A dancing pageant, or any instance of the beautiful, assumes its 'intellectual beauty' on the basis of its divinity in real experience. The perfection of such a perception artistically embodied is an intellectual achievement of the highest order. A poet of the highest order is an evolving individualist whose imagination is composed of heightened perspectives. Chance, death and human misfortune are considered the ruled pawns of a reflective spirit and self reveling in an imaginal bound. Only this imaginal bound, an aesthetically imposed moral definition, is real to the self-creating individual creator.
Once the individual and the independent spirit, as defined in this essay, are held up as a real ideal, a manifest perfection touchable by everyone willing to create himself in the assertion of that self's existence, anarchy becomes an easy necessity, as does atheism. Anarchy is simply the lack of imposed, instead of discovered, social rules or conventions; atheism, in this case, is the lack of social rules or conventions that others claim exist as a result of God's existence. In this state, what is to be the moral or social compass for man?
The apprehension of beauty.
Every poet who has ever lived and generated genius has done so in a sober, well-lived life; when this is not the case, he is not creating. His evils are as dust in the balance. Individual creation is the only redemption that can occur in time. The degenerate king or unprincipled despot is locked into the manifestations of sin (and the confining network of the social contract) far more irreparably than any independent layabout. Those of individual genius who have apprehended their moral case and its inherent freedoms arrange their brief lives automatically around the apprehension of beauty, since that is the highest and best use of all that is highest and best in man.
But what makes these individuals the highest and best?
Their apprehension and forceful claiming of themselves as individuals in a universe of nulls.
All this talk of self-claiming, self-asserted creation and Will gets taken by the Hitler idiots as 'will over others'--the mass--instead as the self-mastering 'will over oneself;' it is a mastering of the inertia of birth, at least to the point of self-creation. After that, all other activity gains its moral credence, as activity even, from that initial willful apprehension.
As soon as any man understands and/or asserts his value and existence as an individual, he naturally addresses himself to eternity, since death instantly sets itself up as the last block the unthinking universe can throw up before him to interfere with his individual's perpetual, unique and value-creation-oriented existence. Then what does all the spastic and hectoring spectre of death become but another inducement to beauty and all the highest and best productions and reminiscences of those imperishable moments of ecstatic consciousness?
It was said of Shelley that: By calling the heart to an ideal, and by bringing about what Shelley describes as 'transforming enlargements of the imagination,' poets become 'the unacknowledged legislators of the world.' This ideal, towards which we are constantly either called or corralled, is constantly--and I think incorrectly--labeled the same Ideal that Plato preached: a separate and untouchable heaven of ideal forms. I would like to draw a distinct difference between any such realm and the Ideal that a poet must hold in his heart to have an effect on his life that would allow him to undertake these meaningful 'transforming enlargements of the imagination.' Shelley's own experience of this Ideal realm, as described in his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, itself argues against this realm being described as 'untouchable.'
The completeness of the visitation enacted upon the speaker of 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,' is almost a rapture that, instead of taking the raptured person to heaven, brings heaven to the person, argues against this beauty being remote at all, and is a witness against its existence being thought of as a mere 'shadow vision' and not as a palpable reality. The ideal that the heart is called to in the poem, and in the hearts of all poets and, as I think, in the heart of every individual, is the complete acknowledgement and apprehension of that individual's own freedom. This is an immediate and life-altering experience of ethical liberation that is anything but remote; it is instead intimate in the extreme--as is the style of experience described by Shelley in his poem.
Plato's Ideal Realm may only be considered as irreparably separate these days because of the complete imaginal hegemony of Kant--who split the world into mind and body, or spirit and form, and whose philosophy demands that they never touch. Plato's metaphors, however, may quite possibly not have been understood by the Greeks or Shelley as quite so untouching, but rather as taking on more of the sort of meanings and sense this essay undertakes.
Shelley's 'transforming enlargements of the imagination' may also be understood as those inter-changing and inter-charging leaps of the individual's asserted sense of self and the moral beauty which draws that self into the universe by its claims. The transformations can then be understood as part of the ongoing life-process of heroic creation, constantly calling on the imagination to claim its invented universe. This claiming and inventing then takes on the organizing characteristics of legislative order as the ideas of Beauty, Individual, and Created System become more and more indistinguishable--the beatification of those saints indwelling in ourselves.
