Essay: Marcus Aurelius and the Frequent
Irrelevance of Literary, Art, and Film Critics
25 January 2003
I, personally, am tired of so-called literary, artistic, musical, and cinematic experts attempting to tell me what is good and what is not good. Many critics (no offense to those of you with sense) seem to hold the belief that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. If (as these critics would say) you think an acclaimed work is not pleasing to the senses, then you just don’t understand it. I have long been of the opinion that if something is beautiful, it is so on its face. (That is not to say that beauty is only skin deep; I merely attest that if there is beauty to be had, it does not have to be explained… it is just there.) The minute you have to explain why something is enjoyable, you have, in my opinion completely discredited it as being worthy of that sort of praise.
One of my huge pet peeves is the famous Modern Library’s list of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century (If that link doesn’t work, click here). I’m sorry, I’ve read several of those that the critics selected and I would not count them as the "best" books of the 20th century in the least. (The readers’ choices are much better; while many of the critics’ choices honestly appear in the reader’s list, many adventure fantasy or science fiction that a critic would never own up to liking also appear. For example, the number 3 book, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is dull, depressing, somewhat confusingly written, and generally not a book that I ever would want to read again. Literary critics would say that I have this opinion because I did not understand it. On the contrary, I understand the book just fine and would be among the first to admit that it is cleverly and thoughtfully written. Joyce’s writing style is clearly very sophisticated. These things in themselves do not make a book enjoyable or in any way aesthetically pleasing; in many cases the exact opposite is true. I am not going to make the mistake of the critics, though, who would say that anyone who disagrees with my opinion is wrong; no, I believe that there are some people who enjoy James Joyce (or Virginia Woolf for that matter) and honestly think that they write beautifully. I am merely asking that critics and other pretentious intellectuals stop trying to badger people into liking or disliking whatever those same intellectuals happen to like or dislike at the moment.
I was finally prompted to write something on this topic when I read The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. The last of the great stoic philosophers summed up all of what I believe on this topic much more succinctly than I can. He, like I, was of the opinion that criticism or other pontification on virtue is completely irrelevant, whether or not something is actually aesthetically pleasing. The only person who knows what is beautiful and what isn’t is the beholder. So, to any professional critics reading this, you don’t have take my word for it, take Marcus Aurelius’s:
"Everything which is in any way beautiful is beautiful in itself, and terminates in itself, not having praise as part of itself. Neither worse then nor better is a thing made by being praised. I affirm this also of the things which are called beautiful by the vulgar; for example, material things and works of art. That which is really beautiful has no need of anything; not more than law, not more than truth, not more than benevolence or modesty. Which of these things is beautiful because it is praised, or spoiled by being blamed? Is such a thing as an emerald made worse than it was, if it is not praised? or gold, ivory, purple, a lyre, a little knife, a flower, a shrub?"
--Marcus Aurelius (121–180 A.D.), Meditations, Book IV:20.
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