Beauty and Meaning As Energy, Force, Spirit, Presence

Beauty is not a quality as much as an energy or force. It’s like desire, a magnetic attraction that draws. Its goal is union, an intimate relationship. Meaning, too, is an energy or force. It’s like value or purpose, it demands a response. Beauty and meaning, then, amount to relationship and responsibility. Neither are qualities in the artwork as much as energies. 

It’s the artist then, energized by some impression, who expresses its inner nature, and sets this energy in motion. Taylor (1928) writes:

“During the period of its composition the work of art is an activity or functioning of the artist’s faculties. Nor does it cease to be an activity when, completed, it works upon those to whom it appeals. As it was an energizing of its creator, so it continues as an energy affecting the hearer or beholder. Its pleasing or satisfying qualities did not become static or passive upon its completion; they continue active or dynamic in their impressions or effects, and are still to be regarded as energies . . . alive and moving” (p. 210).

Where Taylor personified the energy or force and gave it life, Mather, Jr (1935) made it spirit: “We are actually dealing with the transmission of a highly organized energy through the work of art as a conductor, or, more generally, as the rendezvous where the spirit of the artist and that of art lover may commune” (p. 40).

Steiner (1989) finally identifies the energy-force-spirit as presence. This transmission of energy, this rendezvous of spirit is mediated by God. “Any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence . . . the experience of aesthetic meaning . . . infers the necessary possibility of the ‘real presence’” (p. 3).

Beauty and meaning, then, are not the energies or forces of physics, but the movement of transcendent spirit. “When we come face to face with the text and work of art or music,” Steiner continues, it “is a wager on transcendence” (p. 4).

“The act of reception or internalization of significant forms [art] within us, is a metaphysical and, in the last analysis, a theological one. The ascription of beauty to truth and meaning is . . . a piece of theology. It is a theology . . . which underwrites the presumption of creativity, of signification in our encounters with text, with music, with art. The meaning of meaning is a transcendent postulate” (Steiner, 1989, p. 216).

Reference:

Mather, Jr. F. J. (1935). Concerning beauty. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Steiner, G. (1989). Real presences. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Taylor, H. O. (1928). Human values and verities. Edinburgh: R&R Clark.