Roger Scruton’s 2009 documentary “Why Beauty Matters” is one of the most important documentaries I have ever seen. I find it so important not because I believe beauty should take precedent over all values, but because of what Scruton reveals about our modern world when he evaluates our current attitudes on beauty as it is reflected in our contemporary architecture, household commodities, and our taste in artwork. Scruton inadvertently reveals that our fast-paced digital world that resists ideals, such as divine beauty, is consequently becoming a depraved and barren place where its inhabitants are losing touch with their humanity.

Scruton begins by identifying beauty as a “value as important as truth and goodness.” After Scruton urges the viewer to reconsider the purpose of beauty he insists, “if we lose beauty we will lose the meaning of life.” His evocative call to arms is predominantly based on his observations of the state of contemporary art world that came to its present condition following the introduction of Marcel Duchamp’s famous Urinal. To underscore the impact of Duchamp and his subversive art piece, interview footage portrays his ardent endeavor to “destroy” art. Scruton reveals this as a turning point, and thus explains,“in the 20th century beauty stopped being important. Art increasingly aimed to break moral taboos and disturb.” The adverse effects of this movement and this cultural mindset is portrayed by a montage of artwork that depicts profane acts and over-industrialized cityscapes. Scruton insists that “not just our physical surroundings have become ugly, our language, our music, our manners are increasingly raucous, self-centered, offensive as though beauty and good taste have no real place in our lives.” From here, Scruton eventually concludes that, “beauty is being assailed by the cult of ugliness and cult of utility.” That is to say that beauty is devalued by an over-industrialized and materialistic culture.

Scruton’s portrayal of today’s world echos Jean-Francois Lyotard observation of the rising computer age as depicted in his famous 1979 book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Lyotard evaluates a society that entered into what is known as a postindustrial age and postmodern culture. Lyotard defines postmodern as “incredulity toward meta-narratives.” This means the narratives of knowledge no longer accepts the other forms of erudition such as the old epistemic traditions, namely philosophy. According to Lyotard, the computer age prefers scientific knowledge as a discourse, and it has transformed knowledge into a technological language. Consequently, information is deduced to data and moral prescription is lost. Lyotard reasserts Scruton’s observation of a dull and misguided world when he insists that knowledge is being commodified, and that knowledge is “produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production: in both cases, that goal is exchange. Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, its ‘use-value’”(5). Lyotard describes a world where subjective meaning is being dissolved, and therefore brings about the loss of the heterogeneous entity and their speculative nature. They are displaced by the new mechanical knowledge-producing system.

While we are living in the Post, Postmodern age of the 21st century, the cultural outlook Lyotard describes fully materializes in Scruton’s observation of our current society. This is even more evident when Scruton observes in the documentary that we “have lost our faith in beauty because we have lost our faith in ideals. All that there is is the world of appetites.” Thus, we find ourselves in Lyotard’s postmodern condition, for spirituality and moral codes have been superseded and knowledge is legitimized when it can be consumed. In applying Lyotard’s critique of modern society to Scruton’s observations, we find that the condition is a natural consequence of technology and human progress. The complexities of abstract existence are eventually displaced by the need for practical living.

Despite the natural tendency to become mechanized, more secular–to explain away the deeper mysteries of life, we are denying the greater part of our human spirit in ignoring our speculative wonder and our need for spiritual sustenance. Even one of the premier postmodernist Friedrich Nietzsche acknowledged the universal human desire to touch a realm of more divine significance than our banal everyday reality. Nietzsche communicates this when he explains man’s need for our art in the Birth of Tragedy. According to Nietzsche, when man is susceptible to art, “he is a close and willing observer, for from these pictures he reads the meaning of life, and by these processes he trains himself for life” (26). Art gives man an opportunity to reflect on life, and this dream-life of art “testify that our innermost being ,the common substratum of all of us, experiences our dreams with deep joy and cheerful acquiescence” ( Nietzsche 26). This uplifting and transcendental process that accompanies the experience of high art is comparable to what Scruton says in his documentary film when he states, “through beauty we are brought into the presence of the sacred.” That is not to say art reveals the existence of a omniscient deity when comparing Scruton’s perception of art to Nietzche’s, but that they both observe art’s h power to elevate mankind beyond their drab reality and bring them to a place where they may experience a mystic wholeness, which resembles a phenomenal dream experience.

