Beauty is one of the great mysteries of life. Both in grandeur and subtlety, it can astonish and overwhelm us. To experience beauty feels like an encounter with destiny; to contemplate beauty is like trying to preserve a moment of surprise.
But what is it? What is beauty? The question is complicated by our varied use of the word. "Beautiful" has been used to describe everything: people, nature, objects, songs, mathematical formulas, and even words themselves. It seems beauty belongs to all our senses and our mind. There are endless arrays of poets and philosophers who have tried to define beauty throughout the ages.
It's a daunting survey to begin, but the brave and honest soul will find much reward in the journey.
In the Eye of the Beholder
The most common platitude about beauty is the phrase: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." Most people take this to mean that beauty is only in one's mind, that it represents an individual's subjective enjoyment of any given pleasure. It's an easy answer, but even just a moment's reflection presents many difficulties. To name a few, why do so many people enjoy the same things? Why do some things seem more beautiful than others? Why do we enjoy things that are not good for us? Also, if we link beauty to our concept of morality, where moral people are more beautiful than immoral people, what do we make of beauty then? Is beauty then a moral judgment? What differentiates our morality from our aesthetics (the sensory form of beauty)? It cannot simply hinge on individual taste. At the very least, even if beauty is in fact an illusion of the mind, there still has to be some qualification for it that universally applies to all people. So the statement is more useful as a question: "Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?"
Plato
This is a good historical starting point, because the saying is actually a bad paraphrase of the what the ancient Greek philosopher Plato wrote:
"But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty--the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colours and vanities of human life--thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty simple and divine? Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities . . . ." - Plato [1]
In this passage, we find that Plato is not claiming that beauty is a subjective mental experience. Plato believed that beauty was an objective fact present in the reality of the world (and reflecting a divine beauty). However, beauty can only be perceived "with the eye of the mind." In other words, beauty is an empirical and observable fact in the world, but it is only conceivable as an abstract.
Hegel
This unique characteristic of beauty is what makes it difficult to think about. It's observable as a physical fact, but it's not reducible to physical properties. We don't always enjoy the color green, or tallness, or being stationary; yet trees are beautiful. It's not these individual elements that make trees beautiful; it's their real and conceivable unity as a tree. However, describing the physical mode of beauty does not make sense of its abstract mode. The German Enlightenment philospher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel pointed out this disparity in his book The Philosophy of Art. He refers to beauty's physical mode as "the empirical or the facts of experience" and to its abstract mode as "purely theoretical reflection . . . to fathom the depths of its essential Idea." [2] According to Hegel:
"The true philosophical conception of the Beautiful . . . must contain the elements of the two extremes just indicated, but combined and harmonized into unity in itself." - Hegel [2]
Plotinus
This search for a "unified" theory of beauty was originally the work of another Greek philosopher named Plotinus, who wrote:
"Is there some One Principle from which all take their grace, or is there a beauty peculiar to the embodied and another for the bodiless? Finally, one or many, what would such a Principle be?" - Plotinus [3]
Plotinus observed that beauty is not reducible to mere physical attributes or even a combination of them, because there seem to be abstract rules that govern the rules of aesthetics. He uses symmetry as an example.
"Since the one face, constant in symmetry, appears sometimes fair and sometimes not, can we doubt that beauty is something more than symmetry, that symmetry itself owes its beauty to a remoter principle?" - Plotinus [3]
Plotinus then concludes that beauty is an observation of the Soul, which is to say that his One Principle is something that emanates from the physical world but is not itself part of it.
"This, then, is how the material thing becomes beautiful—by communicating in the thought that flows from the Divine." - Plotinus [3]
He proceeds to wrestle with these spiritual implications, which eventually lead him into pantheism: the idea that everything is One but exists as part of the Divine. Plotinus and other similar Neoplatonists were a particular influence on Saint Augustine, and he filtered much of it into Christian monotheism [4]. We owe a lot to Plotinus for his thorough analysis, being the very first systematic treatment of beauty, but if we resist the instinct to spiritualize the subject (at least temporarily), there are further nuances to consider.
Form Ever Follows Function
The famous architect Louis Sullivan wrote another popular idea about beauty: "Form ever follows function." The phrase became a mantra for modern aesthetic philosophy. What it means is that a thing's beauty (its form) depends on its function. For example, a building must function as a building before it can be decorated. The design for a car must work properly as a car before the superfluous design features can be implemented.
