Umbrella

One thing alone makes monotony bearable

The original can be found here.

The First Condition for Dignified Work

by Simone Weil

There is in the work of human hands and, in general, in the skilled performance of a task, which is work properly understood, an irreducible element of servitude that even a perfectly just society cannot remove. This is because it is governed by necessity, not by finality. It is carried out because of a need, not in view of some good, “because one needs to earn one’s living,” as those who pass their days working say. One expends an effort at the end of which, as far as one can see, one will not have anything different from what one has now. Without this effort one would lose what one has.

But in human nature, there is no other source of energy for effort but desire. And it is not human nature to desire what one has. Desire is an orientation, the beginning of a movement towards something. The movement is towards a point where one is not. If the movement that has scarcely begun is fastened on the point of departure, one turns like a squirrel in a cage, like a condemned man in a cell. Turning around always produces discouragement quickly.

Discouragement, lassitude, disgust, is the great temptation of those who work, especially if they do so in inhuman conditions but even if they do not. At times, this temptation bites into the best of them, even more than the others.

To exist is not an end for a human being; it is only the ground on which all goods, true or false, stand. Goods are added to existence. When they disappear, when existence is no longer supplemented with any good, when it is naked, it no longer has any connection with the good. It is even an evil, which it is at the very moment when existence takes the place of all absent goods; then it becomes in itself the unique good, the only object of desire. The desire of the soul finds itself attached to a naked evil without any veil. The soul is then in a state of horror.

This horror is that of the moment when an imminent violence is going to inflict death. In the past, this moment of horror lasted a lifetime for the one who, unarmed under the sword of the winner of the fight, was spared. In exchange for the life that was left him, he had to exhaust his energy in efforts as a slave, all day long, every day, without anything to hope for except not being killed or whipped. He was no longer able to pursue any good but that of existing. The ancients used to say that on the day that one was made a slave one lost half one’s soul.

But every condition in which one finds oneself necessarily in the same situation on the last day of a period of a month, of a year or of twenty years of effort as on the first day, has a resemblance to slavery. The resemblance is constituted by the impossibility of desiring anything other than what one has, of orienting one’s effort towards the acquisition of a good. One makes an effort only to live.

The unit of time is thus the day. In this space, one turns round in circles. One moves back and forth between work and rest like a ball that is bounced from one wall to another. One works only because one needs to eat. But one eats in order to continue working. And again one works in order to eat.

Everything is an intermediary in this existence. Everything is a means. Finality is not grasped anywhere. The article made is a means; it will be sold. Who can put his being into it? The material, the tool, the body of the worker, his soul itself are means for fabrication. Necessity is everywhere, the good is nowhere.

It is not necessary to search far for the causes of the demoralization of the people. The cause is there; it is permanent; it is essential to the condition of work. It is necessary to look for the causes that in former times have prevented this demoralization from being produced.

A great moral inertia, a great physical force that makes effort almost unconscious, allows this emptiness to be supported. Otherwise, compensations are necessary. Ambition for another social condition for oneself or for one’s children is one. Easy and violent pleasure is another that is of the same nature; it is the dream that takes the place of ambition. Sunday is the day on which one wants to forget that it is necessary to work. For that one must pay. One must be dressed as if one did not work. Satisfactions for one’s vanity and illusions of power that license procures very easily are required. Debauchery has exactly the same function as a drug; and the use of drugs is always a temptation for those who suffer. Finally, revolution is another compensation of the same nature. It is ambition translated into the collective, the crazy ambition of the ascent of all workers out of the workers’ condition.

For most people, the revolutionary sentiment is in the first place a revolt against injustice, but it becomes quickly among many, as it has become historically, a worker imperialism entirely analogous to national imperialism. It has for its object entirely unlimited domination of a certain collectivity over all of humanity and over every aspect of human life. The absurd thing is that, in this dream, the domination would be in the hands of those who carry it out, and as a consequence cannot control it.

