Author: Will Turner
At the beginning of my Christmas break, I stopped by my high school to say hi to a couple of old friends and my favorite teacher, Mr. D. During our conversation, Mr. D. said “do not judge your personhood on your abilities as a thinker.” If I am being completely honest, that is the metric that I have held myself to for as long as I can remember. However, I realized recently that thinking can only get you so far, especially considering my special fondness for the medium of music.
Will Toledo of Car Seat Headrest writes quite eloquently about this topic, about how beautifully music speaks to a person, without needing to make an appeal to reason. He talks especially poetically about this topic in “Beach Life-in-Death,” the second song off of Twin Fantasy, an album first released in 2011 and rereleased in 2018. The line goes “And it was my favorite scene / I couldn’t tell you what it means / But it meant something to me.” In this case, Will Toledo is making an aesthetic argument, an argument for the usefulness of beauty as a guiding moral principle, that despite not knowing what it means, it still has aesthetic quality to him. That is the wonderful part of beauty, and so strange about aestheticism. Beauty speaks to some strange, purely emotional part of the brain, which is why it is such a beautiful concept itself. This is also why an attempt at rationalizing it as a logically proven moral principle is such a strange process. However, this does not render it useless, and it is only strange given our current episteme. A thinker’s episteme when considering logical reason is based on syllogism and rational observation of the world. Beauty cannot be put into the form “if x and y, then z,” and neither can it be quantified like rational observation can. In order to take beauty into account, one must widen their episteme to allow for human emotion, the farthest thing from an objective, observable fact of the world. Thus, a person must reject the mindset of a thinker in order to properly take into account the incredible ability of beauty to make a person more human. A person cannot be purely logical, otherwise what would distinguish them from a robot. Not purely emotional either, otherwise what would distinguish them from an animal. Instead, what makes a person a person is the incredible ability for them to engage with both an emotional and logical side of their self. This is exactly the reason why aestheticism is such an astounding argument, its incredibly reasoned approach taking into making emotion reasonably matter, justifying a person’s existence itself.
This argument is very much informed by John Gardner’s Grendel, a retelling of the ancient epic Beowulf from the point of view of the villain, Grendel. In the book, Gardner less than subtly shows the power of different philosophical points of view, with Grendel representing nihilism, killing characters like the storyteller, who himself represents traditional, dogmatic religion, showing the power of nihilism over those other points of view. At the end of the day, Grendel can only be stopped by Beowulf, the representation of existentialism. Along the way, Grendel sets his sights on killing Wealtheow, the representation of aestheticism. However, rather than kill her, he lets her live, proving that, despite nihilism’s superior logical integrity, because aestheticism does not pretend to be purely rational, they can still both exist as worthy philosophies. Hence, aestheticism as a worthy, illogical philosophy based on human emotion rather than human reason. Thank you, Mr. D, very cool.
Will Turner | Captain Teague | KXSU Music Reporter