I completed a thesis once that (ultimately) found ‘statements’ were rhetorically loaded gestures successful merely in differentiating one part of the world of experience from another. If this sounds like garbled nonsense that might also be a (less constructive) way of saying the same thing.
Put another way, I found a world of ‘nonsense’ upon which generations of people sifted out their own sensible gestures or statements which ultimately only made sense because of how they did the sifting. I have perhaps been trying to recover from this discovery ever since.
The problem is that to do that sifting – to make those ‘statements’ – a lot of conviction is required. One might say that one needs to believe that what we experience as ‘nonsense’ does have an underlying logic. A divine plan, in other words – something transcendental that is, in the religious frame. Not limit ‘religion’ to the organised variety, or ‘faith’ to a big beard in the sky.
Having quite thoroughly deconstructed myself through the 90s, pulling together some faith is a slow process. Though it is getting easier. A gift of age as I am getting grumpier, more bound to the ground and habituated to the world.
If you believe in a divine plan, beauty is relatively easy to explain: the divine plan has a shape or sound that is revealed in moments of beauty. What we appreciate as beautiful is the clearing (sifting) away of errors and chaos, and a coming close to how things are supposed to be.
Without that conviction, something else has to step in to explain the pleasure that beauty gives us. Rather than communing with the divine there is a recognition in the experience of beauty that is less emphatic but not less significant.
There is some legwork to do here before the train of thought falls too far into a morass. ‘Beauty’ is in the eye of the beholder – this is a favoured (post)post-modern assertion which succinctly undermines valuations of beauty. Relegated to individual consumer choice, the ‘eye-of-the-beholder’ permits, on the one hand, relegation of beauty into a nice-to-have (available to the wealthy), and on the other, categorically denies evidence of collective experience. There can be an uncanny synchrony in people’s judgements of what is beautiful. Denying this is a way (like Margaret Thatcher) to deny the existence of society.
There will, no doubt, be many liberal people who will be horrified by that conjunction. The eye-of-the-beholder argument is intended to give permission for diversity subjectivity. Somewhere along the lines of: I don’t like/understand it, but if they like it they are welcome too. I understand this as the difference between permission and celebration; freedom to vs freedom for.
Neoliberal ideology protects ‘freedom to’: freedom to use/exploit private assets, freedom to purchase anything on the internet, freedom to fleece the ignorant, freedom to be homeless… if you choose.