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FUTURE SYMPHONY INSTITUTE

O che trate a enaissance.

PHILOSOPHY

Beauty and Desecration

People take revenge on beauty because they don’t see that without it there can be
no revenge.
bySir Roger Scruton
FUTURE SYMPHONY INSTITUTE

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a transcription of the plenary address delivered by Sir

Roger Scruton at The Power of Beauty Conference, hosted in October 2014 by the
FRANCISCAN UNIVERSITY OF STEUBENVILLE and the DIETRICH VON
HILDEBRAND LEGACY PROJECT.
It is reprinted here with their gracious permission,
and we encourage you to watch their VIDEO of the address.

JUST TO SAY A FEW GENERAL PHILO SOPHICAL things to begin with

about why beauty matters: We live in a world in which utilitarian values are not
just triumphant but for many people the only values that there are. There seems
to be no sense that things can have a value which is not a form of use. This
means that all of us are engaged all the time in what some philosophers call
instrumental reasoning. Whenever we’re asked to justify something we try to nd
a purpose for it – we justify, for instance, the shape of this room in terms of its
purpose, which is to gather people together to listen to a lecture. If it’s not very
e cient at that, then the room has not actually achieved what it set out to
achieve.

In all our activities we are familiar with this kind of reasoning, but what other kinds of
reasoning are there? We know perfectly well that instrumental reasoning can’t be the only kind
because if something is a means to an end, there has to be an end that it’s a means to. That too
needs a justi cation. So we do reason with each other – rather insecurely but nevertheless we do
reason – about the ends of our activities, what our goals are, and whether we should be pursuing
the goals that we pursue. This is especially true in activities like building – building a room like

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this, or setting out on a career, and so on – in which there is a long-term project involved and an
end point that you can’t very clearly envisage.

When you set out to build something you can’t clearly envisage the end point just from a ground
plan. You need some conception of not just what it will look like but what it will be like to live
with it. Only if you know what it’s like to live with it will you be justi ed in building it. Here is
an example of a simple activity in which aesthetic reasoning is fundamental. One reason why
modern architecture is such a failure is that people don’t do this. They don’t try to envisage what
it will be like to live with the product of their building, only what its capacity is for the number
of people assigned to it, and so on. Reasoning about what it’s like to live with something means
bringing the end of your activity forward into the present so that you sense its being, as it were,
with you in the moment where you are. And that is one of the roles of beauty and of aesthetic
judgment in our lives: to do just that.

In another area, of course, we argue about our ends from a religious point of view. We know that
people have this conception of the meaning of life, as lying in some way beyond life – either in
the transcendental or in the afterlife. And this meaning is sometimes revealed in the present
moment, the moments which people are apt to describe as sacred: the moment of liturgy and
worship, the moment of revelation, of reading a sacred text, and so on. Perhaps being blessed
with that experience is what Saint Paul described as the peace that passeth understanding.

That’s a very powerful emotion and a powerful experience if you can obtain it. But of course we
live in a world where not everybody does obtain it or even seeks for it. And increasingly the
surrounding culture either ignores that sort of thing or denigrates it. So it’s very di cult to
explain to people who are immersed in the secular culture today exactly how you would think
about justifying the ends of existence and not just the means. We need some other notion of the
real presence in our life of the meaning of things if we are going to be able to justify to others
who are skeptical exactly what it is that we want them to do. I think this is our situation today.

Here is a picture, a landscape by Renoir.

There’s no particular reason for me to
have chosen this landscape – and all
landscapes presented on PowerPoint are
hopeless anyway, because, as you know,
it’s backlit and it doesn’t contain the
texture of the paint, and certainly not that
of the canvas. Still, you see in that a
particular artist’s attempt not just to
present a little bit of la douce France,
which everybody loves, but also to make
you love it, too. And whatever goes on in
that landscape is imbued with a sense of
peace and order and it takes from the

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surrounding colors the vitality that makes Pierre-Auguste Renoir: La Montagne

life meaningful. Renoir, like other Sainte-Victoire, 1889
Impressionists, painted a world to which
we belong. Belonging is an all-important
aspect of human experience. Not everybody has it, and of course our jails are lled with the
people who don’t. Most people in this room, I imagine, got here without criminal o enses, and
feel that they do instinctively belong in the world and are in the business of trying to make that
belonging more rooted, more permanent, more wound together with coexistence with their
fellows. That of course is part of what education is about. And that’s what you see in that
beautiful landscape by Renoir: a painting of ordinary fruit trees and an ordinary mountain in the
distance, and so on – but painting it all as part of the world to which we belong.