This is an important element to be considered, however it does not precisely translate to a working "unified" theory of beauty. The trouble is in the notion of sequential ordering. The order "function then form" is a better summary of our thought process than the actual nature of beauty. It's not as though a thing should be functional before it can be beautiful; it's just that we cannot discern a thing's beauty until we understand what it is. The philosopher Roger Scruton emphasized the importance of knowing a thing's function or purpose before being able to determine its aesthetic qualities. In this way, we correlate beauty with purpose for the sake of our understanding, but a thing's usefulness is less important to its beauty once we know what we're looking at. This is why people collect beautiful antique cars and restore antique furniture. Scruton referred back to architecture:
"Beautiful buildings change their uses; merely functional buildings get torn down. . . . Always there is the demand that we approach beauty for its own sake, as a goal that qualifies and limits whatever other purposes we might have." - Roger Scruton [5]
Kant
Still, this hasn't stopped philosophers such as Immanuel Kant from arguing along similar lines of pragmatism. Kant used aesthetic theory as a segue into his humanistic philosophy. He believed beauty to be a universal value but subjective from the human perspective. In other words, people all perceive beauty in much the same way, thus it's universal, but beauty does not exist in some concrete way outside the minds of humans. It's a phenomenon of the human experience, and thus subjective to what's good for humanity. He differentiated between what he called the beautiful and the sublime. The beautiful is what strikes people as useful or healthy; the sublime may not be useful, but it causes people to become conscious of their own limits and potential; in other words, what makes them human. In this sense, a lush countryside is beautiful because it's useful to mankind; but a scene of steep, rugged mountains is sublime because it's not practical but causes introspection. [5]
Aquinas
This notion that beauty evokes a sense of purpose is not to be ignored. But if Kant was correct that beauty is representative of what is good for humans, this calls into question the definition of "good." The concept of the Good was the major focus of the Greeks, and few philosophers have been as inspired by their efforts as the Italian friar Saint Thomas Aquinas. Invoking Christian theology and a deep love for Aristotle, Aquinas argued that Beauty is in essence the same as the Good; to perceive Beauty is to perceive the Good. However, the two words refer to the two different ways we relate to it. The Good is what we desire and desire all the time. It's what we are seeking, and we are seeking it always everywhere. In this sense, we always have an urge to find enough goodness to satisfy us. Similarly, beauty is the goodness we incidentally find; it is the answer to our call, the result of our search. Beauty is the perceptibility of goodness, even if by happenstance. Beauty is the passive experience of the Good. [6]
Aquinas' explanation actually satisfies the criteria for a unified theory of beauty, though indirectly. It allows beauty to exist empirically in the physical world, thus accounting for aesthetic principles. It explains the rules of aesthetics to be by-products of good design (as Plotinus would agree). It allows beauty to only be conceivable in the mind as an abstract (per Plato). It explains how form and function can be simultaneous and unified. And it answers Kant's humanism. Kant could not account for his own intuition that beauty inspires a sense of purpose. He centered beauty around the goodness and well-being of mankind, but he couldn't figure out how that gives us a sense of purpose. He labeled this mysterious effect as the feeling of "purposiveness without purpose." This is circular and meaningless, a dead end for Kant. Aquinas refers to purpose bestowed on us by God, who is Himself the source of the Good.
The Divine Idea Manifest
Aquinas' remarks on beauty were merely a short tangent in a greater argument, so he never outlined any formal definition of beauty. But as Aquinas can be understood in light of philosophy and theology over the centuries, I propose the following definition:
Beauty is the manifestation of Goodness as Truth.
Beauty here is understood to include both aesthetic principles and the idea in contemplation: the physical and abstract. Goodness refers to the order and purposes that designate people, objects, or ideas as unique, which must come from God. Truth refers not just to reality in general but specifically conceivable knowledge. This distinction is necessary because even fictional worlds can be beautiful, and the same principle applies to memories and mathematics. And manifestation is understood as rendering order and purpose as conceivable knowledge, the union of Goodness and Truth.
There are many different ways to express this, but in each of them I find that "manifestation" is the best noun for the job. But the key to properly understanding this definition is to realize that the Good is not completely manifested in anything in the created world. And this is why we rightfully perceive degrees of beauty; we can adequately say that some things are more beautiful than others. This illuminates two standards: one by which we compare things of the same type, and one by which we compare things of different types. For example, in one sense we can say that a person is more beautiful than a car. This is because humans are more valuable than cars. However, we can compare people and determine that one person may be more beautiful than another. It's also worth saying that we have not abandoned a sensory aesthetic for a purely moral judgment. It would be tempting to say that a beautiful, evil person is not beautiful at all. It defies our social sense of tact to compliment a despicable person by calling them beautiful. But this has more to do with our cultural use of the word and not a strict philosophical treatment. In truth, the evil person's body could still be properly called beautiful, because it is a manifestation of what the human body ought to be (one in a spectrum of possibilities). Still, it is the actions and lifestyle of the evil person that we cannot properly call beautiful, because those actions are not a manifestation of who a person ought to be. So then, this concept of "manifestation" applies both aesthetically and teleologically.
In conclusion, we find that beauty abounds in all things, though not completely nor perfectly. All things have beauty; they all bear the marks of the Creator. They have all fallen short of the original purposes of God (Romans 3:23), and in that respect there is potential yet to be attained. God is the transcendent source of the Good and the transcendent source of Being. God is who officiates the marriage of Goodness and Truth, thereby manifesting Beauty. You can think of Beauty as the light of God shining through creation. Beauty is God's idea of what a thing (or a person) ought to be. Beauty is the Divine Idea Manifest. In Beauty, the Divine Goodness of God is revealed, and the Truth of God is revealed. But this shining light is dimmed by the world's imperfections. In the created world, Beauty is incomplete; but beyond the world, in God, Beauty is perfect, because in God both Goodness and Being are self-sufficient. Beauty is the revelation of God's glory.
1. Plato: Symposium, 211.e-212.a (Barnes and Noble, 2005) pg. 102
2. G.W.F. Hegel: The Philosophy of Art (Barnes and Noble, 2006) pgs. 19, 27, 28
3. Plotinus: The Enneads, tractate 6.1-6.2 (Digireads Publishing, 2009) pgs. 35, 36
4. "Saint Augustine" from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, section 4
5. Roger Scruton: Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2011) pg. 18, 61-63
6. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae, pt. I, q. 5, art. 4, ad. 1, from Selected Writings (Penguin, 1998) pg. 350
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