On Suffering & the Transcendence of Beauty
How beauty can help us navigate through darkness
As a general rule on writing, when it comes to world events, I’m inclined to follow the sentiment of friend and fellow Substacker Phoebe Maltz Bovy: just let me niche. But the outbreak of more cruelty and hostilities abroad has turned my mind to the sombre corners of this newsletter’s subject. As Remembrance Day approaches, in this post I will consider the nature of suffering and the role that beauty can play in providing consolation. Also, I will look at the dangers at risk when art falls short of achieving this goal, causing our minds to drift unmoored in darkness.
THE NECESSITY OF MEANING
My life has, so far, been blessed with generous peace, health and good fortune. But like any person, I have had moments of suffering, big and small. The most tragic loss came for me five years ago when my brother died unexpectedly, leaving behind his wife and two young children. It was the first time that I had to face a violent tragedy of such personal significance. In the years since, I have benefited from reflecting on the nature of grief, as well as how beauty can help to find meaning in it.
Aside from accepting its inevitability, possibly the hardest lesson to learn about suffering is how to avoid it from turning into bitterness and resentment. On this subject there may be no greater authority than Dr. Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who wrote about his experiences in Nazi concentration camps, after which he developed the therapeutic practice known as logotherapy (healing through the pursuit of meaning). Along with love and purposeful work, Frankl believed that suffering was one of the few paths that can lead to meaning in life. And meaning, as he observed among his fellow prisoners, often made the difference between the will to live and the resignation to die.
Frankl’s polemical book Man's Search for Meaning was a refutation of Sigmund Freud’s popular idea that people will necessarily succumb to a base animal nature if they are deprived of their needs and dignity. In contrast, Frankl found that those confined to the concentration camps had an amazing ability to rise above their hopeless conditions and maintain their humanity. He noted that prisoners and, surprisingly, guards alike were capable of great acts of kindness and beauty, so long as they had a sense of decency and meaning in their lives.
Frankl believed that the key to finding meaning in suffering is to identify a purpose for enduring it. When this is done, suffering transcends into sacrifice, making it worthwhile to bear the costs. The reasons, of course, will vary in every situation: The suffering of the pregnant and labouring mother is for the life of her child, and the death of a soldier is for the preservation of his comrades. Even in the most desperate circumstances, the possibility of a future beyond suffering can provide sufficient hope to endure it—a belief made more potent by love’s seeming ability to reach beyond death.
THE TRANSCENDENCE OF BEAUTY
Over the ages, artists have explored in great depth the difficult nature of suffering. It is the subject of every tragedy, and it permeates painting, poetry and music. The reason is simple: art has tremendous power to teach us valuable lessons about suffering.
In this task beauty is essential. As with goodness and truth, beauty has the special ability to focus our minds on suffering. This is necessary because our natural inclination is to turn away from the discomfort of tragic events and negative emotions. That tendency notwithstanding, our subconscious seems to know the value gained in experiencing suffering at a distance, so that the hard costs can be avoided while the lessons are still learned. All that is required is the work of genuine sympathy. In this endeavour art is an unparalleled teacher.
Striking the right balance when depicting suffering is delicate: too little beauty and you risk revelling in the obscene; too much and you risk glorifying it. In both cases the sense of meaning is in danger of being lost. The long tradition of crucifixion paintings demonstrates this tension well. For example, Matthias Grünewald’s depiction shows a very realistic, almost gruesome portrayal of Christ’s suffering, but without revealing much meaning beyond.
In contrast, Raphael’s beautiful rendition below strives to highlight the sacrificial element at the core of this important religious story. Though the composition is similar to Grünewald’s, there are key differences which elevate it. Firstly, the eminence of Christ is highlighted by positioning his body above the other figures, whose mourning seems consoled by the sacrifice’s significance. Meanwhile, Jesus is granted peaceful dignity by leaving the full grimness of his execution out-of-frame, allowing the larger meaning of his resurrection to take centre stage. As with other great, consoling works of art, part of the message conveyed is that suffering is never without end, and its resolution can bring us value of unexpected significance.
A somewhat complicated truth about suffering is that it can also bring greater depth to periods of joy, so long as bitterness and resentment have not taken hold. The philosopher Immanuel Kant saw the connection directly with aesthetics, writing in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Viewpoint:
Between one pleasure and another, pain must take its place…through pain alone do we gain the feeling of being alive; without it we would be torpid.
Viktor Frankl reflects on this paradox in his memoir by noting his renewed appreciation of life immediately following liberation from the camps. And though this did not justify his pain or the loss of his family, the fact of it was undeniable and helped to bring him consolation. He rejected the unmerited guilt that often accompanies this emotion.
This idea is explored in music to great effect, where dark and joyful themes are intertwined with the result of enhanced meaning. For example, in Beethoven’s seventh symphony the sheer exuberance of the third and fourth movements might seem almost frivolous were they not preceded by the sombre mood of the second movement, where a dark presence has been rendered in sound so beautiful that it seems to almost enter the room as a being. Listen and see if you agree:
A clip from Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, 2nd movement (circa 1812)—suffering rendered with great beauty
Music, like other art forms, has the power to explore and resolve such contrasting themes. This seemingly magical ability helps transmit meaning to us by removing the arbitrariness that otherwise marks our lives. If a piece of music can take a troubling melody and beautifully bring it to a consoling end, perhaps we, too, can do the same with the moments of suffering in our lives.