For Renoir and his contemporaries, it was a post-religious world. They were very much people of
their time who were skeptical about religion. And in any case, they regarded it as their duty as
painters to show that it is this world and not the next that matters. It is quite hard to paint the
next world, as you can imagine. It has been done in words by Dante, and a few painters have
tried to follow him, but for the most part it has been a failure. Nevertheless our world is not that
bad. It is imbued with its own tranquility, and that tranquility can reside in perception itself.
That’s what Renoir was telling us: stop, stand still, look. In that perception you will see that this
thing in front of you has a meaning all of its own, a meaning which justi es you being in it and
reminds you that you belong to it. There’s a moment of standing still that we all can achieve and
in which we can let the otherness of the world dawn on us. It’s something other than me – not
just imagined by me, but there in front of me and including me nevertheless.

When painters do this – the painters of modern life, as Beaudelaire called them – they don’t
behave as photographers behave. This is something very di cult to explain to people these days
as everybody goes around with this criminal object in their pockets immortalizing the ephemera
of their existence, and as a result desecrating it with their own trivial perceptions. Renoir wasn’t
doing anything like that at all. He wasn’t pointing a camera at this landscape. Maybe the
landscape didn’t entirely look like that. He was trying to extract from it what it means, not just
from a perceptual point of view but also spiritually.

We live in a time when there is much ugliness around us and much desecration – in many ways,
a deliberate making ugly of things, or a carelessness as to whether things should be ugly or
beautiful. And many things that we regard as beautiful we discover to be desecrated not just by
the way we treat them but also by the works of art which are supposed to celebrate them. We
know this obviously from our experience of the human form. The human form is all-important
to us because it is the primary locus of meaning, the thing that means most to us in the world.
The human face and the human body come before us imbued with the life of the spirit. But we
can also, as we know, desecrate them – as they are desecrated by pornography and such things,
which turn the subject into an object. And being turned into an object is essentially to lose one’s
spiritual value.

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Part of what lies behind this is a growing obsession with power. Power is the great commodity
that is as it were transferred from person to person in the world we are creating. Many people
would say, here is old Scruton up in front of an audience enjoying his power. You are
transferring to me that power, the power to hold your attention and to infect you with my
reactionary attitudes. This power is something that I have not yet justi ed to you. Many scholars
in uenced by people like Foucault will say that I couldn’t justify it. The institution is structured
by domination, and I’m enjoying that domination and triumphing over you, the victims who are
sitting before me. Now, you don’t actually believe that because you know that you are sitting
there willingly, but nevertheless you can redescribe the whole of the world in that way. You can
take the most innocent thing – the love of a mother for a child, or a child for a mother – and
there’s power in that too. If there weren’t, the mother couldn’t protect the child. But yet, it’s not
the power aspect of it that’s important here, it’s the love aspect. All our loves create powers.

In all the things that matter to us most there is that element of power. Of the tranquility that
Renoir is trying to put across to us in that painting, many of our literary and artistic critics today
would ask the question, “What does this tranquility conceal? Who is using it, who is gaining,
who is losing?” And you can imagine the text in Modern Language Review which will analyze that
painting and try to persuade you that it is there as part of the hegemony of the bourgeois class,
representing nature as a place that endorses its comfortable and relaxing attitudes, excluding the
truth about labor, which went into creating those fruit trees in the rst place – in other words,
legitimizing the power of the French bourgeoisie over the French proletariat. In that way Renoir
becomes part of the ideology which is being imposed upon us by our Western culture. We need
to liberate the oppressed, the victim, from beneath this ideology. And the victim of course will
turn out to be whoever the current obsession is – probably working-class women in this
particular case.

