Liberalism and Beauty

~

The Contributions of Friedrich Nietzsche

‘The noblest kind of beauty is that which is born of struggle, of contradiction, and of victory over suffering.’

~

Friedrich Nietzsche

INTRODUCTION 

The exploration of beauty in relation to Greek thought is common (e.g. within the Platonic tradition), the investigation of beauty within cultural history is prevalent. However the study of beauty in tandem with the political ideology of liberalism is uncommon. This essay will therefore traverse into hitherto uncharted territory within intellectual history, particularly focusing on the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, who implicitly and explicitly speaks of liberalism in relation to beauty and whose views align with the postulations of this work —  that modern liberalism is not conducive to beauty. This essay will argue that characterised by consumerism, complacency and comfort, modern liberalism does not facilitate true beauty, only suffering, pain and adversity do. In other words, this essay will argue that the political constellation affects the realm of aesthetics. Moreover, this essay will contend that this notion extends beyond the idea of causation, revealing the most profound truths, suffering is not merely a catalyst for beauty — it is a prerequisite. This essay will firstly explore how Nietzsche’s stance on the dominant ethical framework of the West — Christianity, leads him to overtly assert that liberalism is not conducive to aesthetics; secondly it will investigate how Nietzsche's view that liberalism is not favourable to beauty is covertly revealed through his reverence of Dionysus. Thirdly, this work will clarify that Nietzsche is ultimately and undeniably connected to Plato, despite his supposed contempt of Plato, as maintained by scholars such as Martin Heidegger or Walter Kaufmann. This is because Nietzsche shares the Platonic definition of beauty as being high, celestial, divine and simultaneously deep and profound; ultimately as fundamentally sacred. Therefore in this sense such a work is genealogy, tracing the line of descent from Plato to Nietzsche, locating the ancestor of Nietzsche so to speak, perversely and unexpectedly rendering Plato and Nietzsche not foes but rather friends and fellow brothers. 

In the name of coherence and precision, this piece will utilise Benjamin Constant’s, Swiss and French political theorist (1767 –1830), definition of modern liberty/ liberalism. Within his essay, The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns, 1819, Constant discusses two divergent and oxymoronic conceptions of freedom, one held by the ancients, the other by moderns. Whilst the liberty of the ancients existed within the collective or public domain, the liberty of the moderns prevailed within the individual or private realm. Whilst Ancient liberty was concerned with the exercise of duties and responsibilities in the political domain, the liberty of moderns was predicated upon the exercise rights in the private sphere, on not what one ought to do, as with the ancients, but rather what one desires to do, often entailing an emphasis on the ‘enjoyment of… private pleasures’, an embracing of capitalism and trade. Such modern liberalism encourages an addiction to pleasure, inertia and sloth. Importantly, such modern liberalism, posits this work, is the end of heroism. It is prosaic, unromantic and mundane, leading to the worship of mediocrity, ordinariness and banality; it is the death of beauty. To put it simply, the language of liberalism does not allow for the expression of beauty. This assertion is echoed by Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 1859),  the French political philosopher, who in his magnum opus, Democracy in America, noted that ‘The majority of men in the United States... are concerned solely with…their own private affairs. The great mass of men are alike in their passions, interests, and manner of life... they do not aspire to anything more than a comfortable existence.’

I

NIETZSCHE AND MORALITY 

Nietzsche’s stance that liberalism is not conducive to beauty is explicitly elucidated through his stance on morality. To begin with, Nietzsche's root of contempt for liberalism (as well as other modern political ideologies of the West, such as feminism, socialism, communism, capitalism, and democracy) lies in his contempt for Christianity, the dominant morality of the West. For,‘The poison of the doctrine equal rights for all’—this has been more thoroughly sowed by Christianity than by anything else’. According to Nietzsche two kinds of morality existed, herd and master morality. Christianity was rooted in what he termed herd morality as opposed to what he upheld and championed, master morality.  Within The Genealogy of Morals, 1887, Nietzsche traces the history; the genesis and evolution of Christianity. He contends that it originates in the revolution of the oppressed masses, the slave classes, specifically the plebeians in Rome fueled by their ‘ressentiment’ and wrath against their oppression. In other words, Christianity was an act of vengeance, a striking back at ‘the warrior class’, a swinging of the pendulum. Thus the triumph of Christianity was tantamount to the triumph of the weak, impoverished, and feeble. Since slaves could not physically take avenge for reasons of their material impotence, they sought to enact a spiritual or metaphysical revenge. Such a retribution was characterised by the redefinition of morality, the taking of the concept of ‘good’ — which once meant superior, predator, and ambitious — and the categorisation of it as ‘evil’. Good, the opposite of evil, was made to describe the plebs —  poor and frail. Thus to summarise, as Nietzsche proclaimed Christianity was 

a religion of slaves as buttressed by biblical axioms such as ‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth’ or ‘the last shall be first, and the first last’ or ‘The greatest among you will be your servant’. 

