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It is not our instinct that decides what we find pleasing, but our mind, this vague feeling somewhere inside of us. We perceive something as enchanting when it bewitches us, captivates us, takes our breath away; when it captures our gaze, pleases our ears. There’s this cave painting: two crimson hunters and an equally crimson warthog, in the limestone mountains of Maros-Pangkep, South Indonesia; there’s Sandro Botticelli’s Venus in Firenze; E lucevan le stelle by Giangiacomo Puccini; or a frosty morning, alone on the pasture, dew on the meadow, cow bells ringing in the distance, fog at the foot of the Dolomite Alps, early rays of sun clearing the haze.

Beauty is a matter of taste! Oh, what a simple sentence that so often slips out without thought! Only a fool would actually mean it.

The opposite is true, and whoever says such a thing has no taste whatsoever. Of course, it is subject to the changing spirit of the time what we humans generally perceive as beautiful. Sometimes a zeitgeisty creator is ahead of everybody else; explorers of the present get to define the status quo, and art historians ponder what might once have been in style. And yet, it is not this vile sense of volatile beauty we shall talk about here.

One mental level above lies quite a different kind of fascinating veil of beauty, one that has remained steadfast through the millennia. It is certainly difficult to say why such everlasting fascination never ceases to fascinate; why beauty—of course, it’s never too soon to quote Oscar Wilde, so quote him we shall—is the only thing that time cannot harm. It is a question that has puzzled the greatest thinkers of all times. Let’s see what Wilde has to say next: “Philosophies fall away like sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons.”

Some of the aphorisms often attributed to Wilde are unshakeable, others fall apart quite quickly when given deeper thought. Which is, however, no reason to withhold them here: “The secret of life is solely in the search for the beautiful.” Is it though? “Beauty has nothing to do with truth and morality.” Really? No, not really, but who wants to quibble in the face of such aphorismic force? And then again, it’s all true after all, because these sayings, breezily phrased as they are, defy verisimilitude in a seductively nonchalant way. “The only beautiful things […] are the things that do not concerns us,” Wilde writes, meaning that beauty must, of course, always have something reckless about it, never be moralising.

Or, to quote Friedrich Nietzsche, who tends to always be right and utters yet another touching truth when he writes,

Whenever we speak of this kind of beauty, the everlasting one, we mean old masonry with ivy growing up.

We mean the things once created that humankind is not willing to allow to break down; the things to which an architect, with a delicate sense of past, present and future alike, adds modern yet timeless elements, thereby pushing them into the light even more. We mean the house that humans, while building them, cleverly embedded in nature; the alpine chalet, close to the rock shrouded in fog, that feels like it has always been there, created by higher powers before we little earthlings even thought of erecting them. Almost as if the noble idea of us humans making sense as part of nature was real and reasonable.

This beauty— true beauty—must by no means be mistaken for perfection! Perfection is boring. A mere façade.

Plastic. A bumbling attempt at imitation. In this respect, westerners had better learn from the Japanese. Brush up their wabi-sabi, this aesthetic principle a definition of which our words may at best approximate.

Wabi-sabi, that’s the crack that lends the hand-shaped teacup its character; that’s, as architect/ artist Leonard Koren phrases it, a philosophy of humility. It’s the magic of imperfect, impermanent, incomplete things. It’s just there when you see or feel it. It’s the opposite of being cluttered; the opposite of mass taste (which is mostly quite tasteless, to be honest). It’s the absence of frills. Koren writes that everything that exists has its right. For him, wabi-sabi is “deep, multidimensional, elusive” and means to allow and celebrate vulnerability. It’s beauty in its most captivating form. Bewitching, breathtaking, enchanting our ears.

Which brings us to Friedrich Schiller, who has luckily gifted us with, in addition to his plays, thoughts on the present subject in discussion. Schiller added dignity and grace to the concept. He distinguished man-made beauty from grace as given by nature, only to then converge the two of them again. Beauty has admirers, he explains; but grace gathers lovers around it. Schiller tackles two things that fight inside us as apparent opponents: emotion and reason. In this, his arguments are sounder than Wilde’s, who is of course, quite charmingly, a stranger to all reason. In claiming that the synthesis of both is united in a beautiful soul, Schiller proves to be very Japanese—duty and inclination in harmony. Invoking Botticelli’s Venus as an example, Schiller describes what he deems dignified grace. Not all beauty is graceful, but all grace is beautiful. And grace, well, it presupposes morality because it can only be achieved through freedom, and because the fight for freedom is a moral one. Otherwise, freedom would be nothing. And certainly not beautiful.

We should dare to strive for beauty—the dignified, graceful kind. The kind worth fighting for.

Lenz Koppelstätter