A couple weeks ago I had my annual leg wax. I only get my legs waxed once a year – in the spring, when baring one’s legs becomes newly possible – because the process is expensive and painful. After that I just shave them, which doesn’t leave them as smooth for as long. (I’m bemused by the association of women with weakness when beauty treatments are so metal: you rip out your hair with hot wax, or even literally get shot with lasers.)

I’ve noted before how feminine beauty is deserving of attention in philosophical aesthetics. So we might well pause on how remarkable it is that so many of us do pay money to have our leg hairs ripped out with hot wax.

One of the most striking things to me about leg waxing is how unnatural it is – fighting against our bodies’ natural tendencies. A French proverb says il faut souffrir pour être belle – you must suffer to be beautiful – which would scarcely be the case if it just involved leaving your body in its natural state. Without such interventions, adult humans of either sex naturally have some amount of leg hair; if you don’t, it could be the sign of a disease. To remove one’s leg hair is an act of artifice: it is not something that just happens, not a subtle trimming of or tinkering with one’s natural state, but a direct confrontation with the natural process.

Such conflicts with a natural state make many philosophers uncomfortable. The one who most comes to my mind is the eccentric conservative German-American thinker Eric Voegelin. For Voegelin, most of the evils of the modern world could be attributed to an attitude he referred to as “Gnosticism” (which he saw in the historical Gnostics as well as the moderns, though it’s not always clear whether he was right about that). In Voegelin’s view, Gnostics believe that what makes the human condition unsatisfying is that something is wrong with the world – that “the world is poorly organized”, and human beings can make it better. (Science, Politics & Gnosticism 64-5) Such a Gnostic view would animate Marx’s claim that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it”, but also the Futurists and the way they inspired both fascism and Silicon Valley techno-capitalism. Aesthetically one could see it in the flashy architecture of the late Frank Gehry, who has been described as “hating the real world”.

To wax one’s legs is not an attempt to change the whole world, of course; it’s not even close. But it is a revolt against the natural course of one’s own body. In Voegelinian terms I think the transgender movement in general is quite Gnostic: one refuses to allow gender roles and identity to be tied to natural biological sex. But the same is also true of cisgender women’s beauty treatments: one way or the other, it’s not natural to rip the hairs out of your legs, whatever your chromosomes happen to be. You’re aiming at a smoothness against your natural irregularities, bringing your body closer to a Platonic symmetry.

As you might imagine, I’m pretty skeptical of Voegelin’s negative evaluation of “Gnosticism”. At one level, it’s probably true that without a certain rebellion against nature, we wouldn’t have had the horrors of Stalinism (or, of course, the problems of climate change). But we also, I think, wouldn’t have had the technological striving to improve the human condition. There is such a thing as progress: in the words of sociologist Peter Berger, “remind yourself that, in any historical painting depicting a scene prior to the mid-19th century, 80 percent of the people in the picture are suffering severe tooth pain.”

The most clearly contrasting ideology to Gnosticism, the alternative that Voegelin juxtaposes against it, is the traditional view of the Abrahamic monotheisms, according to which an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God created the world just as it should be, and the natural order of things should be respected. I cannot subscribe to such a view: there is far too much needless suffering in the world for an omnipotent omnibenevolent God to make any sense.

Less nonsensical, in my view, is the Confucian and Daoist ideal of a heavenly nature (tian 天) that we might conform ourselves to. Thus the Canadian Christian philosopher George Grant, who was deeply inspired by Voegelin, winds up looking surprisingly Daoist. You could make a critique of Gnosticism on the grounds of that sort of view. But I still don’t subscribe to it.

As a Buddhist I don’t feel much need to put a high value on the natural. For Buddhists, understandably, our human natures are what trap us in suffering. Buddhists and Gnostics – historical or modern – share a desire to transcend our everyday natures and the everyday world, though often through changing ourselves rather than through changing it.

That doesn’t mean there’s anything particularly Buddhist about waxing one’s legs. There isn’t. Buddhist monks – male and female – shave their heads, but that’s not for beautification but really the opposite of it: alongside their simple robes, it’s a sign that they don’t care about the pleasures of a beautiful appearance. The prevailing Buddhist philosophical view is single-minded enough to think that the really valuable beauty is in things that help take us out of worldly suffering, like temples.

But I don’t accept that single-mindedness; I am Buddhist but not only Buddhist. I think there is a real value in beauty, aesthetic pleasure, and self-expression – adhering to an expressive individualism that I aim to harmonize with Buddhism, however difficult that task might be. One part of that combination is a denial that there’s a positive natural order in the world we must conform to; value of all kinds comes out of our subjectivity as conscious, valuing beings.

In all that, I’m encouraged by the way Indian Buddhist texts like the Shorter Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra dream of a Pure Land that glitters with emeralds and chimes, rather than a gentle natural world of untouched trees and rivers. That is an aesthetic that does not accept a natural state as it is, but looks to something more pleasingly artificial – shiny like a smooth pair of legs.