When you start thinking like that, nothing is as it seems. It’s as though there’s a reality behind
everything and that reality is the power that people exercise over each other. And that’s why
beauty is a kind of deception – because it’s always concealing those real relations between
people in which one class or one person or one group has dominion over another. But of course
for the Impressionist painters that’s all nonsense. For them, seeming is everything. What Renoir
was trying to do in that painting is to remind you of something that you would otherwise not
notice: namely, that the world does seem in a certain way to you and that’s what it really, really is
– in other words, how it comes across to you in your immediate perception when you’ve stopped
all the instrumental reasoning, forgotten all the powers and the projects, and just look. But
because of this obsession with power, people do wipe away the face of the world so that the way
things seem is no longer available to us, and that means that beauty is no longer available to us,
either.

Here’s an example of a work of art, if you can call it that, which was created by two brothers. It’s
quite normal now in the products of the British art schools for people to do joint works of art
like this because that way you get rid of the romantic idea of the artistic genius who has
something special to say. You’re doing it together with someone else. And of course, the purpose

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in this case is to make the human body

repulsive, into a kind of liquid, standing in
these childish Mary Jane shoes with all the
parts deformed – penis instead of nose
and things like that. What its point is can
only be understood if you realize that
these boys were brought up in an art
school which tells them that the purpose
of art in not to beautify life, in no way to
replace the sacred moments that religion
might have given us, in no way to give you
a sense of the meaningfulness of things.
Chapman brothers: Zygotic acceleration
On the contrary, it is to deconstruct those
biogenetic de-sublimated libidinal model,
things, to show that life is essentially
1995
meaningless, and you can best do this by
taking the human body and making it
repulsive.

We all know of Tracey Emin’s famous bed

– which last changed hands at two million
pounds – in which she presented, well, her
bed – after she had got out of it, of course,
and with all the debris of her night’s
dissipation lying on the carpet around it.
And there it is. It’s in the Tate Modern
Gallery now, its permanent resting place,
although of course those sheets are going
to rot away quicker than most sheets do. I
Tracey Emin: My Bed, 1998
want to contrast it with another bed,
which I mentioned in the lm I made
about this: Delacroix’s bed. Delacroix, as
you know, is a great French painter from the Romantic period, who is also a highly learned and
interested cultural gure, perhaps one of the greatest of the nineteenth-century cultural gures
in France.

Here is his bed. This isn’t an actual bed, of course, this is a painting of a bed. In painting it, he
has tried to transfer into the bed some of his sense of the value of lying in it, of being the thing
that was in it, and also what it meant to wrestle with the sheets in that way. A comparison of
these two does help you to understand a little bit about what’s gone wrong with art today.
Tracey Emin’s bed presents itself but obviously nothing beyond itself; it just is there. Delacroix’s
bed presents something other than itself. It’s a life that’s been translated into those fabrics, a
perpetuation in another form of a spiritual wrestling, which we know from Delacroix’s life and
his other paintings – that wrestling with fabric, with reality, the exibility of this world, and the

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attempt to impose upon it a meaningful

human form, if you like, a testimony to
the spiritual life with which we invest all
the objects that we’re in touch with. So he
was looking for a kind of harmony, order,
even a redemption in the shape of those
sheets. He’s searching for the trace left in
them by the spirit, which will be a
meaning beyond the present moment.
Here we’re talking about the di erence
between an attempt to represent life, Eugène Delacroix: Un Lit Defait, 1828
which is also a trans guration of a life into
something which is a permanent record of
the spirit, and the mere debris of a life. Once you see it you realize that only the rst of those is a
genuine artistic activity.

However, we’ve entered this period in our history where ugliness has become a kind of cult –
not ugliness as such but more transgressive ugliness, like those melted-together human gures
of the Chapman brothers. It’s an ugliness that pollutes or negates some familiar ideal or value.
Transgression is something which also has a certain appeal, especially to younger people. It’s an
act of self-a rmation that frees itself from judgment. The transgressive gesture is one that says,
“I don’t actually care whether you judge me or not. I’m going do it and I’m going to a rm myself
against your judgment, and that is in itself a liberation.” I think we’ve seen this in every sphere of
human endeavor since the 1960s: the assumption of the freedom to o end, the freedom to
annihilate other people’s vision of what matters, and to show that the values for which other
people live don’t count for you. That’s a stage which obviously all of us have to go through at
certain points in our lives. We have to ght against our parents, ght against institutions, ght
against the people who seem to be preventing us from being what we truly are and going out
into the world and claiming it as our own. In the normal run of things that’s not a particularly
bad thing to do because, after all, once you’re out there in the big world, feeling the winds of
change around you, you realize that you are actually on your own and that it was a terrible
mistake to be so o ensive to the people you need, and gradually you work your way back to
them. You reassume possession of them in their view and you are reconciled and forgiven, as in
the famous parable of the prodigal son. So there’s a paradox in this position of assuming the
freedom to o end: it’s only because other people’s values count for you that you can be
exhilarated by defying them or disavowing their ideals.

