Perfection: Coming to Terms with Being Human

6. Beauty

107 chapter six beauty Professor of civil engineering and historian Henry Petroski tells the story of a person who shared with him on a public radio show her enthusiasm for an object “that she was not sure anyone else would appreciate but which she marveled at when she had a hot pizza delivered: the ‘thingy’ that keeps the top of the box from sagging and getting stuck to the melted cheese.” Petroski admits that he, too, admires the white plastic tripod for its ingenuity and simplicity. Another listener (an artist) emailed him and also declared her admiration. Moreover, she “described shortening [the tripods’] legs and using them as spacers between staked palettes in her paint-storage box. She had also used them for a different purpose, turning them upside down to support, like little Atlases, spherical objects for display.” Another person used the tripod “for holding eggs, to which she applies sequins, beads, and other festive trim to make Christmas-tree decorations .”1 Petroski notes, “That the pizza-box tripod can also serve, albeit unintentionally, for holding round and ovoid objects for display and decoration . . . makes its design all the more satisfying . Indeed, though it may never garner awards for aesthetic excellence, admirers see it as a thing of beauty.”2 108 • Perfection The beauty of the tripod shows itself in its “technical perfection ”: an invention doing exactly what it was designed to do with the maximum efficiency. The tripod’s beauty is further enhanced as it lends itself to the inventiveness of its users. Beauty, in other words, has a genuine relationship with the purposive function of our creations and their successful employment. Petroski expands on this point: Beauty is ultimately in the eye of the beholder, of course. We tend to develop an affection and a fit for our familiar tools and furniture, no matter what they look like. Our favorite hammer or chair is often the one that we have grown so accustomed to that any other feels awkward or uncomfortable to use. Our favorite things get old and worn, but they become so molded to our shape that we do not care that they are dirty and deformed and possibly even offensive to the senses of others. By absolute aesthetic standards, they may be downright ugly. But judged by personal aesthetics, they may belong in a museum.3 Indeed, we are metaphysical creatures: we have a longing for security and completeness, for feeling comfortable and at home with others and our surroundings. Petroski emphasizes that our designs are always “works in progress,” an ongoing process of betterment: “There can never be an end to the quest for the perfect design.”4 Still, there are moments throughout the quest that warrant the response, “Beautiful!” Beauty and perfection can, and do, go together in our everyday, purposeful lives. Beauty is found in things that suit our purposes in particularly pleasing and satisfying ways. I am associating beauty with the utility or instrumental function (technical perfection) of some tool, what Immanuel Kant terms its “objective purposiveness.”5 Pizza-box tripods, our favorite hammers and chairs, and any other number of useful devices exhibit such purposiveness. The same can be said of language. Language is a tool, a means to an end: making things meaningful such that what these things are perceived to be, their “truth,” can be communicated to others in an understandable way. Recall that this most basic and fundamental use of language is what defines its “perfectionist” capacity. Kenneth Burke’s observation of the matter noted in the introduction is worth repeating: “The mere desire to name something by its ‘proper’ name, or to speak a language in its distinctive ways, is intrinsically ‘perfectionist.’ Beauty • 109 What is more ‘perfectionist’ in essence than the impulse, when one is in dire need of something, to so state this need that one in effect ‘defines’ the situation?” Also recall that the art of rhetorical eloquence enhances the perfectionist capacity of language. The objective purposiveness of such eloquence is to help a given discourse establish the truth of a particular matter and to arouse a love for it in the hearts of others. Rhetorical eloquence functions to cultivate the faculty of “taste,” which, as Hugh Blair reminds us, manifests itself in “the relish of beauty of one kind or other; of what is orderly, proportioned, grand, harmonious, new, or sprightly.”6 I will have more to say about...