Post 148.
This morning, I read St. Oscar Romero’s reflection from December 31, 1977 (published in The Violence of Love, Orbis Books), in which the good bishop explains why the Church resists torture and other abuses. He writes, “The church, entrusted with the earth’s glory, believes that in each person is the Creator’s image and that everyone who tramples it offends God,” and later in the same contemplation, “There is no dichotomy between man and God’s image.”
The question, Why Beauty, has a relative, Why Beauty Matters. For St. Oscar, Beauty exists for God’s purpose. In the 19th Century Romantic aestheticists argued effectively that art is for art’s sake—that is, Beauty is for Beauty. Immanuel Kant had previous argued for the intrinsic value of human beings because every person would want to be understood as intrinsically valuable—this is the categorical imperative, which is his extension of the golden rule. But what does this mean for art? Non-human beings (animals/plants) and objects exist not because they are intrinsically valuable, but because they have a purpose—they are of use value.
This dichotomy, picked up by the Romantics, extended intrinsic value to certain arts, especially those found in museums, opera houses, and concert halls frequented by the nobility, aristocracy, and wealthy capitalists. These high arts become intrinsically valuable. The contradiction becomes obvious when we ponder that the same persons that in the 19th Century employed child labor and fought workplace safety laws, were aggressively negating the intrinsic value of other human persons, the working poor, while disseminating the intrinsic value of Beauty. This type of aesthetic theory found voice in 20th Century Music Education through the philosopher Bennett Reimer, who trained numerous music teachers and professors to begin from the position that music has intrinsic value, and insisted we teach music for music’s sake, rather than for any extrinsic ends, be those ends political, spiritual, economic, or social.
In response to the aesthetic movement, specific to Music Education, praxial philosophers such as David Elliott, Christopher Small, and Thomas Regelski dominated scholarly writing beginning in the 1990s. Praxialists argue that music is not a thing at all, but an action which people do. They reject the intrinsic/extrinsic dualism, and open space for today’s scholarship, which includes much that is political, spiritual, economic, and social. Both aesthetic and praxial music educators and scholars remain active today.
I was trained to be a music teacher in the 1990s, when the aesthetics/praxialist conversation was at its most heated, and earned my Ph.D. in 2015, firmly placing my scholarship in the praxial faction, which allowed me to research music improvisation and ecological literacy—topics which would be understood as extrinsic to music itself from the aesthetic perspective. More recently, my understanding of ecology has led me to my current enquiry into Beauty, an idea that tends to find greater expression in aesthetic theory than praxial. A synthesis is needed.
The Christian perspective is something quite different than most conceptions of the aesthetic or the praxial. As St. Oscar revealed “There is no dichotomy between man and God’s image,” and if there is no dichotomy then intrinsic value does not lie there and not here—in art and not factory workers; in a sonata and not in a country hit; in the mental image of beauty and not in this mere performance, here. The aesthetic position as it has been argued in Music Education scholarship is vacuous because God says each person—the disabled, the homeless, the illegal alien, the trans, the cashier, as well as the business owner, the monastic, and the internationally recognized scholar--is the image of God. There is no dichotomy to be found because God, who is trinity—perfect relationship—has not chosen to dichotomize reality into those of his creation having intrinsic value and those having mere use value. Rather, ever creature of God has intrinsic value as well as use value, when we choose to put ourselves to the use of others in Christian love. The most beautiful lives have been the lives of saints—though often not lives filled with wealth, length, or lack of suffering. People are unfulfilled when we are not of use to our friends, family, neighbors, communities, and humanity—but we are unhappy when treated as less-than others of God’s creation and not given the time to explore with our bodies, minds and souls the beautiful things at within our grasp, whether in silence and solitude or together with others.
Daniel J. Shevock
Link to the image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beatificacion_Monse%C3%B1or_Romero_(17984373076).jpg
This morning, I read St. Oscar Romero’s reflection from December 31, 1977 (published in The Violence of Love, Orbis Books), in which the good bishop explains why the Church resists torture and other abuses. He writes, “The church, entrusted with the earth’s glory, believes that in each person is the Creator’s image and that everyone who tramples it offends God,” and later in the same contemplation, “There is no dichotomy between man and God’s image.”
The question, Why Beauty, has a relative, Why Beauty Matters. For St. Oscar, Beauty exists for God’s purpose. In the 19th Century Romantic aestheticists argued effectively that art is for art’s sake—that is, Beauty is for Beauty. Immanuel Kant had previous argued for the intrinsic value of human beings because every person would want to be understood as intrinsically valuable—this is the categorical imperative, which is his extension of the golden rule. But what does this mean for art? Non-human beings (animals/plants) and objects exist not because they are intrinsically valuable, but because they have a purpose—they are of use value.
This dichotomy, picked up by the Romantics, extended intrinsic value to certain arts, especially those found in museums, opera houses, and concert halls frequented by the nobility, aristocracy, and wealthy capitalists. These high arts become intrinsically valuable. The contradiction becomes obvious when we ponder that the same persons that in the 19th Century employed child labor and fought workplace safety laws, were aggressively negating the intrinsic value of other human persons, the working poor, while disseminating the intrinsic value of Beauty. This type of aesthetic theory found voice in 20th Century Music Education through the philosopher Bennett Reimer, who trained numerous music teachers and professors to begin from the position that music has intrinsic value, and insisted we teach music for music’s sake, rather than for any extrinsic ends, be those ends political, spiritual, economic, or social.
In response to the aesthetic movement, specific to Music Education, praxial philosophers such as David Elliott, Christopher Small, and Thomas Regelski dominated scholarly writing beginning in the 1990s. Praxialists argue that music is not a thing at all, but an action which people do. They reject the intrinsic/extrinsic dualism, and open space for today’s scholarship, which includes much that is political, spiritual, economic, and social. Both aesthetic and praxial music educators and scholars remain active today.
I was trained to be a music teacher in the 1990s, when the aesthetics/praxialist conversation was at its most heated, and earned my Ph.D. in 2015, firmly placing my scholarship in the praxial faction, which allowed me to research music improvisation and ecological literacy—topics which would be understood as extrinsic to music itself from the aesthetic perspective. More recently, my understanding of ecology has led me to my current enquiry into Beauty, an idea that tends to find greater expression in aesthetic theory than praxial. A synthesis is needed.
The Christian perspective is something quite different than most conceptions of the aesthetic or the praxial. As St. Oscar revealed “There is no dichotomy between man and God’s image,” and if there is no dichotomy then intrinsic value does not lie there and not here—in art and not factory workers; in a sonata and not in a country hit; in the mental image of beauty and not in this mere performance, here. The aesthetic position as it has been argued in Music Education scholarship is vacuous because God says each person—the disabled, the homeless, the illegal alien, the trans, the cashier, as well as the business owner, the monastic, and the internationally recognized scholar--is the image of God. There is no dichotomy to be found because God, who is trinity—perfect relationship—has not chosen to dichotomize reality into those of his creation having intrinsic value and those having mere use value. Rather, ever creature of God has intrinsic value as well as use value, when we choose to put ourselves to the use of others in Christian love. The most beautiful lives have been the lives of saints—though often not lives filled with wealth, length, or lack of suffering. People are unfulfilled when we are not of use to our friends, family, neighbors, communities, and humanity—but we are unhappy when treated as less-than others of God’s creation and not given the time to explore with our bodies, minds and souls the beautiful things at within our grasp, whether in silence and solitude or together with others.
Daniel J. Shevock
Link to the image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beatificacion_Monse%C3%B1or_Romero_(17984373076).jpg
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