Nevertheless this is certainly what artists at a certain stage did. De Kooning was a paradigm of
this. He’s an artist who, I think, has largely been seen through now, except in America – and the
reason why he has not been seen through in America is that a lot of money has been spent on his
pictures. So museums, art critics, and private owners conspire together to make sure they are
not going to lose the two million dollars that they spent on them. If you can keep the values up,
your museum is still worth what you invested in it. This is just called Woman, and it’s his

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representation of what a woman fundamentally is. All those

ideals of womanhood which you might have entertained in
your self-deceiving moments are as nothing compared with
this representation.

And here is another instance of this way of approaching our

ideals. Rusalka – some of you may know this great opera by
Dvorak – tells the famous story of Ondine the water nymph
who falls in love with a mortal. And it’s a beautiful, romantic
story not only about the mystery of woman but also about the
importance of chastity and purity in preparing a woman for
love, and the danger in which she is put by that. And of course
this is symbolized by the fact that there she is living in the
water. If she comes out of it, is that the end of her? And if she William de Kooning:
tempts the mortal into the water, is that the end of him? This Woman III, 1953
story has been told many times, but never as well as by Dvorak.
This is the production that Covent Garden made of that opera
in which Rusalka, the pure water nymph who dreams of an erotic relation which no water
nymph is allowed, is a prostitute and the water is the bath in which she is lying, expecting the
stream of lovers. And for reasons that can’t be explained she sings an aria to the moon.

Now that’s simply one example of a very

ordinary occurrence in opera productions
today. The idea in so many opera
producers’ minds when given a romantic
fairy tale like this is of course to desecrate
it if you can, and also to bring in sex,
violence, and all the usual stu in order
that the audience you have trapped there
– an audience of ordinary, decent middle-
class people who spent a couple hundred
Covent Garden: Rusalka, 2012; Image by dollars for the ticket – well, you can really
Alastair Muir give them a hard time. You’re never going
to get them there in any other way
because they came for this beautiful
romantic legend – and they won’t come again, but you’ve got them for a couple hours anyway.
This is the way in which opera productions tend to go now. Why did all this come about?

I think we can’t understand this great movement to desecrate works of art like that if we don’t
attend a little bit to the phenomenon of kitsch and the distrust of beauty that arose because of
kitsch. The Romantic movement that arose, as you know, at the end of the eighteenth century
and dominated all of art through the nineteenth century was a movement away from beauty, the
homely sorts of beauty that appeal to ordinary people and that don’t seem to threaten them.

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There was a movement toward the sublime, presenting great tragedies rather than sweet fairy
tales, emphasizing the di culties of human life, the di culty of emerging from a life of
oppression, and so on. We have many great works of Romantic art which focus on these fairly
negative aspects of the human condition but try to nd beauty in them nevertheless. All this is
epitomized in Beaudelaire’s famous poem to beauty, which I recommend you to read, Fleurs du
Mal. There was a movement away from the beautiful and at the same time a fear of the
sweetness that beauty can bring into our lives. Isn’t there a kind of deception involved in that? If
life really is as bad as we all know it to be, isn’t art deceiving us by trying to make us accept it and
nd sweetness and consolation in it? Maybe there is no sweetness and consolation. Maybe art
should have another role, that of showing the truth to people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to
perceive it. If art concentrates on beauty, isn’t it going to degenerate into a form of lying, a form
of faking things?