Most crucially, the slavish concepts — Christianity, the father, and liberalism, its child — acted as a treacherous levelling force tragically truncating greatness, eminiece and grandeur, which Nietszche associated with true beauty. ‘Liberal institutions…are the levelling of mountain and valley exalted to a morality, they make people small, cowardly and pleasure-loving — by means of them the gregarious animal invariably triumphs. Liberalism, or, in plain English, the transformation of mankind into cattle.’ Or, ‘The craving for equality can mean only one thing: it seeks to lower heads that stand too high’. Thus, ‘morality itself’ concluded Nietzsche was the ‘danger of dangers’. This is why Nietzsche once posited that he would ‘never forgive Christianity for what it did to Pascal’ since the conversion of the genius mathematician and scientist to Christianity sought to suppress his intellectual rigour. Furthermore, contrary to being conceptualised as the pinnacle of ideas and of humanity by Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire or Kant, Nietzsche regarded the ‘democratic movement’ as ‘not only a form of decay of political organization but a form of decay, namely, of man’. In other words, liberalism, for reasons of being devoid of glory and beauty, was a degeneration of humanity. The evolutionary power of beauty, that is the power of beauty to transform an animalistic, rudimentary, and crude entity into something human, higher, refined, and sophisticated is demonstrated metaphorically within the fairytale, Beauty and the Beast, whereby beast is rendered man in the face of beauty. Fundamentally Nietszche cared not for the masses, the crowd, nor for the sheep, rather solely for the superior, the aristocrat, the shepard, for only they could create and embody true beauty. 

The antidote to the toxicity of Christianity (and consequently liberalism) a ‘poison’ which had infected ‘the entire body of mankind’ was transcending beyond good and evil,  transitioning from herd morality to master warrior morality.  As Micheal Sugrue claims, to ‘harken back to the age of the Homeric hero.’ The latter morality also possessed an oxymoronic nature though was typified not by a distinction between good and evil but rather weak versus strong, competent versus impotent, predators versus prey. This was not a normative phenomenon however, concerned with the categorisation of phenomena as benevolent and malevolent, rather such a morality was pervesley amoral, placing him alongside Niccolo Machiavelli, infamously strictly amoral. Think of hawks and sparrows or vultures and lambs  — there exists simply nothing morally reprehensible about the predator, such is merely the inevitable order of life. Christianity inhibited such human predators or such ‘higher men’ from actualising their destiny, of sacrificing blood, sweat and tears, from forsaking all to actualise their lofty goals and in turn generating  astounding works of beauty. 

Nietzsche then calls for the opposite of egalitarianism, for the necessity of hierarchy. His justification of classes, or slavery to put it crudely completely differs from Aristotle’s view. Aristotle’s justification of slavery was rooted in a hierarchical view of nature, with some organisms being naturally predispositioned as submissive and therefore whose telos lay in servitude. On the other hand, Nietzsche contends that outward or societal hierarchy is necessary for the maintenance of internal or psychological layers. These internal layers differentiate high from low, ugly from beautiful.

‘We are not by any means ‘liberal’; we do not work for ‘progress’... ‘no more masters and no more servants’ has no allure for us.…we are delighted with all who love, as we do, danger, war, and adventure, who refuse to compromise, to be captured, reconciled, and castrated; we count ourselves among conquerors; we think about the necessity for new orders, also for a new slavery—for every strengthening and enhancement of the human type also involves a new kind of enslavement.’ [Since] ‘every elevation of the type ‘man,’ has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society—and so it will always be: a society which believes in a long scale of orders of rank and differences of worth between man and man and needs slavery in some sense or other. Without the pathos of distance such as develops from the incarnate differences of classes… that other, more mysterious pathos could not have developed either…in short precisely the elevation of the type ‘man’, the continual ‘self-overcoming of man.’

