Art and imbalance

In Alain de Botton's “The Architecture of Happiness,” there is a passage as follows:

“We are drawn to call something beautiful whenever we can detect that it contains in a concentrated form those qualities in which we personally, or our societies more generally, are deficient. We respect a style which can move us away from what we fear and towards what we crave; a style which carries the correct dosage of our missing virtues. That we need art in the first place is a sign that we stand in almost permanent danger of imbalance, of failing to regulate our extremes, of losing our grip on the golden mean between life's great opposites: boredom and excitement, reason and imagination, simplicity and complexity, safety and danger, austerity and luxury.

If the behavior of babies and small children is any guide, we emerge into the world with our tendencies to imbalance already well entrenched. In our playpens and high chairs, we are rarely far from displaying either hysterical happiness or savage disappointment, love or rage, mania or exhaustion – and, despite the growth of a more temperate exterior in adulthood, we seldom succeed in laying claim to lasting equilibrium, traversing our lives like stubbornly listing ships on choppy seas.

Our innate imbalances are further aggravated by practical demands. Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored. Society ends up containing a range of imbalanced groups, each hungering to sate its particular psychological deficiency, forming the backdrop against which our fervently heated conflicts about what is beautiful play themselves out.”

The book is more narrowly concerned with the influence of art and architecture on us, as psychological and emotional beings, but I think there is a vaster reach to this idea than just the aesthetic environment we find ourselves in. The people we seek, the things we do, the dreams we have, the books we read, the places we go, the clothes we wear, the schedules we create, the relationships we make, the plans we share, the prayers we offer ... these are all indicative of the internal yearnings we have to correct our perceived imbalances. What do we find beautiful, grand, intriguing, noble, pleasant, virtuous, good, or even praiseworthy? Think about it.