I’ll give you a contrast between two Venuses. Everybody

knows Botticelli’s Venus, who is so detached from the world,
and I contrast him with the Venus of Bouguereau, being the
famous salon painter of the nineteenth century in France
who was a wonderfully accomplished painter in the style of
Ingres, but a question mark inevitably is placed over him
because of this sweetness and gentleness and also the
perfection of everything he did, which seemed to many
people to be a kind of lying. Beaudelaire expressly defended
Manet against Bouguereau because Manet was showing us
Sandro Botticelli: The Birth
life as it is without any of this cloying sweetness. You all
of Venus (detail), 1486
know Botticelli’s Venus, not an easy way to show it, but in
that face you see a particular conception of what the erotic
is. Botticelli was a Platonist, who believed as Plato did that beauty is an object of desire but it’s
also a gateway to the transcendental, that you understand what beauty really is if you follow
through that gateway, leave behind your earthly desires, and unite with the spiritual condition
from which they originally spring.

This face for him was not an object of sexual desire but an object of a sexual desire that had been
transcended. She was Simonetta Vespucci, who was mistress of his prince Lorenzo de Medici,
and therefore unobtainable anyway. The thought in this Venus is the symbol of the erotic as
Plato conceived it, something to be transcended into the spiritual.

Bouguereau’s Birth of Venus, as you see, is all perfection of form but doesn’t mean anything.
There she is, sni ng her freshly shaven armpit, waiting for the lover who’s going to come
through the bathroom door, and obviously she’ll have to get rid of the company meanwhile.
Bouguereau was a great master of color and form, but somehow the sentiment is fake: it isn’t a
real Venus. This is sexuality in its ordinary, vulgar form without any attempt to show you the
meaning of it and its re ection in the transcendental.

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Desecration takes many forms. But if we worry about

kitsch – which all artists today do – what do we do about
it? There are two ways of dealing with it. First, try and
nd a way of producing real art that is not kitsch. And
that’s a really hard thing to do: producing art that
doesn’t have this fake character, isn’t childish and isn’t a
Christmas decoration. Or you can do what Je Koons
does: produce something that is so obviously kitsch that
no one could ever accuse you of it. He’s saying, “Of
course, this is such obvious kitsch that I must be making
another and deeper point.” No one has ever discovered
what the deeper point is. But there it is, desecrating a
beautiful classical façade probably for many years to
come.

William-Adolphe Bougereau:
The Birth of Venus, 1879

The causes of this situation in which we

nd ourselves go deep. We have acquired
this distrust of beauty because it is an
invitation into realms that have been
mined. There are traps here. You might
fall into the trap of Bouguereau; however
beautiful your human gures, they turn
out in the end just to be standard
Christmas card porn, or something like
Jeff Koons: Balloon Dog (Magenta), 2000
that. The reality slips away from you and
you’re left with this fake.

Artists have come to distrust beauty. And I think you all know this from modern cinema and
much modern music as well. There is an attempt often to show that you’re a genuine artist by
producing something that nobody could possibly like, so you must be serious. And there are
consolations also of ugliness, consolations of showing that in some way life doesn’t matter
anyway. That’s the meaning of the Chapman brothers’ sculpture. Life is simply a nothingness.
We happen to have been born and we will die and decay and disappear – and so what? There’s a
charm in that kind of view, a charm which I call the charm of disenchantment. Being
disenchanted with things gives you a kind of glamor. If you go around a room of people who are
ooh-ing and aah-ing with fake enchantment about kitsch, then your being disenchanted gives
you a kind of distinction.

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Many artists aspire to that distinction of not being taken in by anything, not being dupes to the
surrounding culture and values. Added to this there is a desire to desecrate values as well, like
putting gra ti on things or a moustache on the Mona Lisa. When that moustache was rst put
on the Mona Lisa by Marcel duChamps, you can see what he was doing. He was saying, “Yes, yes,
yes, but we’ve gone beyond that. That’s all nonsense. You might be taken in by that but I’m not.”
And essentially, ever since that gesture which was made a hundred years ago, the majority of art
that we’ve come across, at least the art coming from art schools, has been putting another
moustache on the Mona Lisa. The question automatically arises as to whether there is any point
in doing it twice, let alone a thousand times. The thought behind all this is that we’ve asked too
much of art, we’ve asked it to be a substitute for religion, to be the light from and the window
onto the transcendental. If it disappoints us, we start becoming angry with it. Disappointment
turns to repudiation.

