What Good are Aesthetics?

or, Letter to a Young Artist

Aesthetic experience, through making things or experiencing things, is just good. We should engage such activity without fear of its “usefulness.”

Through the aesthetic, we come to know the world in a way that is more than translation, or reducing it to some essence. We come to know the world in a way that is reciprocal. As we let the world shape our perception, perhaps shaping a medium as part of a process, we are changed. We become part of the world in a way that doesn’t merely behold it at a distance; the world gets all over us.

Through aesthetic experience, we stand to become porous to things and to other people, not in a way that is undifferentiated, reducing everything to one thing, but in a way that multiplies difference.

As in Dürer’s watercolor of a “large turf,” the more you try and paint one blade of grass, the more every blade of grass becomes a universe unto itself. For some, such discovered fragmentation is a revelation; for others, the integration of such pieces within a whole is the big news.

Understanding and noticing those differences — between things and between relations to those things — is good. It’s a slow process, and as such it’s often a fight. The world is full of other, lesser purposes to which you might lend your attention, your senses and body, many of which deaden the senses, and hurt the cause of freedom.

(Freedom and aesthetics are more intertwined than we might think, though usually in unexpected ways.)

This struggle, of learning to notice differences, of allowing people and things to be worlds unto themselves, is one of the soundest paths to getting oneself properly oriented in this world. And by that, I mean oriented to the universe, and not just to ourselves.

The universe contains, as does wood or fabric, a grain, a direction. And it is a grain of plenitude, of excess, of there being more than the sum of the parts.

What good is aesthetic experience? It orients us to that bounteous reality of the universe, helps us live that excess, and our limits within it, every day. I love it.

Which is to say, aesthetic experience makes me a better person, a person who can better love, who can better listen, who can be more open to receiving challenges to my ways of thinking, of knowing.

And after all that, I still say: Aesthetic experience isn’t good because it makes us better. It makes us better because it is good.