This profound dream-experience in art embodies the Greek god Apollo for Nietzsche. Nietzsche uses Apollo to describes this “artistic impulse”, or rather what it means to be deeply moved by a piece of artwork, when he renders Apollo as:

[…] the god of all shaping energies, is also the soothsaying god. He, who (as the etymology of the name indicates) is the “shining one,” the deity of light, also rules over the fair appearance of the inner world of fanasies. The higher truth, the perfection of these states in contrast to the only partially intelligible everyday world, ay, the deep consciousness of nature, healing and helping in sleep and dream, is at the same time the symbolic analogue of the faculty of soothsaying and, in general, of the arts, through which life is made possible and worth living. (26)

Nietzsche uses the Greek god associated with light, prophecy, and poetry to signify supreme enlightenment. The unearthly deity illustrates the experience of the sublime that can not only bring one into the hidden depths of their consciousness, but can enrich the meaning of one’s life. Nietzsche’s other persona is the Dionysian artistic impulse, which comes from the Greek god of merriment and wine Dionysus. Dionysus is associated with rituals of madness and ecstasy. This antithesis to the Apollonian impulses is:

brought within closest ken perhaps by the analogy of drunkenness. It is either under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which the hymns of all primitive men and peoples tell us, pr by the powerful approach of spring penetrating all nature with joy, that those Dionysian emotions awake, in the augmentation of which the subjective vanishes to complete self- forgetfulness. (Nietzsche 26)

In this persona, man experiences beauty through his physical faculties as opposed to his mental faculties. Man’s inner self is subsumed by the gratification of drunkenness. The Dionysian personality bares resemblance to the postmodern dilemma that seems present in Scruton’s documentary, for he finds the modern age is too preoccupied with pleasure and self-gratification; and he concludes following a montage of images from today’s art scene,which portray video footage of woman inducing vomiting, a garish jeweled skull, implied nonsensical sex acts, “there is one word written large on all these ugly things and that word is ‘me’: My profits, my desires, my pleasures. Art has nothing to say in response to this except “yeah, go for it’.”

Here Scruton depicts the nature of the Dionysian impulse and the raw gratification it strives for. As tasteless as such the artistic impulse is rendered by Scruton, to Nietzche’s credit he believed the Dionysian spirit allowed man to experience a “Primordial Unity” with nature, and prevented mankind from becoming sterile. In fact, Nietzsche characterizes this artistic impulse as the superior one upon explaining when man comes under the Dionysus influence he, “is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art […]” (27). It would seem Nietzsche intends to simply encourage man to embrace his natural appetites rather than remain detached from them and rapt in a dull meditation process. Furthermore, Nietzsche has a reasonable proposal, for who doesn’t want to experience the full artistic ecstasy, or rather live life to its fullest. It is certainly possible to cultivate a more stimulating, more satisfactory experience from an evening of listening to sensational music and enjoying good wine than contemplating Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. However, there is a danger in preferring the Dionysian persona to the Apollonian, and it is fully revealed in the troubled characters featured in Scruton’s documentary who completely embody the mad satyr god in their audaciously debauch and uncivil exploits.

Naturally, Nietzsche distinguishes art from morality, unlike Scruton who seems to believe true art is morally uplifting and has a civilizing effect. Nietzsche writes, “art—and not morality–is set down as the properly metaphysical activity of man;[…] the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon” (18). This means human existence can be validated by the creative act. For Nietzsche, art gives man the power to create the world, and he insists in becoming conscious of his own “sovereign glory” man resists the strictures of moral institutions and overcomes the suffering and bleakness of his everyday existence (18). Scruton finds in his documentary that man has embraced this Nietzschean disposition, and man finds himself today in the fully constructed industrialized postmodern realm Lyotard once saw emerging; thus man finds himself free and free to abandon his morality, and create any world he desires. Yet, the fact that Scruton reveals in his documentary that man is more interested destroying the old world rather creating a new and better world indicates man has not become conscious of his sovereign glory, as Nietzsche had expected, but lost in a what Scruton calls a “spiritual desert.” And I would like to follow Scruton when he offers a“path out of that desert” because he offers what Nietzsche and other skeptical postmodernist can’t, and that is “a path that leads to hope.”

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1984. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Kansas: Neeland Media LLC, 2009. Print.