So what is the mission of art, then? Is there a mission we can still maintain? I believe we all have
a need for redemption. I don’t mean that necessarily in the religious sense. I mean that we need
our actions, our gestures, our plans and projects, to have a ful llment of some kind, to lift us out
of the day-to-day appetites that otherwise swallow us. All our actions aim towards this; they aim
beyond themselves to a point of rest in which we can look back and endorse what we have done.
This is obviously the case with human relations, especially love relations, but it’s there in all our
lives and a life without this, without ideals, gets tired of itself. When people set out on the path
of transgression it’s partly because they’ve become disappointed with the possibility of actually
achieving this sort of redemption.

Where, then, does beauty t into this and what can it actually do by way of satisfying this desire?
I have argued that the search for beauty is the search for home, for a place where you can be at
home with yourself and with others, but in particular where you belong. Going back to the
Renoir painting, which is a painting of a landscape as a thing that we belong to, being at home
means being at home with yourself. And that means seeing yourself in some way as another, as
another person, seeing yourself from outside – not just this sel sh self-involved thing you are
familiar with when you wake up in the morning, but that other thing which you were when you
went to bed, having spent the day with other people. You want to be at home with what you
nd. I think this search for being at home does not start with high art, nor does it end there.
One of the reasons people have become so confused about beauty is because they have
constantly taken their examples from the realm of high art, those great and di cult things like
Botticelli’s Venus, which you have to think about for an awfully long time before you know what
it really means. High art challenges us in the deepest parts of our being, and maybe we get
turned o by it, we feel we can’t live up to it, so let’s live in another way. But that’s not where the
search for beauty begins, nor is it where it ends.

I think it begins and ends in everyday life. People misconceive aesthetics when they see it merely
as the realm of beauty. It is as though that’s all we were ever thinking about when we were going
around our world making aesthetic judgments. “Oh yes, that’s beautiful. No, that’s ugly.” But
that’s not the way we behave at all. We actually make completely di erent kinds of judgments.

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We talk about whether something ts in, whether it’s graceful, whether that would be the right
way to go forward, does this color t with that color and so on. And I think people take revenge
on beauty because they don’t see that there’s something more important without which there
can be no revenge. And that more important thing is just our instinct to get things right, to
make things t in and harmonize. This is where the aesthetic judgment is a fundamental part of
our everyday lives; we are making it all the time.

Now, I’m not a natty dresser but even I had to question whether this tie goes with this jacket. It
probably doesn’t, but nevertheless the question occupied me for a certain amount of time, and it
was part of my attempt to t in and harmonize and also to t in to this occasion where I’m
giving a public lecture. You could put this, however, in a much more pretentious and
philosophical way by saying that when we do this we’re trying to realize ourselves as subjects in
the realm of objects. That’s the language that Hegel and his followers would use. It’s a tough
language, but you can see what it means. We are free beings, we are subjects who have an inner
life, but that inner life is not meaningful to us if we cannot in some way make it into an outward
reality among other outward realities. In all our gestures we are trying achieve that, to become
something real, and part of things – to belong, in other words.

So, this realization is something that goes on all the time and all rational beings are engaged in
it. Children know about this already. In these two little girls you see what Wittgenstein would
call the natural expression of aesthetic judgment. There they are, trying to t things in the right
place on the table. They’re not saying to themselves, “Is this beautiful, is this ugly, or sublime?”
Those words are not part of their vocabulary, probably, but they are asking themselves the
question, “Is this right? Am I getting it right? Should it be a little more to the left?” You can see
the intent expression here, something only human beings manifest. No animals manifest this
sense of the rightness and wrongness of things because these girls are not reasoning
instrumentally. They are completely beyond the idea of the function of these things. They are
trying to t things together so they look right, so the guests will nd that they look right, too.
That’s the beginnings of the aesthetic attitude.

We know this as well. We don’t accept the world simply as a thing out there, an assembly of
objects. We try and adorn it and t it to ourselves and us to it. We are always aware of the
distinction between things standing out and tting in. Sometimes it’s right for them to stand
out; sometimes it’s wrong. Fitting in is one of the most important aspects of our life in every
sphere of human endeavor. We all have this need to be part of something greater than ourselves,
and this is something that happens to us all day long: that we know that we are part of
something greater and we know that we are either tting in or not tting in. Obviously there is a
distinction between looking right and being right, but one of the important features of the
aesthetic is that that distinction gets collapsed. If you look back at the two children, there isn’t a
distinction between the plate being in the right place and looking in the right place. Being and
seeming have come together and that’s perhaps something that’s really important for us – to live
in a world where every now and then being and seeming coincide, so that nothing, as it were,
deceives us anymore.