The apprehension of beauty becomes the moral compass of the individual because that is the only way that heroic creation can take place; the only way that bits of soggy reality can be organized into permanent representations of the absolute consciousness that races in us as the universe races in God's mind. It is a principle of organization that supercedes and precedes any conception of 'the good.' It includes the Good as a fire must include fuel, to refine for use to produce the brightest flames. The Good only has active meaning for humans as an incentive to morally good future acts; it is not some dead substance that can be hoarded or spent. Only individuals can perform meaningfully original actions--and the only self-conscious individuals that exist understand that the only actions worth taking are ones that are beautiful, or which result in beauty. Death is meaningful in this context only in that it gives a definition to what is done, an endpoint to one life's possibilities. Death helps to shape the moral meaning of individual acts of beauty. It is a sort of spectre and goad to goodness, meaning and beauty. What happens after death is not of immediate concern for the living; death is meaningful not in and of itself, since it is a place beyond or other than life, but because it gives us a place to stop being. An abstract, ineffable, and unapprehendable heaven is even more useless to living humans--since it only gives us a place where we may one day continue being, but never in life. Neither death nor heaven put meaningful limits on the self-consciously willful individual; neither the grave nor the cloud participate in human possibility.
Heroic creation, in this way, gives man the chance to 'flirt with death,' and still claim, 'but I don't care about it' with an undying cry. To the degree that his deep apprehension of beauty guides and decides an individual's behavior it is the ethical force of the universe. Shelley saw Milton's excellence and moral suasiveness in the energy imparted to Satan in 'Paradise Lost.' This excellence is perceived exactly to the extent that that energy and excellence are given to Satan to make the poem more beautiful and fill the brilliant individual's defeat with defiance. So the creation of a brilliantly individual and defiant Satan becomes a moral act of beauty.
Morality is the flower of beauty in the world.
So, what then might avail in man's pinching circumstance where false heavens and the distraction of death have been deleted of their abstract and compelling characteristics?
Beauty. Beauty draws each man to it to the extent that its vitality increases each observer's liveliness. It sweetens without sickening and ever gives pleasure to the purest portions of an individual, which it helps to awaken for the purpose of having that pleasure more greatly enjoyed and received. There is no model for this concept in history or life other than the innate idea of unending and increasing pleasure and beauty called by the godless LOVE. The greatest harmony and order of perceived beauty reaches so far into the individual that it eventually demands that the individual create harmony, order and beauty out of himself, so that this interpenetration may have completeness and demonstrate the reality of the original creation. That which is beautiful, creates beauty in those who correctly perceive that beauty. The only 'proof' that the original creation's beauty has been perceived is that those who come in intimate contact with its beauty themselves become more beautiful. This may seem to resemble a religious conversion, but it is more like the act of falling in love. If there is any insistence in this co-creation of the beautiful, it is only that of our own ardency; that which is beautiful calls on that which is beautiful in us.
Beauty demands of the individual only himself, never subservience or bland acquiescence.
When a man is excited to the point of genius, he is the most himself and the most universal in terms of vital individuality. Because only the most self-asserted individuality can create beauty, and because the most beautiful is that which is created and partakes of the intimate eternity of the individual, the two quickly consummate an inseparability in the history of genius. How could anything from a lesser source give true pleasure to the free individual? Beauty can begin the siren call at any and every level of perceptible pleasure, and if that call is followed it will eventually demand the abolition of God, predetermination, hate, and all that debilitates the creative faculty in the individual. Beauty will demand to be answered by beauty, nothing less will suffice.
When an individual claims himself and his freedoms, poets become the acknowledged legislators of the world because poetry is the only way free consciousnesses can communicate, via the eternity of beauty which heroic creation produces--individual to individual.
Therefore, beauty is the only moral compass for the individual because it is the only outside agent that can actually reach his independent center and demand that that center respond. It is, perhaps, the only real object in the universe for the individual to respond to, act upon, etc. In a world of beautiful objects, every action becomes a demonstration of Love, every commitment a simple entirety as deep as ourselves.
Ethics is all about what a man does in this life, and what he should do: if beauty is the only object sufficiently real and individual for a man to act upon, then it is obviously intimately tied up with all ethical action.
Beauty is the moral compass of the individual because it is the agent, result, and object of all truly individual activity.
From the collection "Ghosts and Princes"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.