Insofar as it is a revolt against social injustice, the revolutionary idea is good and healthy. Insofar as it is a revolt against the essential evil of the workers’ condition, it is a lie, because no revolution will wipe out this evil. But this lie has the greatest hold over people because this essential evil is resented more vigorously, more deeply, more sadly than injustice itself. Usually, moreover, they are confused. The name “opium of the people,” which Marx applied to religion, belongs to religion when it betrays itself, but it is essentially applicable to revolution. The hope of revolution is always a drug.

Revolution satisfies at the same time this need for adventure, as being the thing the most opposed to necessity and that is another reaction against the same evil. The taste for novels and for police films and the tendency towards criminality that is seen among adolescents corresponds also to this need.

The bourgeoisie have been very naive in believing that a good recipe consisted in transferring to the people the end that governs their own life, that is to say, the acquisition of money. They have reached the farthest limit possible by piecework and the extension of exchange between the cities and the countryside. But they have done nothing but push dissatisfaction to a dangerous degree of exasperation. The cause of this is simple. Money, once it becomes the goal of desire and efforts, cannot tolerate in its domain internal conditions in which it is impossible to be enriched. A little industrialist, a little business man can become rich and become a big industrialist or a big business man. A teacher, a writer, a minister are rich or poor in any circumstance. But a worker who becomes very rich ceases being a worker, and it is almost always the same for a peasant. A worker cannot be bitten by the desire for money without desiring to leave, alone or with his comrades, the workers’ condition.

The universe where the workers live has no finality. It is impossible for ends to enter there, except for brief periods that correspond to exceptional situations. The rapid fitting out of new countries, such as America or Russia, produces change upon change, at a rhythm that is so swift that it proposes to all, almost from day to day, new things to expect, to desire, to hope for; this feverish construction has been the great instrument of seduction for communist Russia, due to a coincidence, because it depends on the economic state of the country and not on a revolution or on Marxist doctrine. When metaphysical principles are elaborated, according to these exceptional circumstances that are passing and brief, as the Americans and Russians have done, these metaphysical principles are lies.

The family has as its end the raising of children. But unless one hopes for another condition for them—and in the nature of things such social movement is necessarily exceptional—the sight of children condemned to the same existence does not prevent one from feeling sorrow at the emptiness and heaviness of this existence.

This heavy emptiness causes a lot of suffering. It can be felt even by many of those whose culture is nonexistent and whose intelligence is weak. Those who, because of their state in life, do not know what it is, cannot judge fairly the actions of those who put up with it all their lives. It does not cause death, but it is perhaps as painful as hunger. Perhaps more so. Perhaps it would be literally true to say that bread is less necessary than the remedy for this pain.

There is no choice of remedies. There is only one. One thing alone makes the monotony bearable, that is a light from eternity; that is beauty.

There is only one case where human nature allows the desire of the soul to be carried not towards that which might be or which will be, but towards what exists now. This case is beauty. Everything that is beautiful is an object of desire, but one does not desire that it be different, one does not desire to change anything, one desires the very thing that exists. One looks with desire at the starry sky on a clear night and what one desires is exactly the sight that one has.

Since people are forced to place all their desire on what they already possess, beauty is made for them and they are made for beauty. Poetry is a luxury for the other social classes, but the common people need poetry like they need bread. And not only the poetry enclosed in words; by itself that cannot be of any use. They require that the daily substance of their lives be poetry itself.

Such poetry can only have one source. This source is God. This poetry can only be religion. By no trick, by no process, no reform, no upheaval, can finality enter into the universe where workers are placed by their very condition. But this universe can be completely linked to the only end that is true. It can be hooked onto God. The workers’ condition is one where hunger for finality that constitutes the very being of every man cannot be satisfied except by God.

That is where their privilege lies. They are the only ones who can possess it. In every other condition, without exception, some particular ends are related to the activity. When it is a question of the salvation of one soul or many, there is no particular end that cannot make a screen and hide God. By detachment it is necessary to pierce through the screen. For the workers there is no screen. Nothing separates them from God. They only have to lift their heads.

