52 Ordinary Words: Beauty

Smoke subjectively observing the sun objectively rising (© Sophia Roberts)

It is with some relief that I see David Whyte’s word for this week is Beauty.  We all know beauty when we see it and Whyte’s response is not complex, for which I am grateful.  He is a traditionalist:  for him, beauty can be counted among the ultimate values, with goodness, truth, and justice.

When I read philosophy at university I soon discovered that the nature of beauty is one of the most enduring and controversial themes in Western philosophy.  In essence, the debate is over whether beauty is subjective or whether it is an objective feature of beautiful things.

Though Plato and Aristotle disagreed on what beauty is, they both regarded it as objective, in the sense that it is not localised in the response of the beholder.  Indeed, until the eighteenth century, most philosophical accounts of beauty treated it as an objective quality: they located it in the beautiful object itself or in the qualities of that object.

Tributes to the objective pleasures of beauty were often described in quite ecstatic, subjective terms, as in Plotinus: “This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce: wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight” (Plotinus 23, [Ennead 1, 3]). 

But, by the eighteenth century Locke – and others – maintained that our appreciation of something beautiful is merely our subjective response to it.  Nothing is inherently beautiful of itself.  

However, if beauty is entirely subjective, then it seems that the word has no meaning; or that we are not communicating anything - other than our own opinion - when we call something beautiful.

Both Humes and Kant considered that the purely objective view reduced beauty to a matter of taste or social and cultural constructs.  They then went on went on to acknowledge that reasons can count, but that some tastes are better than others (!) Thus, in their different ways, they agreed that every judgment of beauty is based on a personal experience, and that such judgments vary from person to person.

And so on, and so forth…  Until the 21^st century, when Crispin Sartwell in his book, Six Names of Beauty (2004), "attributes beauty neither exclusively to the subject nor to the object, but to the relation between them and, even more widely, also to the situation or environment in which they are both embedded. He points out that when we attribute beauty to the night sky, for instance, we do not take ourselves simply to be reporting a state of pleasure in ourselves; we are turned outward toward it; we are celebrating the real world. On the other hand, if there were no perceivers capable of experiencing such things, there would be no beauty. Beauty, rather, emerges in situations in which subject and object are juxtaposed and connected."

On a first reading Whyte’s conception is classical: beauty consists of an arrangement of integral parts into a coherent whole, according to proportion, harmony, symmetry, and similar notions.  And yet, he is also an idealist: his is a mystical vision of the beauty.  In this tradition, the human soul, as it were, recognises in beauty its true origin and destiny. Whyte specifically uses the word bridge as a metaphor to describe the moment when our eyes, ears and imagination carry us from the realm of the world to the heart: to describe what happens to us when when we look at something of beauty and it resonates with the beauty that already resides within us. 

Even so, I find Whyte’s use of language quite tricky and there are a number of holes in his argument.  “Beauty is the harvest of presence” sounds very lovely, but I have to dig deep to really understand what it is that that he’s saying.  Is “beauty an achieved state of both deep attention and self-forgetting?”  We don’t usually describe the state of transcendence that can be acquired through long periods of prayer and meditation as a state of beauty.  And I can’t quite get my head around “beauty invites us, through entrancement, to that fearful frontier between what we think make us; and what we think makes the world.”  Equally beauty “is an inner and an outer complexion living in one face.”  And I fail to see how beauty “especially occurs in the meeting of time with the timeless,” with the scattering of apples blossom, for instance. 

But perhaps I can appreciate that “the passing moment framed by what has happened and what is about to occur” is beautiful.  Yes, I can see that beauty is to be found in being truly present to this; even if I am not prepared to go along with calling it the harvest of presence, which suggests – to my mind – a finality, a finished product.

Fans of David Whyte will doubtless disagree with me!  For the record, I do delight in the beautiful profusion of the things of this world that merge into a single spiritual unity.  I’m an idealist, too.