A Journal for Western Man-- Issue III
' Part III
G. Stolyarov II
To those who comprehend not why beauty must be a creation of man, the author presents the following deliberation. Does nature create functional organisms? Yes, but it is unable to construct them with precision. There exists a reasonable explanation for why the human being in a savage wilderness is hideous and shall remain hideous until achievements of culture do not cloak or mend his �pristine� state. Every man is, essentially, randomly generated by combinations of the genetic codes of his parents. Chance selects which parent will donate which gene of theirs for a particular trait of the child at hand. What results is a smorgasbord of functions that may well not be the workings of an ideally healthy Homo sapiens, certain defects present within every creature, none of the greatest possible efficiency or a mathematical perfection. To add to this, no natural portion of the human organism can truly be classified as a geometric shape nor have concrete principles and formulas determine the means of measuring its smallest elements. And this may be said of the human being, the most advanced and least repulsive of the natural creations. The lower an organism is on the food chain, the more disgusting its exterior and interior workings. From the erratic fur covering the animals and feathers coating the birds, to the repulsive, slimy forms of the insects, to the randomly twisted carcasses of plants (A note to the reader: the only flora considered beautiful is that cultivated by humans in gardens, where, with the correct tending, they become geometrically proper and worthy of exhibition. Indeed, man mends these natural resources as he does to conceive any other work of beauty, yet the fact remains that man alters them in such a manner that nature cannot.), to the terrifying disfigured structures of microbes, the hideousness culminates in the semi-living, devastation-wreaking blob of chemicals that is the virus. The further from human control a matter is, the more repulsive and irregular, the more erroneous and flawed it becomes. There is a line that hideousness eventually crosses into danger. Among the examples in our "hierarchy of ugliness" for life, that line begins with a majority of insects. The less advanced a structure, the more it lacks the stability of precision, the more it is willing to inflict harm to "compensate" for its fallacies. But a treatise against parasitism would be too far a deviation from our original topic. The author simply means to clarify the hideousness of anything parasitic. Parasitism breaks down, degrades, severs. Beauty connects, constructs, restores. Two opposites cannot be one. Wilderness creates to destroy; man creates to create further. Wilderness dooms to oblivion; man seeks to fathom, preserve, and utilize. Thus, Wilderness, being, in essence, the more parasitic the further it becomes detached from the willful accomplishments of man, cannot be beautiful unless tamed, sculpted, and enhanced by humankind.
But what has man created for himself in order to conceal his natural errors and render himself beautiful? Let us begin with the matter of greatest ease, the covering of our deformed exteriors, clothing. True clothing aims to mend the erroneous form of the human body into one of significantly greater geometric precision. In its evolution over time, the Western suit for males and the gown for females have been the most recent advancements on the path toward mending the human form into an ideal state consistent with our mathematical doctrines. Our limbs have now increasingly begun to resemble cylinders, and our upper organisms, from the shoulders to the waist, parallelepipeds. This is, of course, a crude oversimplification that neglects the aesthetic enhancements offered by such precise accessories as ties, collars, pockets, buttons, all adding intricacy and appeal to clothing, building upon simple shapes as the Greeks had done with the column. A clothing designer producing works of such correctness is a developer of beauty. And by wearing these articles, we ourselves become far more beautiful and demonstrate our understanding of genuine aesthetic grandeur. What physical deeds do we perform concerning our heads? We groom our hair, place various artificial coloring on our faces to conceal deformities, tend to our teeth and skin, style or remove facial hair, provided we have any. Technology has even permitted such techniques as plastic surgery to correct inborn defects and slow the decay that aging inflicts on one's exterior, granting it greater geometric precision. With prospects of genetic alternations just over the horizon, we may live to encounter humans engineered by humans to a perfection that an absence of innovation would be unable to furnish.
But the greater impact of beauty has been and must continue to be on the human mind. We are born to be tainted with natural impulses that, however a proper end of survival they may seek, utilize obsolete and improper means to achieve it. In the author's previous works we had discussed how the inability of instinct to evolve alongside culture has produced such abominations as drug and sugar addictions, censorship of progress, and violent emotionally-guided sentiments. Yet to remain at the level of development of one's �animal instincts� is an even greater folly. Given a proper education, one may avoid the above miseries caused by an obsolescence of our natural systems, but without development one is forever bound by the dreadful fallacies of an uncultivated subsistence, namely, disease, susceptibility to the elements, vulgarity, transience, and oblivion. Thus, the greater aim of beauty, of culture in general, is to civilize the mind, to update it to the system of thought most fitting to the progress of humankind, its only guarantee for long-term survival. While instinct contradicts its intended purpose, beauty seeks to accomplish it. This is precisely the reason for our establishments of learning, which must liberate the human thought processes from the self-destructive script of instinct and instill in it an appreciation for the wonders of logic, pattern, and quantitative relationship that had made possible the very existence of both the arts and the sciences, which are, in truth, one; that, which is beautiful. Of the various systems of learning that had thus far come into existence, none, the author must admit, had fulfilled that purpose ideally or even remotely close to such, else we would have inhabited a utopian society where the will of man is omnipotent and self-directed. However, any systematic process of learning has been able to free at least portions of our selves from the parasitic, suicidal grasp of nature. Any man educated is infinitely more a human than one who is not. Diogenes Laertius relates to us this moment in the life of one of Greece's most profound thinkers: "When asked how much educated men were superior to those uneducated, Aristotle answered, 'As much as the living are to the dead.'" Indeed, if anywhere has life a foothold, 'tis in learning, for learning is growth without destruction, and such is life. This, then, the means of passing on beauty to the hideous, culture to the uncultivated, life to the subsisting, knowledge to the ignorant, is the ultimate beauty, founded upon the same logical and numerical (referring to a grading system for performance measurement) base as its previously addressed counterparts.
The purpose of this deliberation has been to create a definition of beauty which the reader may then be able to apply to all matters in order to grant them either the presence or absence of such a distinction. Every portion of this definition has obtained justification enough for one to be able to safely state that a crooked structure, a contradictory thought pattern, a losing strategy, a cacophonous piece of music, an incorrect use of language, a haphazard blob of paint upon a canvas, a dysfunctional machine, and a harmful medicine are not beautiful. Furthermore, one possesses the capacity to state that an even greater degree of hideousness is evident within that, which has not seen even the most futile attempts of men, the disordered plant, the microscopic parasite, the cry of a seagull, the droppings of geese, the genetic jumble of contradictory schemes for suicide within human beings, and an ignorant mind. What is it that renders existent all genuine accomplishments of beauty? 'Tis work, a relentless labor of hours, days, years, centuries, and millennia by men who love both themselves and their species, fulfilling the essential need of humankind to survive and perpetuate itself by committing itself to the finalization of the resolve to remain on the path of development. Nothing comes by itself but degradation. And it is degradation that true beauty would halt and reverse for the boundless benefit of all. The author doubts that a work of utter perfection had yet been achieved, but numerous individuals for whom we must hold an eternal remembrance, including Frederick the Great, that delightful expansionist of righteousness and civilization, have come remarkably close to attaining this goal. And work, thought, and knowledge shall someday lead us to ascending to that divine peak of humankind's pyramid of gold, a metaphorical marvel that would have made Imhotep proud. It is proper to summarize our findings in the following quatrain:
The path is long, the slope is steep.
Man yet may fruits of triumph reap.
He must, survival to retrieve,
The turn of beauty into truth achieve.