To summarise, any form of normative or political structure that does not aim for a higher end (which according to Nietzsche is master morality) will lead to a less than ideal aesthetic form. More specifically in the above section Nietzsche’s stance that liberalism is not conducive to beauty was explicitly elucidated through his stance on the dominant ethical system of the West, Christianity, from which all egalitarian political systems are birthed. Such systems, including liberalism, were characterised by a worship of the values of the herd — inertia, mundaneness and ugliness.

II

A DISCIPLINE OF DIONYSUS 

Nietzsche’s stance on aesthetics, namely that high aesthetics require great suffering and tragedy is seen from his reverence of the ancient Greek god Dionysus — ‘Dionysus is the god of ecstasy and intoxication…He is the god who leads to madness and suffering, but also the one who gives birth to beauty through this ecstatic madness.’ To illuminate the nature of Dionysus, Nietzsche juxtaposed him with Apollo, the sun god. Whilst Apollo symbolised rationality, logic, reason, the left hemisphere, order, harmony, yangness, masculine; Dionysus epitomised emotions, instincts, intuitions, passions, the right hemisphere, chaos, war, suffering, yinness, feminine. Apollo was thus connected to the enlightenment and its various rational political philosophies, including democracy, modern liberalism, egalitarianism etc. Nietzsche lamented that modern western culture had overemphasised the Apollonian at the expense of the Dionysian — ‘The modern individual, shaped by the Enlightenment and the rise of scientific reason, lives under the dominance of the Apollonian’ which had become ‘so predominant that it utterly eclipsed the Dionysian, resulting in the collapse of true tragedy. What remained was a pale shadow of art’.  In this regard Nietzsche implicitly argues that the language of liberalism does not allow for the expression of beauty (since he does not overtly refer to liberalism but heavily suggests it by virtue of liberalism being a western ideology).

Furthermore such a reign of Apollo within the West is reflected in the environmental domain characterised by the encroachment upon, conquest and violation of the feminine nature by virile masculine industrial modernity. This notion is reinforced by the contentions of Mahatma Gandhi — ‘What is called progress is merely the … exploitation of nature’, or the words of Theodore Adorno — ‘society’s domination over nature [has been taken] to unimagined heights.’ Within the architectural sphere, this rapture manifests as a prevalence of towering phallic buildings in the form of skyscrapers and a consequent ailment of mother nature (global warming), since according to the ancient Chinese medical tradition all illnesses arise from imbalance. This can be contrasted to Pagan aesthetics typified by earthliness. Although such societies possessed many Gods, many experiences, many shifts, they ultimately honoured nature. Perhaps such is the irony of John Jacques Rousseau, who possessed great yearning and nostalgia for the state of nature, yet whose philosophy inspired the greatest detachment from it. Moreover, the given abuse of nature then, is perhaps the true definition of ‘toxic masculinity’, a common phrase hijacked and weaponised by the modern left, and utilised imprudently and imprecisely, with little understanding of what masculinity truly entails. It is perhaps important to clarify however that this work is not a typical feminist piece, calling to avenge the masculine, rather it posits for the necessity of balance between the two opposing yet complementary forces.

Additionally, despite Dionysus being contrasted to Apollo, contrast exists within Dionysus himself, as mentioned above and as Walter Otto, classical philologist notes,  —  ‘It is true that the worlds of the other gods are not without paradox. But none of these worlds is as disrupted by it as the world of Dionysus.’ He was a paradoxical god, the ‘god who gave man wine’, the god of the ‘most blessed ecstasy and the most enraptured love’, the god of intoxication and drunkenness,  but he was also the persecuted god, the suffering and dying god.’ Perhaps his conception explains his dual nature and tragic disposition. Dionysus was conceived by a mortal woman, Semele, and an immortal god, Zeus. While still Carrying Dionysus in her womb, she was destroyed by a torrent of lightning borne from Zeus, rendering Dionysus an emblem of anguish and misery. Furthermore according to Nietzsche it is this duality of Dionysus — which unites unlike anything else abyss and peak, valley and mountain — which enables true beauty. Dionysus epitomises the principle that suffering is required for ecstasy, creation and beauty.  The Dionysian realises that pain and tragedy are not only to be endured nor welcomed but rather worshipped and prostrated before. Hence — ‘The highest we can attain is the transcendent, the sublime: the beauty of life is to be found in this tension between the forces of life and death, beauty and suffering.’