The difficult thing for them is to lift their heads. Unlike other people, they have nothing beyond what is essential, nothing they must get rid of with effort. There is something that they lack. They are in need of intermediaries. When one has advised them to think about God and to make an offering to him of their troubles and their sufferings, one has still done nothing for them.

People go into churches expressly to pray; nevertheless, we know that they are unable to pray unless their attention is grasped by intermediaries that can keep them oriented towards God. The very architecture of the church, the images that it contains, the words of the liturgy and the prayers, the ritual gestures of the priest are these intermediaries. By paying attention to them, people are oriented towards God. How much greater then is the need for such intermediaries in the place of work, where one goes only to make a living. There everything binds one’s thought to the earth.

But religious images cannot be placed there nor can it be suggested that the workers look at them. Neither can one propose that they recite prayers while working. The only objects of sense to which they can give their attention are matter, the instruments, and the gestures of their work. If these objects themselves are not transformed into mirrors of the light, it is impossible that during work their attention will be oriented towards the source of all light. There is no necessity more pressing than this transformation.

It is only possible if a reflecting property is found in matter as it is offered to the work of human beings. For it is not a question of fabricating fictions or arbitrary symbols. Fiction, imagination, dreams have nothing to do with what concerns the truth. But, fortunately for us, there is a reflecting property in matter. It is a mirror tarnished, clouded by our breath. It is only necessary to clean the mirror and to read the symbols that are written in matter from all eternity.

The Gospels contain some of them. In one’s own room, in envisioning a new and truthful birth, one must stop to think of the need for a moral death, and to read or repeat to oneself the words about a seed only bearing fruit by first dying. But he who is busy sowing seed can, if he wants, turn his attention to this truth without the aid of any word through his own gestures and the sight of the grain that is being buried in the ground. If he does not reason about it, if he just looks at it, the attention that he pays to the accomplishment of his task is not impeded but brought to the highest degree of intensity. Religious attention is not called the fullness of attention for nothing. Fullness of attention is nothing else but prayer.

It is the same for the separation of the soul and Christ that dries up the soul, just as the branch dries up when it is cut from the vine. The cutting of the vines takes days and days on large estates. But also there is a truth there that can be examined for days and days without being exhausted.

It would be easy to discover written from all eternity in the nature of things a lot of other symbols capable of transfiguring not only work in general but each task in its uniqueness. Christ is the brass serpent that one only has to gaze upon in order to escape death. But it is necessary to be able to look at it in a manner completely uninterrupted. For that reason it is necessary that the things that the needs and the obligations of life constrain us to watch reflect what they prevent us from watching directly. It would be very surprising if a church constructed by the hands of man should be full of symbols while the universe would not be infinitely full of them. They must be read.

The image of the cross compared to a balance in the Good Friday hymn could be an inexhaustible inspiration for those who carry loads or handle levers and are tired in the evening from the weight of things. In a balance, a considerable weight near the point of application can be lifted by a very light weight placed at a great distance. The body of Christ was a very light weight, but, because of the distance between the earth and the sky, it makes for a counterweight to the universe. In a manner infinitely different, but analogous enough to serve as an image, whoever is working, or lifting loads, or handling levers, should also make of his weak body a counterweight to the universe. It is too heavy, and often the universe makes the body and the soul bend with heaviness. But he who clings to the heavens will easily make a counterweight. Once a person has perceived this truth, he cannot be distracted by fatigue, boredom, or disgust. He can only be brought back to it.

The sun and the sap in the plants speak continually in the fields of what is the greatest thing in the world. We do not live by anything else but solar energy. We eat it, and it keeps us on our feet, it makes our muscles move, it operates bodily in all our acts. It is, perhaps under diverse forms, the only thing in the universe that constitutes a force opposed to gravity; it is what rises into the trees, what lifts loads through our arms, what drives our motors. It comes from an inaccessible source that we cannot approach even by one step. It comes down on us continually. But although it bathes us perpetually, we cannot capture it. Only the vegetable element of chlorophyll can capture it for us and make food out of it. It is only necessary that the earth be suitably managed by our efforts; then, through chlorophyll, solar energy becomes something solid and enters into us as bread, as wine, as oil, as fruits. The entire work of the peasant consists in caring for and serving this biological power that is a perfect image of Christ.

