On Artificiality

At the beginning of the Enlightenment period, modern science started to flourish and replace our religious worldview with a secular worldview. Along with the introduction of scientific technique, the West had undergone the Industrial Revolution. Machines replaced the gods as the objects of worship. Capitalism became the virtue practised by factory owners and business men.

However, from the latter part of the eighteenth century down to the present day, our world has been influenced by a way of feeling which may be called 'the romantic movement'. As men have assimilated themselves to machines, a group of people has emerged. They wish to revert us back to our natural impulse. Their praise of nature, however, is not itself natural. It is a reaction against too much artificiality and machines. They condemn reason and value passion. Their allegiances are to art and emotion.

This theory has increasingly gained support from some feminists regarding the beauty of women. As our scientific technique has become more advanced, the aesthetic ideal of the classical Greeks is no longer an utopian dream. Women, with the help of surgical doctors, discover a new way to enhance their beauty. However, their wish to transform their appearance by means of plastic surgery is not in accordance with the ideology which most feminists hold. They wish to, like Nietzsche, interpret every bit of positive sentiment as a bid for power. Men, they claim, are by nature a shallow species. They only find women in appearance rather than in quality. Therefore, women's need to artificially enhance their beauty is considered a submission to men. They lack the courage to embrace their original beauty as it is. Among theses two distinguished species of humans, these feminists sincerely inquire, who has power over whom? But what strikes me as curious is the fact that they often wear makeup when they speak of such provocative statement on television.

What else is wrong with being artificial? Reason always remains the biggest enemy to the romantics because it suppresses our sentiments from being freely expressed. But all civilisation, especially on its aesthetic side, is artificial. Good food will lose its flavour if it is not presented in an elegant and beautiful manner. Good music will fail to charm our ears if all musical instruments are made with primitive tools. Good writing will no longer delight our eyes if we abandon the art of calligraphy. Good dancing will no longer let us appreciate the beauty of bodily movements if it is not performed in a certain 'order'. All these things give grace to life because they are artificial. In the French Revolution, the French valued the extremity of violence and passion rather than compromise and negotiation and preferred to have the heads of the aristocrats cut off rather than diminishing their power. But reason depends not on the denial of natural impulses, but on allowing them to express themselves in a way that are more delightful than primitive sentiments. Reason seeks to refine these sentiments which will bring delicacy rather than vulgarity.

But men's blind worship of machines have urged us to focus on the resulting product of work rather than the work itself. Our employers only speak of quantity, but not of quality. They turn us into commodities which we are no longer able to display our human faculty during the production of work. We are living in a world where the purpose of drinks is to quench our gross thirst, food to only satisfy our hunger, writing to get our message across even if it means to be presented in vulgar language, and education to only ensure our success in career and destroy curiosity and culture.

Living in a commercially driven world is itself a tragedy. Business men and politicians no longer care for the sorrows of the general public, instead they devote themselves entirely to the pursuit of power. Teenagers no longer care whether they have artistic talents before they make up their minds to get on television shows like American Idol. They only seek to achieve fame in one night. We are doing this because we love power and fame more than beauty. There are other sides of human nature that are equally praiseworthy. But the world, unfortunately, is becoming more regressive. I, for one, do not know how it should be resolved.

'Where there is delight in a process, there will be style, and the activity of production will itself have aesthetic quality.' -Bertrand Russell

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