The Question of Beauty

There are some who believe that the question of beauty is every bit as intractable as the question of evil. Why should something be beautiful to us and why should it—a face, a body, a sunrise, a landscape, a house, a vase, a diamond—be able to so overwhelm us by its simple presence? We have so many adjectives for what is beautiful (as indeed we also have, we must acknowledge, for what is evil): beautiful is the most generally applicable, but then there is lovely and fine and handsome and pretty and fair. What are we to make of all these refined distinctions?

The question of beauty calls up our most searching philosophical instincts, of course, and cultures as ancient as any we have record of took account of the mystery in their art and myth. Some say that we must always keep in mind the difference between the nouns beauty and pulchritude if we are ever to hope for advancing toward an answer to the whence and why of the beautiful. For the noun beauty refers both to sensible and mental delight, to the pleasure and satisfaction that is ours whether what is beautiful to us is some concrete thing we perceive through one of our senses, or whether it abides only in our mind, something we recognize and respond to, but which we cannot perceive with our eyes or touch with our hands. Pulchritude, however, refers only to the former, only to what is sensibly beautiful in its texture or color or shape. And yet, both can bestir us to smile or sigh.

Beauty and pulchritude. The distinction between those two nouns, let alone all their associated adjectives, is enough for us to consider here. And what is important to think about is that all these terms have to do with value, what the philosophers define as what is good and worthy of a human being. The tradition has been (or had been, perhaps) that our confidence in natural language, the way we use our everyday sentences to say something about something, is not naïve but trusting; that our minds incline rightly to perceive realities and then go on to make language to represent what we see. But right there, just at that point where we have no doubt about this common, natural way of being with language in the world, others have come with the question, “Where do you see what you see?”

The objection is not as recondite as it sounds. It is simply questioning whether anything insensible, anything we do not perceive with our senses, is there to be seen, to be cognized, at all. Those who distrust natural language believe that the empirical is the only and final standard, that to look past what we sense is merely to be looking at our psychological, nerve-induced self. What is beautiful, therefore, is merely what excites the nerves, what is aesthetic, that is, what is pleasing to the senses. To such thinkers there is, strictly speaking, no beauty but only pulchritude. (The term aesthetic, or esthetic, is fraught with difficulty, to be sure, but its origin is instructive. It derives from a Greek noun meaning sense perception. We undergo an anesthetic, for example, to escape the aesthetic; the prefix a– negates the meaning of a word to which it is attached. Hence the aesthetic, strictly speaking, can never be more than corporeal, because that is where the nerves lie.)

But the traditional outlook sees the world differently. When we call something beautiful, we mean that we are intuiting universal beauty through some particular thing we find beautiful. And there is nothing especially difficult in this idea when we remember that this anciently recurrent philosophy, sometimes called perennial, distinguishes between form and figure. There is only one form (think of Plato’s ideas) for each of the great governing notions to which we humans seem inevitably oriented: for beauty and truth and the good. But there is a veritable indefinitude of figures, configurations, structural arrangements which we perceive with our sight, hearing, and touch. All such sensible objects of space and time present themselves as members of a class, a form, to which they belong and what in the end accounts for them; and what we find beautiful is not compelling because it is what it is in itself, but exactly because of what it is a representative of. And whatever that ultimately is, while it abides elsewhere, it moves us in the things we live amidst.

This is why traditional thought puts so much emphasis on the study of language. By creating a multitude of nouns and adjectives for all the things and events with which we are caught up, language can suggest these universal ideas and shake us free, at least in our more reflective moods, from reducing the variegations of life to but clever animation. The American philosopher of language Wilbur Marshall Urban opens his work Language and Reality by affirming that “language is the last and deepest problem of the philosophic mind.” But we are all philosophers in the true sense when we question received opinions and strive to understand ourselves by not settling too soon for what simply appears to be the case. “The limits of my language,” says Urban, “are the limits of my world.” If that is true, then struggling to put into words just what the great values like beauty are might take us from the obvious to the hidden, and even, as Plato suggests, all the way to the ironic edge of language itself.

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