The laws of mechanics that derive from geometry and that apply to our machines contain supernatural truths. The oscillation of alternating motion is the image of our earthly condition. Everything that belongs to creatures is limited, except the desire in us that is the mark of our origin; and our covetousness that makes us seek the unlimited down here is the unique source of error and crime. The goods that things contain are finite, and so are the evils, and in general, a cause produces only a limited effect up to a certain point, beyond which, if it continues to act, the effect is reversed. It is God who imposes a limit on everything, and it is God by whom the sea is fettered. In God there is only one eternal act that, without change, is fastened on itself and has no other object but itself. In creatures there are only movements directed towards the outside, but which are forced to move back and forth by limit; this back-and-forth movement is a degraded reflection of the orientation towards oneself that is exclusively divine. This divine relationship has as an image in our machines, the relationship of circular movement and alternative movement. The circle is also the place of proportional means; in order to find in a perfectly rigorous manner the mean proportional between unity and a number that is not squared, there is no other method but to trace a circle. The numbers for which there exists no mediation that binds them naturally to unity are images of our misery; and the circle that comes from outside in a transcendent manner in relation to the sphere of numbers, to bring mediation, is the image of the unique remedy for this misery. These truths and many others are written in the simple sight of a pulley that establishes a back-and-forth movement. They can be read by someone with very elementary geometrical knowledge; the rhythm of work that corresponds with this oscillation makes them sensible to the body; a human life is a very short period to contemplate them.

Many other symbols could be found, some of them more intimately united to the very behavior of the one who is working. Sometimes it would be enough for the worker to extend to everything without exception his attitude with regard to work in order to possess the fullness of virtue. There are also some symbols to be found for those who have tasks to perform other than physical work. They can be found for the accountant in the elementary operations of arithmetic, for the cashiers in banking institutions, and so on. The reservoir is inexhaustible.

Beginning from there, one could do a great deal. One could transmit to adolescents these great images, allied to the notions of elementary science and general culture, in the circle of studies; or propose them as themes for their festivals, for their theatrical endeavors; or establish around them new festivals. One could see to it by these means that the men and women of the common people live bathed in an atmosphere of supernatural poetry, as in the Middle Ages, or even more than in the Middle Ages, for why should one limit oneself in one’s ambition for the good?

In this way the feeling of intellectual inferiority that is so frequent and at times so sad for workers would be avoided, and also the arrogant self-confidence that replaces it after a superficial contact with the life of the mind. The intellectuals, for their part, would in this way be able to avoid at the same time the unjust disdain and the type of deference no less unjust that the crowd has made fashionable in our farm circles for some years now. Both would meet, without any inequality, at the highest point, that of the fullness of attention that is the fullness of prayer—at least those who would be able. The others would at least know that this point exists and would represent to themselves the diversity of ascending paths, which, while producing a separation at inferior levels, as does the thickness of a mountain, does not prevent equality.

School exercises have no other serious purpose than the formation of attention. Attention is the only faculty of the soul that grants access to God. School exercises use an inferior, discursive form of attention, the one that reasons; but, drawn on by a suitable method, it can prepare for the appearance in the soul of another type of attention, that which is the highest, intuitive attention. Intuitive attention in its purity is the unique source of perfectly beautiful art, of scientific discoveries that are truly luminous and new, of philosophy that truly moves towards wisdom, of love of the neighbor that is truly helpful; and when turned directly towards God, it constitutes true prayer.

In the same way as a symbol would allow one to dig and to mow while thinking about God, so a method that transforms school exercises in preparation for this superior type of attention would by itself permit an adolescent to think about God while he applied himself to a geometry problem or a Latin translation. Failing which, intellectual work, under a mask of liberty, is also for him a servile work.