Ancient Greek civilisation, argues Nietzsche, was permeated and saturated with the spirit Dionysus. ‘The Greek endured this [Dionysian] reality in its total dimensions and worshipped it as divine.’ This can be perceived in their worship of procreation, tantamount to their recognition that pain and suffering are intrinsic to all forms of creation and beauty. 

‘For the Greeks a sexual symbol was therefore the most sacred symbol…Every single element in the act of procreation, of pregnancy, and of birth aroused the highest and most solemn feelings. In the doctrine of the mysteries, pain is pronounced holy: the pangs of the woman giving birth consecrate all pain; and conversely all becoming and growing — all that guarantees a future — involves pain. That there may be the eternal joy of creating, that the will to life may eternally affirm itself, the agony of the woman giving birth must also be there eternally. All this is meant by the word Dionysus.’

He concludes,‘What suffering this race must have endured’ ‘in order to create such beauty.’ Malnourished of the Dionysian, the modern liberal pleasure addicted Apollonian West is thus devoid of true beauty. 

III

PLATO AND NIETSZCHE

Ultimately Nietzsche is a Platonist, by virtue of sharing a parallel definition of beauty as Plato. Despite being overtly and explicitly contemptuous of Platonism (as well as Christianity) for its otherworldliness (emphasis on the intangible, celestial and heavenly realms), Nietzsche was the deepest and most profound of Platonists. Both thinkers championed that beauty is inextricably connected to the divine, transcendent, and elusive kingdoms, that physical beauty is a mere instrument to the sacred — which Plato calls the forms. Plato delineates such an idea within the Symposium, one of his notable works on the theme of beauty. In fact such is the purpose or telos of physical beauty — the guiding of man out the shadowy cave of illusion, maya and  ignorance, to higher realms, to universal and absolute beauty; the form of beauty. Socrates recalls the teaching of his guide Diotima on the subject of beauty spelling out a soul’s progress toward ever-purer beauty, from from meat and flesh to soul and spirit, from earth to heaven, profane to sacred, physical to metaphysical:

He … begins to perceive that beauty, is not far from the end. And the true order of… bring led…to the things of love, is ‘to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.’ ‘which in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying, or waxing and waning… beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever-growing and perishing beauties of all other things.

Hence beauty is not merely a hollow and superfluous phenomenon, beauty possesses great depth, it is a terrible abyss, a mighty chasm, extending all the way to the depths of hell. To create, embody or contemplate it requires great pain and sacrifice. Its depth paradoxically allies it with height, since the transcendent is that which all is predicated upon. Thus as Nietszche notes, ‘Art is the highest task and the proper metaphysical activity of this life.’ 

The divine nature of beauty is also elucidated in the fact that people treat beautiful objects as if they are sacred. For instance, they make pilgrimages to beautiful places such as museums, art galleries rendering them modern shrines, or they listen to music, journey to concerts and festivals, entranced by music, a ritual in which even nihilistic punk rockers participate in. People sacrifice great resources (money and time, with time being of infinite value for reasons of its irreplaceability) to such deeds. Moreover the divinity of art is further consolidated by the fact that beauty is a judge, for every ideal is a judge, and ideals are that which transcend us; they are transcendent. Additionally, judgement is associated with hierarchy (distinction between high and low), and an ideal is the ultimate entity of value, epitomising the pinnacle of the hierarchy. This notion further acts to consolidate Nietzsche’s view that beauty is associated with the opposite of egalitarianism. Thus, beauty is an ideal, a judge, and just like people are terrified of ideals, for reasons that such ideals highlight how short they fall of such heights, they are terrified of beauty. Beauty tells you to be more than you are, beauty possesses contrast, beauty highlights what is ugly — ‘Beautiful and Ugly: — Nothing is more relative, let us say, more restricted, than our sense of the beautiful’. The meditation upon it is tormenting, with it burning, annihilating, and destroying within you all that which is inadequate, unworthy and untrue. We believe we border our paintings with frames to accentuate them, ‘but we do it at least as much to insist to ourselves that the glory of the painting itself ends at the frame. That bounding, that bordering, leaves the world we are familiar with comfortably’ unaltered. We do the same with museums, those asylums for genius: we isolate everything that is’ beautiful … ‘It is fear that entices us to imprison art.’ Lastly, beauty’s sanctity is paramountly consolidated by its redemptive element. It is your union with that which is truly beautiful, that bestows unto you the grandest of reasons to live, to be and to become. It animates you, enlivens you, fills you with enthusiasm, (etymologically derived from  the Greek words ‘en’, (in)  and ‘theós’ (god) meaning inspired or possessed by a god). It renews you, cleanses you, purifies you. It is that which redeems you. Devoid of beauty then, the modern liberal west is devoid of the divine, without which all is ossified. 