AVOIDING THE TRAP OF VICARIOUS FANTASY
Artists and philosophers have long noted the distinction between imagination and fantasy, which, though subtle, can mark the difference between sincere sympathy and obscene vicariousness when engaging art. To help explain, consider the definition of imagination as offered by Immanuel Kant. He viewed it to be the contemplation of an aesthetic object free of any desire to utilize it, like the feeling one has when holding a newborn baby. Nothing is desired in that moment other than to behold the child’s beauty.
Fantasy, on the other hand, takes over when the distance between the viewer and the subject collapses, and one’s personal desire takes over to engage vicariously, as with the pornographic image. As a consequence, the work’s subject becomes objectified, made replaceable and devoid of individual humanity (a phenomenon explained in my previous post as the I-You vs. I-It relationship).
The philosopher Sir Roger Scruton observed the pervasiveness of fantasy in modern depictions of violence, contrasting it with the restraint exhibited by Greek playwrights who conducted their scenes of violence off-stage to maintain the distance necessary to achieve sympathetic imagination. In his book Modern Culture, Scruton postulates:
A morbid person may reflect endlessly on death and suffering. The image of agony is often before his mind. At the same time fear, sympathy and the respect for human life makes his desire abhorrent to him. He is not a torturer or a murderer…He looks instead for surrogates: …the realistic deaths and dismemberments in the films of Quentin Tarantino, and then—at the limit—the ‘snuff movie’ in which actual death is delivered but from another sphere, removed from all prevention.
In addition to movies and artwork, modern people are bombarded with graphic images in the media, both journalistic and social. As we dutifully inform ourselves of troubling world events, we sometimes fall into the trap of vicariousness: mistaking our feelings with the emotions of those who are actually suffering. When taken to this extreme, we displace the subject’s humanity with our own desires, seeking self approbation through a detached compassion for the oppressed. But this feeling is made fleeting because it is gained without true cost or even the work of deep sympathy. This then demands of the observer a never ending consumption1 of dehumanizing images, which can never satisfy our deeper, more noble hunger for greater understanding and moral being.
Sir Roger warned how the realism of photography and video can easily drift into this subversive pattern, comparing gratuitous violence to sexual pornography:
Fantasies of violence have a similar function: they obliterate the human person, by enlarging the human body, until it fills the foreground of our thoughts. This too involves a malignant shift of focus, and this too is a profanation. By focusing on the tortured body, we degrade the embodied person.
While it’s tempting to believe that it doesn’t really matter what we view or listen to, most of us feel at our core that it does. We sense that there are real consequences to our character and mental well-being when we engage with the world improperly, even when it seems to satisfy some primal urge or deliver important information with visceral urgency. That is the truth to bear in mind when deciding on what art and media deserves our attention.
REFLECTIONS ON SUFFERING
When it comes to the tragedy of my own brother’s death, how did beauty help me? Perhaps most, my grief was aided by the rituals observed at his funeral. And while many people today prefer to grieve privately and hold a less sorrowful “celebration of life” weeks after the fact, my sister-in-law chose wisely to hold a traditional service a few days following his death, one that reflected my brother’s religious beliefs and embraced the raw grief of his unexpected loss. Through the beauty of the church, the hymns sung, and even the respectful clothes worn by those in attendance, my brother was granted the dignity that had abandoned him at his darkest hour. Compared to that graceful act of transcendence, what meaning could have possibly come from observing the mere unfiltered, physical details of his death?
Regarding my profession: it’s true that buildings, too, can help transfigure suffering to the plane of sacrifice. To accomplish this, architects must aim for the same goal as other artists, forgoing the urge to dwell in ugliness or glorified fantasy as a shortcut to cheap emotion. The best examples, like the Saadian Tombs in Morocco shown above, use beauty skillfully so that suffering transcends to peaceful serenity. As is typical, Islamic architecture is particularly apt at demonstrating the eternal character of our greatest hopes. By using fractal, geometric patterns, it reveals an ordered world where each individual element is a necessary part of the greater whole. Adding to this effect, the delicate arabesque detailing can be imagined to reflect our finest aspirations, held protected high above us by ever-standing, stoic marble columns. Here is a place where one can feel at peace with death.
In honour of Remembrance Day, I’ll leave the last words with Ivor Gurney, a young soldier writing from the trenches of France during the Great War2:
O may these days of pain,
These wasted-seeming days,
Somewhere reflower again
With scent and savour of praise.
Draw out of memory all bitterness
Of night with Thy sun’s rays.
“Consumption” is the right word and the one usually used to describe this phenomenon. Consuming is what we do to satisfy our appetites, not our higher aims. No one “consumes” time with their family or a masterpiece of fine art.
Excerpted from his poem “Song of Pain & Beauty: To M.M.S.”
Explained very well about how beauty and emotion affects one and makes one pause and examine it this thoroughly.
Very well written