Why are we so attracted to beauty? When one sees a work of art or a film of great beauty, one has the sensation, even if one cannot explain it, of witnessing a transfigured world, a redeemed world. There is something that catches us. However, nowadays we are suspicious of beauty, we think it has been overcome.
Years ago I was teaching film criticism at a university in Madrid, and explaining the aesthetic foundations of film analysis I talked about beauty and automatically several students replied saying that art had nothing to do with beauty. I was perplexed. In the classical training I have acquired, beauty, truth and goodness go hand in hand, they are properties of the real. Why didn't some of my students think so?
Beauty is the face of truth and goodness
Why do we choose the ugly and vulgar as authentic? Why does the consumption of pornography abound, which strips the human body of its beauty, meaning and soul? The book The adventure of beauty aims to answer these questions. Alzola says that beauty makes us more human by elevating us above ourselves. And works of art are the expression of something that transcends us. Beauty is not so much fullness as promise and, to this extent, it is synonymous with hope.
For all these reasons, beauty is by no means synonymous with naivety. Great works of art and even good films that show pain and suffering, but which are open to mystery, also leave us with the feeling of being before a promise: because in everyday life we have the impression that suffering and death have the last word, but authentic beauty speaks to us of a reality that will be transfigured, saved. That is why it has been said that beauty will save the world, that beauty which is hidden in the most beautiful of men, Jesus Christ, in his passion full of suffering and before whom our gaze turns away.
Pablo Alzola, professor of Aesthetics and Theory of the Arts at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, encourages us in this essay to go through the history of thought from classical antiquity to the postmodern era, and to understand how beauty has gone from being a promise of fulfillment to become a strategy suspected of covering up dark manipulations or spurious interests.
Cinema, philosophy and aesthetics
Alzola invites us to begin this adventure by looking at the unbounded, mysterious aspect that beauty reflects: like that unforgettable sequence at the start of Desert Centaurswhen the door of a Texas house opens and the characters step out onto the porch to look out over the vast desert, where an enigmatic John Wayne appears on horseback. All this western speaks of search (The Searchers is its original title) and rescue. In the same way, our subjective gaze has to be open to the whole of reality, that unfathomable reality that beauty reflects.
Alzola gives an essential importance to cinema in this essay, and it is logical that this is so: cinema is the seventh art, although it took a long time for intellectuals to give it this recognition. Cinema is not only a useful anecdote to complement an idea or simply an example to embellish our thoughts, but it is philosophy in itself and therefore beauty in itself. Film art reflects that mystery of reality that amazes us so much.
That's why they parade through The adventure of beauty authors such as Plato, Homer, Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, Shakespeare, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Rilke, Waugh, Tolkien or Heidegger. Films such as On the way home, Apocalypse now, Lullaby, Amadeus, The tree of life, Babette's Feast, Vertigo, Quince sun, Better than that o 2001: A Space Odyssey. With all of them we dialogue and discuss, creating a peculiar symposium of philosophy, cinema and literature.
Chapters of an adventure
In this journey to rescue beauty, the author has structured the chapters of his essay chronologically, covering the history of Western philosophy from classical Greece to the present day, all encompassed with key words that synthesize the essence of each period:
-Unity" for Greek philosophy: unity of beauty with the good and with the divine origin of everything, which requires purifying the gaze and transcending sensible appearances in order to contemplate full beauty, the source of happiness. This purification or catharsis reminds us that happiness is possible, despite the vagaries of life, if the subject has the virtues that perfect knowledge and will.
-Relationship" for medieval philosophy, for Christian philosophy holds that we can see beauty as a relationship between creatures and their Creator, who is a personal being. And the act of being received in the divine creation from nothing, together with the form of each thing, makes beauty something concrete and not vaporous.
-Experience" for modern philosophy. Modernity does not admit a confident relationship with the world. Beauty ceases to be a quality of the real, because beauty is not in things but in the feeling they generate in us. The objective criteria for evaluating beauty are lost, creating a vicious circle in which beauty is where a reliable critic says it is, and the reliable critic is the one who says where beauty is. And also the unity of aesthetics and ethics begins to dislocate, and some, like Nietzsche for example, think that beauty is a mask that covers up the terrifying truth of existence, its depths of suffering and despair. The work of art becomes a question mark, Alzola concludes.
-Work" for contemporary philosophy. Some, like Heidegger, admit that art opens us to the truth of things and of the world. Cinema reflects this very well. Beauty would be another way of calling the truth that happens as unveiling. At the same time, this work of art has lost mystery and authenticity: in the age of the selfie, it has lost its authenticity. and works of art accessed exclusively by cell phones, artistic creation loses its unique, perhaps sacred character. The old art awakens attitudes of contemplation and recollection, says Walter Benjamin. The new art seeks to distract us, to provoke us, to shock us, it is art as a shock or projectile. This phenomenon can be seen in the proliferation of violence and ugliness in certain types of cinema from the late 1960s onwards.
Beauty and transcendence
Postmodernity has disfigured the face of truth and goodness, defaming beauty and creating a disenchanted world, full of helplessness and precariousness. But beauty resists all conspiracies, for it makes us more human by raising us above ourselves. And in this way it prepares the advent of something, of Someone, concludes Alzola.
The adventure of beauty. Philosophers, scenes and aesthetic ideas.
