Philosophy

The Power of Beauty. The Beauty of Justice

We live in a world replete with inequality, social injustice, and conflict. But these states of being are not intractable metaphysical truths. They are human generated problems, and therefore they are open to human created solutions.

By placing excess value on material accumulation and self-interest, we lose a deeper sense of purpose. We inhibit our ability to achieve profound happiness. By endlessly striving for material objects of desire, we become detached from ourselves and others and lapse into a state of anomie. In pursuing lifestyles of conspicuous consumption we create a hostile, unhappy, and overly competitive society that makes us complicit in social structures that serve to perpetuate conflict, degradation of natural resources, and social inequality.

Despite the evident injustice that exists in the world, we reject the Hobbesian account of human nature that accepts the inevitability of competitive violence and eternal conflict. Humans have an equal capacity to create as they do to destroy, to love as to hate, and to find meaning in sharing the beauty in this world. To refocus our lives toward shared creativity and the collective good we advocate a transformation of social values within our contemporary capitalist framework. Key to this value transformation is a society that consciously promotes a culture of beauty and justice.

Beauty in the Platonic sense of the term is intimately connected with goodness and truth, and therefore becomes a powerful source of happiness. As Schopenhauer suggested, by appreciating and creating beauty in the world we relieve ourselves of the anxiety of striving for that which we can never fully reach. All people have the capacity to find beauty, and in doing so, generate greater happiness and meaning in their lives. Beauty can be perceived, produced and circulated in virtually every aspect of nature and society: a sculpture, a poem, a symphony, a landscape, cultural traditions, and social acts of compassion. In its broadest sense, beauty allows for individual expression, self-realization and a diversity of perspectives. In our definition, however, the plurality and subjectivity of beauty is not without limits. Any object, concept, or social product deemed as "beautiful" by any person or culture cannot, by definition, cause harm to any individual or other members of society. In this respect, morality and the collective good are integral to our definition of beauty. Our conception of beauty reaches beyond conventional senses of the term as the individual cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility. Instead, we define beauty as both a personal relationship between object and observer, and as a collective, inter-subjective experience. In the colloquial terms articulated by our philosophy advisor, Thomas Pogge, "beauty is a symbol you can't take too narrowly. It's something like friendship, nothing physical to look at. It's a beautiful thing to go with a a friend on a long walk and just have a good conversation about life. If everyone had something fulfilling them they wouldn't be so gung-ho about grabbing things from people who need them so much more."

By making beauty in this ample sense a priority in our society and sharing in its creation, we move from purely individual concerns to deeper meaning and an appreciation of the collective good. We draw the connection between beauty and justice because the process of perceiving, producing, and sharing beauty renders us sensitive to the world and those around us. Moreover this process is all the more valuable when it is shared with others. By advocating this socially responsible value system we not only increase human happiness through the creation and appreciation of beauty in culture, the arts, nature, and social interaction, we create social and political structures that are reflective of social values that are inherently more just.