Those who have some spare time need to exercise to the limit of their capacity the faculties of discursive intelligence in order to achieve intuitive attention; otherwise they become a hindrance. Especially for those who are forced by their social function to bring these faculties into play, there is without doubt no other way. But the hindrance is weak and the exercise can be reduced very much for those among whom the fatigue of a long workday almost entirely paralyses the faculties. For them, the same work that produces this paralysis, provided that it is transformed into poetry, is the way that leads to intuitive attention.

In our society, the difference in instruction more than the difference in wealth produces the illusion of social inequality. Marx, who is almost always at his strongest when he simply describes the evil, has legitimately branded as a degradation the separation of manual and intellectual work. But he did not realize that in every sphere, opposites have their unity in a transcendent plane in relation to each other. The point of unity of intellectual work and manual labor is contemplation, which is not work. In no society can the person who manages a machine exercise the same type of attention as the one who resolves a problem. But both can equally, if they desire it and if they have a method, promote the appearance and the development of another attention situated beyond all social obligation, and which constitutes a direct link with God, if each exercises the type of attention that constitutes his proper lot in society.

If students, young peasants, young workers represented to themselves in an entirely precise manner, as precise as the wheels of a mechanism clearly understood, the different social functions—insofar as they constituted equally efficacious preparation for the appearance in the soul of one identical transcendent faculty, which alone has value—equality would become a concrete thing. It would be then at the same time a principle of justice and of order.

The completely precise representation of the supernatural destiny of each social function alone gives a norm for our will to reform things. It alone permits one to define injustice. Otherwise, it is inevitable that one is deceived either by regarding as injustices some forms of suffering that are written in the nature of things, or by attributing to the human condition some forms of suffering that are the result of our crime, and fall on those who do not deserve them.

A certain subordination and a certain uniformity are forms of suffering included in the very essence of work and inseparable from the supernatural vocation that corresponds to it. They do not degrade a person. Everything that is added to them is unjust and does degrade. Everything that prevents poetry from crystallizing around these sufferings is a crime. For it is not enough to rediscover the lost source of such poetry; it is also necessary that the very circumstances of work permit it to exist. If they are evil, they kill it.

Everything that is indissolubly linked to the desire for, or fear of, change, or to the orientation of thought towards the future, should be excluded from any essentially changeless existence that simply needs to be accepted. In the first place, physical suffering, except for that which is made clearly inevitable by the necessity of work, for it is impossible to suffer without hoping for relief. Privations would be more in place in any other social condition than in this. Food, lodging, rest, and relaxation should be such that a workday taken by itself may normally be free of physical suffering. On the other hand, superabundance has no place in this life; for the desire for what is superfluous is itself unlimited and implies a change in condition. All advertising, all propaganda that is so varied in its forms, that arouses the desire for the superfluous in the countryside and among the workers, ought to be regarded as a crime. An individual can always leave the workers’ or the peasants’ condition, either for basic lack of professional aptitude or because of the possession of different capabilities. But for those who are there, the only change that ought to be possible should be that of one’s well-being as it is strictly related to the general well-being; there should not be any reason to fear falling below or to hope reaching beyond this level. Security should be greater in this social condition than in any other. The chance events brought about by supply and demand should not be masters.

Human arbitrariness drives the soul to fear and hope, unless it can defend itself against it. It must be excluded, therefore, from work as much as possible. Authority should only be present when it cannot be absent. Thus, the small farm property is better than the large. It follows that wherever the small property is possible, the large is evil. In the same way, the production of machine-finished pieces in a small workshop is better than making them under the orders of a foreman. Job praises the death of whatever will allow the slave to no longer hear his master. Every time the voice that commands makes itself heard if a practical arrangement could substitute silence—there is evil.

But the worst outrage, the one that perhaps deserves to be likened to the crime against the Spirit, which cannot be forgiven, if it were not committed by those unconscious of what they were doing, is the crime against the attention of the workers. It kills the faculty in the soul that is the very root of every supernatural vocation. The low quality of attention demanded by Taylorized work is not compatible with any other because it empties the soul of everything unconcerned with speed. This type of work cannot be transformed; it must be suppressed.

