Oct 1, 2019
Does beauty matter? Very much so! But why does it
matter? What does beauty do for us? For that matter,
what is beauty? Bryan Baise—Saving Elephant’s first
out-of-state guest to make a repeat appearance of the podcast—joins
host Josh Lewis to attempt to untangle why beauty matters.
How we think about beauty can impact how we think about nearly
everything. St. Thomas Aquinas taught that, for something to
be beautiful, it must have integrity, proportionality, and
brightness, clarity, and texture. Beauty was portrayed by
classical and Christian thinkers as something that involved both
the intellectual and moral parts of humanity. But in modern
times people began to question this notion of beauty. They
began to ask why beauty might do for them, and originality and
utility became more important than mere beauty in the arts.
In focusing on originality, art became unoriginal in that all
it had left to say was that some people like looking at some things
and other people like looking at other things and that, in the end,
nothing really matters. In focusing on utility, art became
useful but void of the beauty that enriches lives. When
everything has to have a use we lose the ability to look outside of
ourselves because we’re always asking “what’s in it for me?”.
Bryan Baise is a professor of philosophy and apologetics at
Boyce College. Bryan is the program director of philosophy,
politics, and economics and the program director of the Christian
worldview and apologetics. Bryan is currently working on two
book proposals, one about beauty and another about introducing the
conservative worldview to a non-academic audience.