by Sherman J. Clark
In a previous essay, Beatrice 2.0, I argued that a love of beauty can guide our desires and help us flourish amid distraction and commodification. But what hinders us from letting beauty lead us in those ways? Beauty abounds—if we can see it. Not only in art, but in sports and music, in craftsmanship and science, in mathematics and everyday life. The trouble is not scarcity—or not merely scarcity—but our own habits of mind.
What hides beauty
We may be able to develop the capacity to see and cherish beauty. But that may first require us to confront a set of obstacles—internal obstacles, patterns of thought and feeling that make it hard to direct our desires where they would most nourish us. Some are what contemporary philosophers call intellectual vices—things that cloud our thinking. Some mirror what older traditions call sins or moral vices: habits of thought and action that mark us for judgment. We can think of these as barriers to flourishing, vices in the eudaimonist rather than moral sense. These are attitudes that keep us from attending to beauty. If we want a label for this sort of inquiry, it would be “neo-Aristotelian eudaimonist virtue ethics.” But elaborate philosophical labels won’t make us happy or guard us against exploitation and commodification. Beauty, however, might—if we can let it.
To that end, we can tentatively identify four internal obstacles—vices, if you will—that can prevent us from nurturing a love of beauty and letting that love help us thrive: impatience, laziness, arrogance, and, more obscure-sounding but perhaps most destructive of beauty, what Aristotle called micropsychia, which we can translate as smallness of soul.
Our impatience is profitable to those who want to keep us grasping at the next thing they can sell us; but it can prevent us from attending to what might matter most. The first few moments of a Bach fugue are lovely, but the transcendent order emerges when we hear it through, and then again, and begin to catch the patterns. Shakespeare’s language can seem strange and off-putting at first, but rereading can reward us with nearly shocking depth and beauty—if our impatience and lack of attention didn’t prevent us from making that effort.
Good and beautiful things often take not just time but also effort. Laziness, what Dante and other called sloth, what some call a lack of persistence or work ethic, can prevent us from seeing through on potentially promising efforts to see and appreciate beauty. The internet is full of pitches that promise inspiration without effort; most do not deliver. Many good and beautiful things take some work to do well or even appreciate.
Arrogance—not in the sense of pride alone, but in the conviction that we already know what counts as beautiful—can block our appreciation for what might inspire us or help us ward of exploitation. Self-satisfied arrogance can make us smug curators of our own narrow taste. Algorithms reward it, feeding us more of what we already like, assuring us that our playlists, our aesthetics, are the best. But we don’t know what we are missing.
Smallness of soul, what Aristotle called micropsychia may sound like an obscure vice, but a version of it is perhaps the most emblematic of our age. Aristotle described the person afflicted by micropsychia is one who, although actually worthy of great honors and capable of noble deeds, fails to claim or accept the honors that are truly due. They undervalue themselves and shrink from the scope of action that their abilities merit.
The version of micropsychia that now plagues us most is the insistence on emphasizing goods that can be counted and measured—a narrow emphasis on the bottom line, sometimes manifested as cynical sneering at what aspires to elevate. We need food and drink, and we can benefit from money and prestige; Aristotle recognized that. But he recognized also that we are worthy of more, that more is our due as human beings, and we need more truly to thrive. Only small souls sneer at beauty and that to which it can help us aspire.
These are examples, but cultivating philokalia—a love of beauty—cannot be reduced to lists or rules. It is nuanced and challenging. As Aristotle understood, virtues can slide into vices, and what appears as a weakness might sometimes prove a strength. Take impatience, for example. On the one hand, it can prevent us from sticking with things that might reveal beauty. But a restless unwillingness to be satisfied with the empty goods of our world can also drive us to seek something better. Or pride. Yes, it can ossify into smugness, but it can also manifest as the necessary confidence to trust one’s aesthetic judgment when it goes against the crowd. Even what looks like sloth might sometimes be necessary receptivity. We don’t need Walt Whitman to tell us that someone seemingly just loafing, as he put it, might be more available to beauty than someone frantically photographing every sunset for Instagram.
This challenging complexity means we need what we might call aesthetic phronesis: practical wisdom about beauty. Phronesis is judgment, balance, good sense about what capacities to nurture and how to put them to work in a good life. And this means not just countering vices but cultivating virtues—again in the eudaimonist rather than necessarily moral sense.
What reveals beauty
If we aspire to thrive, and we believe a love of beauty can help, we need not just overcome internal obstacle. We also need to ask the affirmative question: what capacities are useful? What virtues help us see and appreciate beauty? Four seem essential: attention, resilience, humility, and a form of courage corresponding to what Aristotle called macropsychia, greatness of soul.
Attention may be the most vital—and among the hardest to nurture in our contemporary aesthetic environment. The attention economy profits from our scattered focus, but beauty requires something else—a quality of presence that resists being harvested. Beauty often unfolds over time, in Bach fugues that reveal their architecture only to those who stay with them, in novels whose depths emerge on second reading, in friendships that deepen from surface charm to soul-sustaining connection. Beauty asks us to focus, listen, and attend.
