I’ll be teaching the educational philosophy course during J-term. It’s a course I enjoy teaching and one I think, when it connects with students, yields enduring understanding. Recently a former student wrote me to share his frustration at the lack of an educational philosophy at his church, and the effects it has on the practice of Christian education. It’s gratifying when we see evidence that students have cultivated discernment and understand the importance of educational foundations—theory and philosophy.
The philosophical questions related to aesthetics—beauty—can be a challenge for students, and for the teacher. The starting point for conversations on the question tend to begin with the assumption that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Ultimately, it’s a matter too subjective to allow one to plant one’s feet and insist one way or another. Yet it’s a question that moves quickly from the philosophical to the pragmatic when students grapple with the question in the context of worship and liturgy.
I have one friend who is enthralled at the beauty in motorcycles, those machines that can invoke feelings and sentiments beyond their mere utility. I have another friend who appreciated the craft of the handgun. Listening to him describe a pistol can make one eye the object with appreciation for its craftsmanship and aesthetics and put aside, if only for the moment, associative feelings of fear or antagonism for what “guns” may represent.
One of the things I do in the philosophy course is clip contemporary articles or pieces that deal with the perennial philosophical questions of ontology, epistemology and aesthetics. A willful technique for saying, “See, people still ask these questions!” Peter J. Leithart has a short commentary in the current (Dec 2008) issue of Touchstone titled “Music of the Gears” that touches on the aesthetic question:
All things made by God are beautiful and pure,” Athanasius wrote, “for the Word of God made nothing useless or impure.” Note the contrasts: Pure-impure is obvious, but the contrast of beautiful-useless expresses a sensibility we have almost entirely lost.
For moderns, the beautiful isn’t opposed to the useless. The beautiful is the useless. At least since the Romantics clashed with the Industrial Revolution, we’ve conceived of engineers and artists glaring contemptuously at one another across a razor-wire boundary.
This need not be, and isn’t always true. It is not too hard to find engineers in rhapsodies over the elegance of their design, or poets who think of themselves as technicians of language.
But in the popular imagination, the useful and the beautiful are opposed, and we will go some ways toward regaining cultural health and integrity when we have ears to hear the mush of well-fitting gears.