All the problems of technology and economy should be formulated functionally by conceiving of the best possible condition for the worker. Such a conception entails in the first place this standard: the entire society should be constituted in such a way that work does not drag down those who perform it.

It is not enough to want to spare them these forms of suffering; it would be necessary to want joy for them, not pleasures that are paid for, but joy that is free and that does not cast a slur on the spirit of poverty. The supernatural poetry, which ought to bathe their entire lives, ought also to be concentrated in a pure state, from time to time, in outstanding festivals. Festivals are as indispensable for this existence as the kilometer markers are to the comfort of the hiker. Free and demanding but difficult trips like the Tour de France in other times should satisfy their hunger to see and to learn when they are young. Everything should be organized so that they lack nothing essential. The best among them should be able to possess in their life itself the fullness that the artisans seek indirectly through their art. If the vocation of the human being is to achieve pure joy through suffering, they are better placed than others to accomplish this in the most real way.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This excerpt is adapted from Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings (University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), Chapter 7, “The First Condition for the Work of a Free Person.” Reprinted by permission of, and in collaboration with, the University of Notre Dame Press.

What beauty can teach us

Originally published here. 

Beauty Can Teach Us the Art of Living Well

FEBRUARY 1, 2021
BY BRIAN A. SMITH

Human beings have a natural appreciation for beauty, but we strain to justify its existence in utilitarian or pragmatic terms. By offering an attractive vision, beauty makes the truths to which it relates appealing. It helps convince us that the good may not just be good for human life in the same way a healthy diet and exercise are, but also a source of joy.

Defenders of the liberal arts point to truth, goodness, and beauty as the noblest ends that make for a worthy life. There may have been times these were held in high cultural regard. Our era is not one of them.

Our era’s strongest challenge to truth comes not from relativism, but from quasi-religious faith in utilitarian pragmatism or almost theological pursuits in identity politics. Both utility and identity fragment our moral universe, but they do so on the basis of ironclad beliefs concerning the nature of reality. As a consequence, we retain all too little in the way of shared language that would help us navigate different competing views.

Walker Percy suggested that many words necessary for grappling with the deepest questions of meaning in life—such as sin, redemption, and love—eventually become worn out. How do we talk about these concepts if the words themselves cannot gain purchase in our neighbors’ minds? For the utilitarians, these are perhaps non-issues. Truth is what generates progress or cash value, and we ought to discard the rest. So, much of what passes for transformative truth these days flows from the Churches of the Woke in calls to redeem ourselves from social injustices, debts that can never quite be repaid. Neither of these, however, accepts the idea that there are distinctive moral truths around which human life ought to be ordered.

The idea of the good is intimately related to truth but deeply enmeshed with questions of character. But today a belief even in the possibility that there are things we can identify as good falls prey to cynicism. Culture reflects this. Across the dizzying variety of digital entertainment media, one constant holds: we live in the era of the “complex” protagonist, characters whose stories lean toward a kind of benevolent moral ambiguity at best. At worst, they advance the notion that only evil is interesting, while the good is either dull and boring or, worse, a mask for imposing our will on others.

But it is no exaggeration to claim that in our culture, beauty suffers most of all. The loss of belief in truth and goodness leads to a sense that nothing is intrinsically worth our admiration or respect. Even those who still believe in truth and goodness may hold that beauty is entirely a matter of perspective. Defenders of the great books tend not to emphasize it much, struggling to articulate how beauty might relate to the rest of this endangered trio. They fail to recognize the ways that beauty might draw us into recognizing the truth about our existence, and from there to a realization of what moral goods might let us live well.

