It is not only when debating the amendments to the Embryo Protection Act that we are challenged to decide on and define human nature, but also when we acquiesce to the radical uglification of our environment.
We redefine our understanding of human nature when we acquiesce to living our life in an environment progressively devoid of beauty; when we find ourselves living in a state which does not give beauty any significant space and role in our lives.
But what does beauty have to do with definitions of human nature? Isn’t beauty a question of taste, something subjective, thus in itself superficial, ephemeral, and ultimately a luxury? Now one might say that to answer and counter this impression it is surely of no use reminding oneself that beauty, at the very beginning of western philosophy, had been thought of as highly as goodness and truth.
For after all, these concepts have also lost all prestige, honour and esteem. Don’t we live in the post-factual world of no truths where (loud) opinion is the criterion of knowledge and significance, in politics and society at large? We seem to have lost beauty, goodness and truth when we gained the absolute right to opine and then transformed opinion into the absolute criterion of knowledge, granting to the radically subjective an absolute reach.
When beauty is pushed out, society becomes generally lukewarm, and indifference and cynicism reign. The soil for genuine human living is destroyed
On the other hand though, it is a fact that at the beginning of western philosophy beauty was a highly political and important concern. In his quest for a just State, Plato, for instance, devised a plan for a polis that is structured in such a way so as to ensure that all human beings – whatever their role in life, male or female – are granted the appropriate space to fulfil their true human potential.
What is that? The most basic characteristic of us humans is, paraphrasing Plato, that we are ‘see-ers of beauty’. Beautiful things attract us because we, as human, have the capacity to see beauty, and we are moved by it.
Humans are moved by an erotic urge that is at the root of the most basic and truthful form of education, namely the pursuit of beauty for the sake of true fulfilment. Not everyone ‘likes’ (or better ‘loves’) the same thing, to be sure, but everyone likes something because in it she/he sees beauty. Humans are thus migrants of beauty, or migrants to beauty; never static but driven and in motion towards the very thing itself.
Whatever stifles that urge, that drive, that motion, is therefore antithetical with human nature; it is corrosive, sick and dangerous. Whatever annihilates the drive in us to see more, to know more, each according to her/his capacity, is thus nothing but opium oppressing the properly human drive for more, better and for truth; it is gangrene.
The suffocation of beauty thus goes hand in hand with social and communal indifference, with disregard for values, with political cynicism and with the pursuit of mere gratification masked as the apex of fulfilment. When beauty is pushed out, society becomes generally lukewarm, and indifference and cynicism reign. The soil for genuine human living is destroyed.
Some might say: but, why should I care about what Plato thought? Seers of beauty we are not; this is not what defines who we are. We are modern, after all. I would reply: So, what does? You may be right: let us forget (even more) about Plato. But, then, what is it that according to you defines or best describes our human nature? Who do you think we (you) are?
I believe that the reply I’d get would be: we are not that; we are not seers of beauty... So what!
In essence: Who cares.
Manuel Vella Rago holds a PhD in philosophy and is a visiting lecturer at the Department of International Relations of the University of Malta.