On Beauty and What It Is Actually For

I was standing on a pavement in Southeast London, nine or ten years old, watching people walk past in the particular grey of a London afternoon, and I could not believe that nobody else was stopping to stare. Each person was cocooned in a field of colour, individually specific, a full spectrum of human states rendered visible and moving through the street like a quiet procession of lanterns.

What I was seeing was the aura, the energetic field every living person generates, and that the head injury had permanently tuned me to perceive. But the larger lesson it delivered, which took considerably longer to absorb, was about beauty itself: what it is, where it comes from, and what it is actually trying to tell us.

Beauty is not decoration. It is data. When something strikes you as beautiful, your soul is receiving information, about the nature of what you are perceiving, and about the nature of what you are.

Plotinus makes a distinction most aesthetic philosophy since has failed to recover: the experience of beauty is not fundamentally about the object encountered but about the act of recognition taking place in the soul. What we are experiencing is the soul recognising, in the object before it, a trace of the intelligible world from which it descended.

This is why beauty is not arbitrary, and why the experience of it is always accompanied by something that resembles longing, because beauty does not satisfy. It points. It is the world's finger, indicating a direction your soul already knows.

The person who uses beauty well is not the one who simply experiences it, we all experience it, helplessly, but the one who learns to follow where it points. To treat it as a compass rather than a consolation.

Spend one week following beauty deliberately. Not seeking it in galleries, but attending to it wherever it arrives. Each time it arrives, ask where it points. You will find, if you do this with genuine attention, that beauty always points in the same direction.