Beginning with Beauty

Intriguingly, and perhaps counter-intuitively, in his book Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for our Common Life, Makoto Fujimura asserts that the path to restoring our belief in truth and goodness may depend on renewing our appreciation for beauty. He defines beauty as

the quality connected with those things that are in themselves appealing and desirable. Beautiful things are a delight to the senses, a pleasure to the mind, and a refreshment for the spirit. Beauty invites us in, capturing our attention and making us want to linger. Beautiful things are worth our scrutiny, rewarding to contemplate, deserving of pursuit. They inspire—or even demand—a response, whether sharing them in community or acting to extend their beauty into other spheres.

Fujimura aims at cultivating an outlook centered on reknitting our constantly fraying civic and social relationships. He believes that an artist’s mindset provides surprising insights into where we can recognize beauty, truth, and goodness in our lives—and through them, learn anew the art of living well.

In service of this view, Fujimura offers a metaphor for understanding how our everyday disasters might lead us into comprehending beauty. When the average citizen of a wealthy commercial society breaks a bowl, he or she sweeps up the pieces and throws them out. If the piece holds particularly great sentimental value, such a person might break out epoxy and mend it in such a way to look as if the accident had never happened. But who looks at the pieces and sees it as a chance to artistically mend the ceramic—to make the damage itself part of the art? In Japan, this is an art form known as kintsugi, and involves the use of silver, gold, or platinum compounds to bind together what was broken, and to find beauty in its restoration. Fujimura links kintsugi to a theological vision, one focused on redeeming the time God gives us by offering gratuitous beauty to enrich our common life.

While Fujimura clearly hopes to reach artists with this book, people from all walks of life ought to appreciate his vision. He writes for “anyone with a calling to create . . . Especially those with a desire or an artistic gift to reach across boundaries with understanding, reconciliation, and healing.” Fujimura views creativity as an act of stewardship: we cultivate, remake, and revive what has been inherited. This allows us to tell old stories anew and sing songs about the perennial cares of human life.

Beauty Combats Utilitarian Pragmatism

Fujimura helps us see why the culture’s profound resistance to beauty (to say nothing of truth and goodness) is actually a symptom of the American devotion to utilitarian pragmatism. Cost–benefit analysis suffuses all that we do.

Most of us recognize the shortcomings of reductionism at a deep level: we know that we are more than what we produce and that efficiency is not the point of education, religion, art, play, or many other aspects of human culture. Most people are dissatisfied with the reductionist viewpoint, yet not enough of us have or can articulate viable alternatives because reductionism has taken over not only how people define success but also what we value in society.

Utilitarian and pragmatic logic colonize our thinking to such a degree that even conscious efforts to override their influence often fail. We make judgments on the value of work this way all the time. (Consider how often stay-at-home moms are asked what they do, and how they feel pressured to answer, and you might have a sense of what I mean.) But more generally, this kind of evaluation forces us to define our actions down, to reduce them to instrumental terms. Such hollowed-out reasoning ultimately diminishes the value of life itself.

Where natural law philosophers and other opponents of these views make a good intellectual case against this logic, Fujimura proposes a somewhat different antidote. Human beings have a natural appreciation for beauty, but we strain to justify its existence in utilitarian or pragmatic terms. Fujimura argues that by offering an attractive vision, beauty makes the truths to which it relates appealing; it helps convince us that the good may not just be good for human life in the same way a healthy diet and exercise are, but also a source of joy.

Art and related acts of beauty offer a reminder of the really human things. In beauty’s absence, utility reigns. Pragmatism’s winnowing of our concerns to what works denies that we need beauty. Ideology’s tyranny of the present in the name of the future subordinates all human things to itself. Fujimura explains how these forces corrupted the practice of art:

When I began to exhibit in New York City in the mid-1990’s, “beauty” was taboo, not to be spoken of in public. It signified cultural hegemony, imperialist power, the corruption of the past, or the cosmetic sheen of superficial contemporary culture. The art world still resists this word.

Art has become distorted in attempts to avoid service to propaganda. Yet the resulting debasement of art offers nothing to the human heart to defend against ideology. Fujimura’s views on this point recall C.S. Lewis: “We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

Thankfully, because beauty is gratuitous, it naturally points beyond itself to truth and goodness—even when those who engage in acts of beauty disbelieve in them. Ultimately, Fujimura tells us, beauty intimates that there is more to life than what we can see. It directs our attention to God. Fujimura’s own story reflects this: he came to Christian faith in his years of graduate study in Japan as a result of his realization that he had no place in his heart on which to rest his love of beauty, and the beauty of the art he created. Thus began the long path of questioning that brought him to belief.

