3. On Beauty: From John Armstrong's "The Secret Power of Beauty" Part Three

Schiller identifies an "Aesthetic Necessity" in what we deem Beautiful. This is in contrast with practical necessity which stifles us and impinges on the sense of who we are. There are also moral necessities which make impositions on us.

Aesthetic Necessity is then liberation as we are presented with how we would like Life to be. Consider an experience of beauty when we come into contact with a piece of music, Schiller describes it as the feeling that each note "has to" follow but this does not make us feel constrained. Instead, we are thrilled by this apparently inevitable sequence and makes sense.

Now, Armstrong takes into account a very important change of perspective. From the viewpoint of the audience, the work of art looks smooth, cohesive and natural in its sequence. But this would have taken a lot of anxiety and doubt on the part of the artist who is trying/ tried to make the parts flow and fit.

When we view our actions, we often are the artist, filled with doubt, uncertainty and anxiety. Our lives, when seen from this perspective, thus can never be like the "perfection" that we see in art.

We now move onto the discussion of Paradise: the imaginative space where beautiful and the good always coincide.

This is a double-edged sword to the contemplative since the more elaborate, refined and serious the longing, the harder it is to realize.

As I advocate, idealism must go hand-in-hand with pragmatism as Aestheticism is an extreme and distorted attachment to beauty, a form of idolatry.

A proper love of anything requires an acknowledgment of its real nature and hence its limitations. Without such recognition, it is not really that thing which one loves, but an idea of it.