Furthermore such an erosion of genuine beauty is therefore intrinsically linked to modern liberalism, which, driven by capitalist hedonism and materialism, neglects the ‘soul’. As Tocqueville observes, ‘I see an innumerable crowd of men, all alike and equal, turned in upon themselves in a restless search for those petty, vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.’  Capitalism’s emphasis on profit and efficiency often sacrifices aesthetics. In contrast, when individuals or societies pursue higher ideals, more profound and transcendent forms of beauty emerge. As Byung-Chul Han critiques, we are in an era of ‘aesthetic capitalism,’ where beauty is commodified, reduced to a product for consumption, a mere object, devoid of depth or subjectivity.  In other words, such aesthetically daring forms related to heroism, sacrifice, religion, and truth, are all but denigrated into a commercial mesh. For ancient philosophers like Plotinus, beauty was disruptive and striking; modernity, however, seeks to smooth it, prioritising ease of consumption  — diluting and in turn adulterating it. Examples include sleek car designs or shallow visual resolutions/one pixel resolutions — because they give a veneer of beauty. Veneer here is very intelligently employed, meaning both ‘a thin decorative covering (coat, varnish, polish etc.)’ and ‘an attractive appearance that disguises one’s true nature (facade, mask, masquerade, pretence etc.)’. This commodification, driven by desire for quick profit, severs beauty from depth and soul, reinforcing that any ideology or way of life, such as liberalism, that fails to pursue a higher purpose, leads to an impoverished and false aesthetic.

  IIII

THE MYTH OF SATURN ♄

The proposition that suffering, pain and adversity give rise to or foster beauty, that they are prerequisites to beauty, is consolidated by both western and eastern mythological literature, which fundamentally assert that an entity’s — be it a creation, individual or nation etc. — embodiment or attainment of beauty necessitates toil, effort and sacrifice. To elaborate, the given notion is illustrated by the myth of Saturn (Roman mythology), also known as Cronus (Greek Mythology) or Shani (Vedic Mythology). Saturn is a paradoxical god, for he symbolises the lowest of valleys and pits and simultaneously the greatest and mightiest of heights. His emblem is the ancient scythe or sickle, traditionally associated with agriculture and harvest. Such a toiling of the earth was historically and universally associated with, the labouring or inferior classes, hence saturn signifies the lowly/inferior stratas of society — the impoverished, subordinates, servants, slaves, proletariat, plebeians, peasantry. Conversely, Saturn, the deity and planet also bestows the highest of positions, signifying earned status, reputation and height, epitomising the ‘rags to riches’ or ‘ugly duckling’ phenomenon, in which a lowly entity attains beauty and glory through arduous struggle and striving. Such a duality of low and lofty is revealed in the nature of farming whereby seeds are buried to the depths of the earth, shrouded in darkness, only to soar to great heights, yielding juicy produce of infinite value.

As Outlined in the Vedas, a body of ancient sacred religious texts forming the foundation of Hinduism, dating back to around 1500–500 BCE, Shani is the son of Surya, the Sun. The esoteric and occult symbolism of the Sun opposes Saturn’s, representing the father, king, nobility, gold, sovereignty, the pinnacle of hierarchies, transcendence, divinity, and holiness. Shani is born ugly, deformed and disfigured, resulting in his mother and father’s rejection and abandonment of him. Thus despite his royal heritage, Shani being excommunicated, exiled and expelled, is rendered a cloaked and veiled heir to the throne. Having lost all benefits of regality, Saturn starts from the bottom, and though initially shrouded, weak, sickly and crippled, the external (severe treatments and conditions) and internal (his merciless standards) pressure and harshness he is subjugated produce beauty, rendering him the most beautiful of swans. Ultimately, the insurmountable fortitude of a mere outcast, a mere peasant renders him mighty beyond kings. Thus, fundamentally, the legend of Shani acts testament to the notion that true greatness, eminence and beauty becomes not despite adversity but because of it. A kindred narrative is seen within the Western tradition. Modern characters like Aragorn, a humble ranger from The Lord of the Rings, or Jon Snow, an abandoned and isolated bastard, within the Game of Thrones, epitomise the Saturnian journey. Both characters are forced to take menial jobs, unaware of their true heritage. They honour their earthly, menial, service jobs, slowly climbing the ranks to dominion, rising to power and greatness due not to blood and lineage and nepotism, but rather perseverance and actual merit. Ultimately without hierarchy, Saturn has nothing to climb and it is during such a burdensome ascent that he transmutes into something beautiful. This consolidates Nietszche’s view for the necessity of hierarchy for true beauty.

