Why Does Beauty Matter?

Artwork pictured above: A Day of Celebration

In a world obsessed with efficiency and production, it may not be clear that a thing’s beauty is anything beyond a luxury or a quirk. Why use a fancy English teapot when you can use an electric kettle? Some go so far as to see things as beautiful only inasmuch as they are useful. Yet, for most of us, it doesn’t take much imagining before the vision of a gray, purely-utilitarian world deflates our human spirit. Why is this? Upon seeing a flaming sunset, the majestic grandeur of a European cathedral, or the smile of a little child, why do we respond with a pull toward that thing and a spark of joy? 

Many have pondered the power of beauty and usually, it brings them to a recognition that beauty is not, in fact, a cherry on top of the essentials of life, but a profound necessity to human life. Benedict XVI reminds us in his 2009 address to artists in the Sistine Chapel that “this world in which we live needs beauty in order not to sink into despair.” It shows us, in a way that necessarily involves not just our reasoning powers but also our senses, that there is something outside ourselves that is worth paying attention to. From a neuroscience perspective, it does this by packing a punch not merely to our prefrontal cortex where we do our analytical thinking, but more immediately to that part of the brain called the limbic system, where humans process emotion, memory, and motivation. We are not just analyzing creatures but creatures in need of viscerally experiencing the truth and goodness we talk and think about. In our humanity, we need concrete re-encounters with the truth and goodness that we want to follow so that we can continually remember that these things are real and worth following. 

This is where beauty comes in. It “unlocks the yearning of the human heart, the profound desire to know, to love, to go towards the Other, to reach for the Beyond,” Benedict says (2009). “If we acknowledge that beauty touches us intimately, that it wounds us, that it opens our eyes, then we rediscover the joy of seeing, of being able to grasp the profound meaning of our existence.” He is describing a unique way in which beauty has the power to pierce hearts and pull humans beyond themselves toward meaning they may not have known existed. As Edgar Allan Poe observed in The Poetic Principle, “this thirst belongs to the immortality of Man,” like “the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us — but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above.”

This is why a fancy English teapot just might save you: it can bring you that compelling reminder that there is something wonderful outside of yourself that speaks to you and shows you something about what you’re made for. We live in a world that has in many ways lost the art of fruitful dialogue. This often makes it hard to talk about truth or goodness on any kind of common ground. Even more of the burden, then, falls to beauty to persuade us through a wholehearted encounter that life is good and that truth exists. It has always mattered, but never more so than now.