My wife’s cousin was visiting us recently from California, and when she came over to the kitchen island where my six-year old son was drawing, my ears perked up when she exclaimed “nice swastika!”
In a typical North American household this might have caused some alarm, but I’ve been married to a Hindu long enough that it seemed perfectly normal. I walked over to take a look at the drawing and was also impressed. My son had rendered an especially handsome temple.
Now of course there is a very different type of swastika which should never receive such praise. The history of how these two (the good and the bad) are connected is a very interesting and sordid one. The figure, itself, has existed in many different iterations across cultures and time, including in the Abrahamic and Dharmic faiths. Its adoption by the Nazis came about through a strange convergence of events, including a major archaeological discovery and the uncompensated services of a modern graphic designer. But for our purposes, we will be considering the swastika as an aesthetic test case, specifically one that will help us better understand the relationship between beauty and goodness.
BEAUTY & GOODNESS
On the one hand, a reasonable person can rationally understand that there’s nothing inherently evil embodied in the particular form of the swastika, as its pre-Nazi history indicates. But when viewing an object such as the beer stein above, it proves nearly impossible to set those dark associations aside. Though the aesthetic theories of Immanuel Kant would have us attempt to judge it disinterestedly, trying to find value in something so tainted simply exceeds our understanding of beauty’s limits, and therein lies a very interesting fact.1
The inability to judge without prejudice in this particular instance demonstrates the connection we inevitably make between beauty and goodness, which both represent forms of value judgments. Plato, for one, certainly saw these two qualities as intertwined, and they’ve long been held in Western thought to be amongst the core transcendentals—the properties of being. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe elegantly expressed the closeness of their relationship, writing:
The beautiful is not different from the good: The beautiful is the good which shows itself to us pleasingly veiled.
But as resonate as that lofty statement may be, it’s undeniably true that beauty also has the ability to deceive us. For what appears pleasant to the senses can at the same time conceal malignant character. As Leo Tolstoy writes in the The Kreutzer Sonata:
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. A handsome woman talks nonsense, you listen and hear not nonsense but cleverness. She says and does horrid things, and you see only charm.
DEGREES OF BEAUTY
To resolve this apparent contradiction, I believe it’s necessary to acknowledge that we speak of beauty in degrees. The first level you could call Beauty 1.0: the immediate reaction to those things we find appealing to the senses.2 When something is said to be beautiful in this way, we really mean that it is attractive at the cosmetic level. Advertisements usually stay within this shallow pool, seeking only to capture our attention long enough to secure a sale.
Beyond this initial appeal lies the potential for a deeper feeling: Beauty 2.0. In this version the subject of our attention inspires sustained contemplation—a desire to behold the thing within our presence and understand the secrets behind its attraction. A scenic view or a handsome building facade has this quality.
At the next and highest level, Beauty 3.0, we pair this sense of contemplative beauty to our greatest virtues and struggles, either implicitly (as with a Brahms symphony) or expressly (as with a Wagner opera). In religious traditions, this type of beauty transcends into the realm of the sacred, and it explains the reverence that Hindus feel for their ancient swastika. At the same time, we arrive at an explanation for why the Nazi’s hooked cross3 strikes us as profane: because its fake religiosity is ultimately at the service of evil.
When we register something as beautiful in the first and second sense, but find it conflicting in the third, the contradiction reveals a phenomenon that the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton dubbed as “false beauty.” One of his illustrative examples is the story of Salome, the woman attributed in the bible as responsible for the execution of John the Baptist, which she is said to have achieved deceitfully in reward for a beautiful dance. In the late nineteenth century her story found new life in the form of the modern “femme fatale,” and many artists have used the theme as an alluring, cautionary tale. Henri Regnault’s painting above skillfully captures the fascination that such false beauty can provoke.
GOODNESS IN EVERYDAY BEAUTY
But of course, clear and weighty moral lessons like murder and genocide are not the stuff of everyday aesthetics. So what, then, constitutes goodness in more typical experiences of beauty, like architecture?
Most directly we look for the good when there is a specific purpose behind the object in question. For example, a sleek bicycle with square wheels is hardly worth praising. Consequently, there is much thought in product design and architecture that the function of something should be expressed in its form so that the goodness of its use is apparent.
But the definition of goodness becomes more difficult to pin down when there is no clear purpose in mind. For instance, what function is the decoration on a Christmas tree other than to be delightful? And if you somehow bizarrely gave it one, it’s quite possible that the tree would cease to be appealing. As Immanuel Kant observed, the act of contemplation that beauty inspires seems to require the absence of purpose, even when there exists an obvious practical one, as with a wedding gown.
Perhaps the answer to this riddle lies within what Immanuel Kant described as “purposeless purposiveness,” a cryptic phrase only sounding like jargon because of the genuine mysteriousness behind the concept. The architect Christopher Alexander explored the phenomenon with great insight, observing that beauty emerges from the relationship of an object’s whole to its parts, which feeds the perception of an underlying, but unstated purpose.
This is similar to the observation that in music one note appears to necessarily follow the other in the creation of melody. Otherwise we perceive only noise. As Christopher Alexander noted in the case of architecture, this effect seems to occur with the presence of certain properties, including fractal scales, local symmetries, rhythm, and interlocking parts, among others.
In as much as an object creates this result without malevolent intent, it seems to me that it fulfills a necessary and good purpose, though unlike the kind of goodness we usually measure in terms of usefulness or moral standards. Beauty of this kind is what provides us with an enriching environment, one that seems ordered and meaningful, instead of chaotic and arbitrary, allowing us to feel at home in the world.
Perhaps viewing beauty in this way can help us take pleasure in all the subtle goodness that surrounds us, even as we struggle with life’s imperfect reality. At the same time, we would be wise to recognize the vulnerability of beauty’s highest plane so that we keep it unsullied by our darker inclinations. Of course, it is one of humanity’s greatest failings that there ever came to be an evil swastika, but maybe hope lies in knowing that there remains beauty and goodness beyond it.
This is based on a similar example given by Dr. Mikolaj Slawkowski-Rode in his lecture at the In Pursuit of Beauty academic conference, September 2023.
This concept is borrowed from a similar line of thinking regarding music put forward by John McWhorter in his NY Times essay “Follow this Music to Joy”.
Interestingly, the Nazis didn’t actually use the term swastika, which comes from the Sanskrit language through the Dharmic religions. Instead they said “hooked cross” (“hakenkreuz“). Perhaps English translators were eager to obfuscate the Christian connection.