Beauty's Guidance

One of my most popular posts, “The Sense of Beauty”, https://seeingmeaning.blogspot.com/search?q=the+sense+of+beauty ties together ideas that emphasize the guidance that our attunement to beauty can provide. Not the marketed beauty of glamorized physical appearance, but the inner response to what goes together, what’s in harmony, the sense of things in place. Philosopher Susanne Langer sees it as a sense in its own right, like smell and taste which don’t wait for cognition to decide if something is bad or good for us. What we see has within it a discernment of what matches, what is wrong or out of place in a scene, a precognitive judgment led by an instinct for beauty. In a time when we’ve been bombarded with so much behavior that’s been ugly, the importance of beauty needs revaluing. I recently read that left hemisphere thinking, which is what most education is directed toward, is narrow and utilitarian and not responsive to values. This is where the sense of beauty and right hemisphere assessments can balance the distortions that come with limited focus by seeing the whole as one. Alan Watts talked about the need for both spotlight and floodlight consciousness. The spotlight is great for seeing more of one thing but we need a floodlight to see the context, how it works with the rest of the scene. Focusing on one area is an act of separation. The floodlight may be dimmer, leaves out the details, but shows the whole so the spotlight can zoom in on what’s needs attention. Looking at art is an opportunity to refine the floodlight consciousness. The experience of art always starts as a whole. It refines our awareness of the feel of experience all at once. This leads to better understanding and attention to the intuitive feel in other situations, what’s right, or wrong, or off about it. Looking at art is training the sense of the whole and the values shown by harmony, graceful form, attention to detail, appreciation of virtuosity in all things. We all have an inborn ability to set the picture right when something looks off. We when respond to an image it connects to our own inner world. We’ve witnessed more delusion than we could have imagined and see how important self- knowledge can be. Looking at art is a powerful tool for learning about oneself. The pleasure that comes with beauty is a signal of the reward system in action, encouraging what is good for us and fortifying our capacities. With so much visual imagery in our technological world, refining the visual sensibility will develop a long-neglected capability necessary to navigating the future with awareness of the interlocked whole.