And resilience—the ability to keep at it, even after disappointment. Beauty is elusive, and so it often eludes. Instead of the joy of surfing, we may find the frustrating exhaustion of being unable to catch a wave. The math in which we sought order may offer instead the insurmountable challenge of concepts we cannot grasp. Without resilience, these experiences can make us cynical, tempted to turn to easier and seemingly more solid pleasures on sale in our feeds. But resilience is memory—remembering the times beauty did arrive, trusting it will come again, staying available to wonder.
And humility. Aesthetic humility means accepting that our taste is not exhaustive, that beauty exists in forms we don’t yet recognize. Think about the first time you heard opera—or perhaps hip hop, depending on the trajectory of your own musical journey. Or the first time you saw a hockey game, or a new and different sort of film.
A crucial aspect of this aesthetic humility is a tolerance for incompleteness and ambiguity. Beauty often arrives in fragments, glimpses, moments that don’t resolve into neat meaning. The sunset that moves us can’t be fully captured or explained. The poem that haunts us resists paraphrase. Walking through a cathedral, we might be moved in ways we cannot fully understand, let alone explain. In a culture that seems to demand that everything be quantifiable and PowerPoint-able, this openness allows us what may be the core experience of philokalia—being moved by glimpses of beauty beyond out present ken.
Most challenging might be what we might call greatness of soul, what Aristotle called macropsychia. This is of course the counterpart to micropsychia, smallness of soul; but it is more than that. And at the heart of this form of greatness is a form of courage. To let yourself be moved by beauty requires dropping your guard. We so often feel the need to preface enthusiasm with disclaimers: “I know it’s cheesy, but…” We’ve been trained to mock sincere enthusiasm, to armor ourselves with irony. It may look like sophistication; but it is a form of fear. And it calls for courage—courage against cynicism and smallness of soul.
What beauty builds
Beauty is not only an object toward which our cultivated virtues are directed; it can also be a source of virtue itself. To encounter beauty is often to be changed by it, to find that it leaves us with new habits of heart and mind. This is not automatic, nor the same for everyone, but beauty has the power to shape us as we shape our attention to meet it. Again, we can identify four examples—capacities that a love of beauty can help us nurture: hope, temperance, humility, and a kind of connectedness or fellow-feeling, which we might simply call community.
Perhaps the most vital capacity that a love of beauty can nurture is hope, or what we might better call the ability aspire rather than reduce. Encounters with beauty open onto horizons larger than our immediate situation. They hint that something more is possible, that the present moment is not all there is. In this way, beauty cultivates a stance of receptivity to possibility.
Beauty can also cultivate temperance. Unlike mere physical pleasure or the ego boost of fame or prestige, it can enrich rather than inflame. Beauty can in this way educate desire, helping us choose sustaining satisfactions over compulsive cravings. A physicist on the verge of a beautiful breakthrough, a surfer watching waves curl in invitation, a craftsperson honing skills and sensing something emerging. It is harder to sell hollow nonsense to folks like that—at least in those moments. This is temperance not as repression but as liberation: the ability to locate and delight in what endures rather than chase what evaporates.
And humility. If humility is already among the virtues that enable us to perceive beauty—an openness to what we do not yet recognize—then beauty itself can amplify that quality. Awe, as psychologists note, makes us feel small but expanded, both less central and more connected. The stars remind us of our insignificance, yet in the same glance we feel drawn into their vastness. Beauty can unsettle our ego and situate us in a larger whole.
And that larger whole can mean community; beauty can call us to fellowship. We point out a sunset, send a poem to a friend, nudge the person next to us when a player makes an impossible shot. The impulse to share is almost as strong as the experience itself. Beauty shows us that aspiration expands when it circulates, that wonder connects as it inspires.
These dispositions can be cultivated by other means—by philosophy, faith, mindfulness, or even force of will. But beauty offers a uniquely immediate teacher. It can call us to hope, reorient our appetites, remind us of our place, and bring us together. Beauty is not only what we perceive through cultivated habits of mind; it is also what helps make us more fully capable of thriving. Aesthetic phronesis is thus not about becoming refined or cultured in any precious sense. It is about developing the capacities that let beauty enrich our lives. Or so we can hope.
What about justice?
This hope ought also to generate a concern. Many of those capacities that might help us nurture this potentially enriching love of beauty require conditions that not everyone enjoys. Time to linger, safety to drop our guard, exposure to beauty in its various forms, communities that model aesthetic attention—these are not equally distributed. A parent working three jobs has little time for patient attention. A student in an underfunded school may never encounter the beauties that would teach these virtues. This is why the question of aesthetic phronesis leads inevitably to questions of justice. We cannot simply exhort people to develop these capacities while accepting a world that denies them the conditions to do so. Thus the task ahead, and the subject of my next essay, is not just personal but political: how to democratize not just beauty itself but the very possibility of developing the capacities to receive it.