Tending a Garden, Not Fighting a War

Pressing artists and creatives into ideological service is clearly destructive. Witness the current woke-athon, which drains art of its appeal across our existing cultural borders and destroys the possibility of dialogue across the borders. Yet it is not just artists that need to hear Fujimura’s message and heed the call to rediscover the power of beauty.

Neither culture war nor cultural fortification allows us to engage in acts of restoration or persuasion.

Fujimura asks us all to consider what acts of culture will bear fruit. What will generate deeper community and renewed affection for our neighbors? He does not dispute that men and women of principle must stand for what they believe to be true, but suggests instead that we must remember that culture is not a field where victory is possible. Instead, it is a garden that requires tending.

Neither culture war nor cultural fortification allows us to engage in acts of restoration or persuasion. The culture wars offer nothing but a model of victory or defeat, and walling one’s family and children off from culture grows more difficult with every advance of technology. Fujimura believes that works of gratuitous beauty can bridge these gaps. Unexpected acts of care and love do as well.

Fujimura suggests that Christians in general and artists in particular serve in a particularly important role, which he calls “border-stalking.” Such people live and work at the margins of various groups, allowing them the possibility of negotiating and translating between them in ways that are impossible for the person who lives and works entirely in one sphere or milieu. This is an uncomfortable role, but a vital one: “Life on the borders of a group—and in the space between groups—is prone to dangers literal and figurative, with people both at home and among the ‘other’ likely to misunderstand or mistrust the motivations, piety, and loyalty of the border-stalker.” Their role is vital because artists can work to heal divisions, “overcoming caricatures and injecting diversity, nuance, and even paradox into the nature of the conversation, and then moving on to teach society a language of empathy and reconciliation.”

Fujimura is not overly sanguine about what it will take to rebuild our culture. He recognizes that cultural renewal will require a generational effort, and he makes practical suggestions for how communities, foundations, and churches can support the border-stalkers in their midst over the long term.

Fujimura offers us a way of thinking and speaking about beauty that might help restore civic friendship. In politics, there will always be winners and losers. Yet politics also retains a culture that must be tended to as well. The mores we display in culture spill over into politics, and our politics in turn shapes our varied cultures. If we do not tend the garden and stalk the borders, we risk finding ourselves to be aliens and strangers who are enacting a truce, not fellow citizens on our way home.

About the Author

BRIAN A. SMITH

Brian A. Smith is Managing Editor of Law & Liberty and the author of Walker Percy and the Politics of the Wayfarer.

Beauty on Ice

Beauty on ice.

Take a moment . . .

. . . to listen to this. Beautiful.

The time to be slow

This is the time to be slow,
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter weather passes.

Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.

If you remain generous,
Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,
Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning.

John O’Donohue, Irish poet and philosopher

The beauty of the Holy Spirit

This is absolutely beautiful. And we need beauty right now.

The Final Shore

Wonder and beauty.

Let us be filled with wonder

“We want to be filled with wonder and with praise, as our Lady’s heart was filled with wonder and praise. In the cave at Bethlehem she was filled with wonder. And under the Cross she was filled with wonder. This is the invitation of Advent, that we should not misuse that sense of wonder that God has put into every human heart. Let us never be filled with dark wonder at the things that go wrong and the things that are wrong, but let us be filled with wonder that God can make all things right and that he will, if we allow him. Let us be filled with the greatest wonder that he chose to come in such guise that we could hold him to our hearts, that he became small enough for us to take into our arms. May we be filled with wonder at God’s love, at God’s forgiveness, at God’s unswerving hope in us. Let us never misuse wonder, this faculty that we shall take into eternity.” (Mother Mary Francis)

Fall from above