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I think this is part of the great social signi cance of the aesthetic. We live in a world which has in
many ways been ugli ed, and it’s a world that we want to redeem so that we are part of it once
again and our ful llment is re ected back to us from all the things we encounter. And that’s
really part of what I mean by redemption and that is the function of the aesthetic. This search
for getting things right is an all-pervasive thing, no matter what circumstances you are in. Even
if you’re living in a trailer park you can do things right. You can go to a local timber merchant
and buy the Georgian windows to replace the rubbish that would otherwise be there, you can
have a little cornice and so on. And if there’s a lot of money involved you can still get things
totally wrong.

This is a part of London, and as you can see, someone’s made a mistake here. There’s another
example of London mistakes. But here is getting it right. This is just an ordinary Victorian street
in London. Someone has built a bridge across it so that two buildings communicate, but this is a
totally di erent thing. Although there’s lots of di erent buildings there, they all harmonize.
They harmonize because they’re standing along a street, they are all built of vertical components
which match each other, and contain they classical details, cornice and stringcourse and
pilasters and so on. And here’s an example of a modern town center, the center of Reading, built
entirely out of horizontals. One of the important di erences between them is everybody wants
to live here, and nobody wants to live there, and in fact nobody does live there. The center of
Reading was destroyed completely by this development and it’s standing empty and vandalized
and covered in gra ti.

This emphasis on the horizontal was

originally a very aesthetic thing. The
modernist aesthetic exempli ed in this
interior is entirely designed in this way.
You can see that, yes, this is a kind of
aesthetic ideal. Nobody, I’m sure, has ever
sat in this room but nevertheless you can
see that it has aesthetic thoughts behind
it. Unlike this. But the modernists, of
course, were in reaction against this, all
this Victorian clutter, which again is
something that most people would nd
A living room of modernist design
extremely di cult to live with now.

Here is an example of a rather perfected modernist interior: Wittgenstein’s house in Vienna,

which he designed for his sister. Wittgenstein, like me, had the sense that architecture
ultimately must get the vertical emphasis right, must make verticals stand in parallel to each
other, and that the sense of detail matters. This is not my preferred form of architecture but you
can see the aesthetic instinct at work in everything in this building. He designed it for his sister,
who never lived in it. It ended up as the embassy of a communist country, for which it is
wonderfully suited.

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This is an example of what architects really can do when

it comes to making corners. This is the corner of a
church in Rome, by Pietro da Cortona. You see when you
have the sense of detail, the classical idiom and this
desire to t things together, how a building comes alive
and captures the light of the sun and incorporates that
light into itself, makes it part of its own spirit, so to
speak. Even in architecture the human spirit nds its
embodiment.

In conclusion, those examples were sort of taken from

the air, really, but they’re meant to emphasize the place
of aesthetic judgment, of our desire to get things right, Haus Wittgenstein, Vienna
in ordinary, everyday life and in our enterprise as
builders and dwellers, as people who have settled down.
We know that we are free beings, but we also know that freedom demands recognition. This is
something that Hegel emphasized. It has to be re-expressed for every generation.

We’re not truly free until others recognize that we are

free and grant us the space to be free in. And that means
that we’re in relations of mutuality with each other. My
freedom is always rubbing up against the edge of your
freedom, and that boundary between us is the public
world where we both belong. And it is in shaping that
boundary between us that the aesthetic sense is so
important. That’s where, in our search for recognition
from each other, we attempt to be graceful towards each
other and to bring each other to our side. I bring you to
my side, you bring me to your side, so that the boundary
where we coincide is mutually acceptable. This
reasonably cool grace is a matter of harmony and tting
in. Of course, it cannot be achieved without the habit of
giving and receiving: I give way to you, you give way to
Pietro da Cortona: Santa
me, I o er you things and you receive them. This is what
Maria della Pace (corner
the public world ideally should be. That kind of giving
detail), Rome, 1667
and receiving of things is what should be embodied in
our ideal forms of architecture.

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