Such Saturnian tales irrefutably parallel the formation of diamonds, whereby heat, pressure and time transform carbon within the depths of the earth into crystalline structures of immense value. Indeed the unparalleled value of diamonds (and consequently of that which diamonds symbolise: merit and saturn) are elucidated through economic statistics. Though gold (typifying royalty, the sun, nepotism) (gold’s connection to unearned height is further reinforced by its celestial or extraterrestrial origins, being the remnants of supernova explosions scattered across earth) is quantitatively rarer, diamonds hold greater monetary value, with one gram of a diamond costing thousands of dollars (depending on colour and clarity), compared to a gram of gold, which on average costs less than a hundred pounds, depending upon the fluctuations of the market. Mathematical truths further reinforce the notion that the low is required for the high. Morphologically and geometrically, consider the triangle, often used as a symbol of hierarchy. Without its foundational base, there can be no height nor greatness. The pinnacle exists only because the foundation does. In conclusion both eastern and western myths and lore indicate like nothing else, echoing the sentiments of the particularly attuned Nietzsche, that suffering not only facilitates true beauty, eminence and grandeur but that it is a prerequisite. 

CONCLUSION 

In conclusion, within this essay hitherto unexplored concepts were explored within the domain of intellectual history in tandem with one another — liberalism and beauty, alongside the contributions of the philosopher Friedrich Neitzsche. Nietzsche controversially and to the distaste of presentist and crude critiques such as those by John Doe, who regarded Nietzsche’s call for hierarchy, aristocracy and slavery,   as unforgivable due violating the ‘ubiquity of egalitarianism’: ‘we simply do not take seriously any arguments that would defend slavery.’  For Nietzsche such hierarchy was allowed for the distinction of beauty, which resided on the summit. To attain such a peak necessitated suffering, sacrifice and effort, thus beauty was necessarily tragic. Thus modern liberalism, characterised by and encapsulating consumerism, idleness and ordinariness, was incompatible with true beauty. This was explicitly demonstrated from his stance on the normativity of Christianity and implicit from his piety of Dionysus, the god of tragic suffering and ecstatic creation. It was further argued that Nietzsche's elevation of beauty, his positing it as something high and mighty, and simultaneously terribly deep and cavernous was  equivalent to his rending of beauty divine: his sanctification and sacralisation of beauty. Therefore it was argued that in this sense he is a Platonist despite being outwardly anti-Plato. Both he and Plato regarded beauty as redemptive and divine. ‘It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.’ Echoing the prophetic declaration of Dostoevsky — ‘Beauty will save the world.’ 

Furthermore, implicitly and indirectly this work has argued for the significance of the esoteric — occult, mythological, astral, heavenly, celestial, intangible domain. Namely its true and tangible influences on the lower, material, earthly kingdoms. This piece has subtly contended therefore that the ‘microcosm must bear testimony to the macrocosm. As Hermes Trismegistus, the messenger of the gods, dictum goes: ‘As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul.’ Though as Swami Vivekananda notes, ‘as a rule, we find that many of these truths are in conflict. At one period of the world’s history, the internals become supreme, and they begin to fight the externals. At the present time the externals, the physicists, have become supreme, and they have put down many claims of psychologists and metaphysicians.’ This work suggests that it is time that we shed light upon these esoteric matters, concentrate and communicate about such matters more directly (though perhaps they cannot be, for it is their destiny to remain unknownable to most, as suggested by its definition — ‘intended for/likely to be understood by only a small number of people’). As Walther Hangraff argues in his book, Rejected Knowledge, while unorthodox knowledge systems are widely rejected within academia, they must be reintegrated due to their historically vital role in shaping Western civilisation.

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