The Aesthetic Duty

To fully understand the Aesthetic Duty it is important to understand what Beauty is, since understanding this leads to the central reason for the Aesthetic Duty.

Beauty is, above everything else, undefinable. What is beautiful to me may not be to the next person. Our relationship with beauty is very much a subjective thing. The important thing is why. Why do you find something beautiful when the next person does not?

Take a work of art as an example. It is possible to break it down into subject matter, the use of colour and shade, the way that the brush stroke captures a scene. It is possible to de-construct the final piece into its constituent parts. But in doing this we do not get to understand why something is beautiful to us. We also do not understand why it is beautiful to us but to someone else it is not.

There is no absolute Form of beauty, in the Platonic sense. There is not some overarching Form from which all beauty is distilled particular examples of. If this was the case then everyone would find the same things beautiful.

Beauty is very much a subjective thing, a very individual reaction to something. No matter the rationale that we place on it, the reaction is personal to ourselves.

The reason for the individualistic reaction to something is because the reaction in question is very much an emotional one. When we find something beautiful we are actually having an emotional response to the thing in question - whether it be a person, an occasion, a work of art.

Emotions are very much a private thing, something which is personal to us. We may share similar emotional responses with other people, but the actual emotional response is very much individual and personal. No two people will have the same exact emotional response to something. We may have a similar broad-category emotional response (like being happy) but the actual response will be different.

When we say something is beautiful we are having a positive emotional response to something, as opposed to a negative/ugly response.

And this is the key to the Aesthetic Duty. Positive emotions are better than negative ones. When we have positive emotions we feel good, as opposed to feeling bad from negative emotions.

It is better to feel good than it is to feel bad. Positive emotions can put a spring in our step, can make our world seem brighter, can give us a positive outlook upon life.

If this is the effect of positive responses to things then it follows that it is important to surround yourself with beauty. Whether it is things, people, places, sounds, smells is unimportant. The important thing is that we are exposed to things that give us positive responses.

Surrounding ourselves with beautiful things means surrounding ourselves with things that give us positive emotions, which in turn make us feel good within.

Sometimes we must be exposed to negative emotions. An everyday example could be our working life. Presuming that we do not get a positive reaction from our working life, then it is important to try and turn it into one. This might be something which we enjoy about our work. It might be something which we can add to the working day which helps us endure the negative. Whatever it is, if we can identify the positive response we can help combat the negative.

The Aesthetic Duty is, therefore, to surround our lives with beautiful things, the things can give us positive emotional responses, which will make us feel good within. It is too easy to put up with the negatives and the things that make us feel bad within. In embracing the beautiful things we can combat this. We can strive to survive the negatives and live a life full of good things. Where possible we need to remove the negative, ugly things in our lives and replace them with beautiful things. Where we cannot do this we must try and find the hidden beauty within it so to try and make the ugly experience as beautiful as possible.

In removing the ugly things from our lives we can start to live a life where we feel good within, rather than having to put up with lives were we feel bad.