instead indicates that we find beauty pleasurable because it reminds us or indicates to us some broader order of things. Instead of roadside autumn colors only being a subjective, personal experience, the beauty of those images and moments stand as an indication of some truth about time, change, life, and death.  

In the classical and Christian view, we do not manufacture beauty; instead, we discover it. And by discovering it, we can partake in a realization about the world we live in: how it works, how it doesn’t, how it all fits together.

How Beauty Helps Us Make Sense

Life’s unexpected trials can shock us to the core. Such experiences can be ones that, in the words of organizational theorist Karl Weick, feel “like vu jàdé--the opposite of déjà vu: I've never been here before, I have no idea where I am, and I have no idea who can help me.” We are left in these times to wonder and piece together meaning about what happened, our role in it, and what the future might hold.

In these moments, we engage in the process of sensemaking. We try not only to figure out what is going on, but what the unfolding events mean—both for us in terms of their consequences and, in some situations, for the world in which we live. This sensemaking reflects who we are: our past experiences, our values, our worldviews, and more. It also comes as a product of interaction with our fellow humans, conversations with them and actions alongside them.

This all may sound like a bunch of theoretical nonsense, but it is nonetheless real and influences how we behave and how we live.

Imagine, for instance, someone receiving a serious medical diagnosis. A common first reaction is shock and disbelief, followed by or in conjunction with the fundamental question of “Why?” or more specifically, “Why me?”

Next may come conversations with medical professionals, family members, and friends about what is going on and the plan moving forward. These conversations likely lead to decisions, including those about treatment options, but perhaps just as importantly, about how to reconcile and cope with one’s unfolding new reality psychologically and emotionally. Those decisions then have consequences of their own, requiring additional sensemaking.

Setting aside the nuances of sensemaking for now and reflecting upon Gioia’s insights, beauty can perhaps serve as a vehicle through which we figure out our own stories. Unexpected adversity can have a particularly disorienting effect. And if one is at least somewhat sympathetic to how Gioia interprets beauty and its utility in our lives, then one can see how beauty might play a role in sensemaking.

Namely, finding beauty around us can help us knit together seemingly random human events and alleviate some of the apathy or ennui that such events may produce. Beauty reminds us that we are part of a bigger structure that does make sense, in a way. It can give us comfort in showing how we are part of a bigger story; we are characters in an ensemble, not the stars of the show.

Furthermore, as Gioia argues, “beauty is not only revelatory; it is also transformative.” By helping us make sense, beauty can influence how we think and act in relation to the world around us.

Some may say that my consideration of beauty as a vehicle for sensemaking is simply about the human tendency to see patterns and trends where they don’t occur, or that there is no bigger story of humanity, that we are all simply isolated, individual animals who live, die, and then are food for worms. But to them I suggest that beauty can help them make sense even of that dour outlook. Beauty, especially the kind that isn’t pretty, can remind us that we are not alone. The world can be a cruel place, and nasty things do happen. But to think you are the first human to suffer is a delusion.  

In social science, studying topics like meaning and sensemaking is difficult for many reasons. We have uncovered many useful insights and gathered many observations, but some of those insights and observations remain opaque. They resist statistical analysis. Part of the reason for that is that sensemaking is what I would consider to be an endeavor involving the entirety of our being, which makes nearly any scientific exploration inherently reductionist. The language of scientific prose, furthermore, tends to suck the humanity right out of the humans we’re trying to explain.  

Art and beauty, in contrast, surpass the limitations of typical language in a way that seems to explain something bigger—and in some ways, perhaps more important. Beauty can reveal truth, and that truth can, as it were, set us free.

I’ll let Gioia have the last word:

The challenge of life is to find personal meaning in a fallen world. To find, in other words, truth, and to live in consonance with it; to seek grace, and through grace, redemption. We must do this not as bodiless spirits but as hairy, heavy, hungry human beings. When society abandons art, when it neglects beauty, it loses its most powerful way to speak to its citizens and communicate its values.

Beauty inspires us to transform ourselves and our world. It gives us a vision of our own possibilities. Art awakens us to our lives. It enlarges and refines our humanity. It calls us to understand the complexities of our own existence. Its pleasure also allows us to feel the truth of insights we might not otherwise willingly embrace.