21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

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creativity at all, but becomes violence. Beauty can drive us crazy; but there’s good crazy and there’s bad!

Edmund Burke (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful) said, ‘The passion excited by beauty is in fact nearer to a species of melancholy than to jollity and mirth.’ Susan Griffin says: ‘Beauty demands a more arduous process’, and, like our quote from Rilke above, Simone Weil reminded us that beauty and terror are related. Matthew Fox (Original Blessing) comments: ‘Prettiness does not demand arduousness, but beauty does … Beauty is not learned or valued without the suffering that makes us big enough and strong enough to be proper vessels of the beautiful.’

The danger is that beauty is regarded just as an adornment, an aesthetic that is detached from anything such as rightness, harmony or love. Beauty then becomes mere attractiveness, as a commodity, that inspires only superficial pleasure at best, but at worst may be used as a means of power or destructiveness.

So it is important to distinguish between the word beauty and words like attractive that we sometimes use when describing another person. Attractiveness is a commodification of beauty. Whilst the word beauty can be used in the context of simply describing a person’s physical appearance it also carries with it at least some connotation of a more general ‘rightness’. This is not necessarily to equate it with moral rightness, but it is certainly a wider affirmation of aesthetics.

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