More on Beauty

(image source)

I have been thinking more about this subject of beauty, trying hard not to fall prey to either of what I see as the Scylla and Charybdis of the abstraction of Platonism or the materialism of the evolutionary psychologists. Specifically, I have been asking myself why a fine painting depicting an ugly person is not less beautiful than an equally fine painting of a beautiful person, even if our animal selves find the beautiful subject much easier on the eyes. The tentative answer that I have come up with is that beauty is the living essence of a thing. Its presence is determined by how much access we have through our perception of a phenomenon to the phenomenon's inherent dynamism. This would mean that beauty is always with us if we are able to discipline our consciousness to perceive it. It also suggests that capturing beauty in art is a matter of capturing the aliveness of things. I believe that, if we are fully present to a phenomenon in any moment, we will in a flash become able to see that it is not reducible to the relatively solid objects that normally settle into our minds—just as so often we fail to see our children growing until we look back and notice that they have grown but, when we do take notice, growth itself becomes present for us in a way that it had not been a moment before.

All that we perceive is, if we are only able to become aware of it, a spiraling dance of qualities never at rest but art seems, paradoxically, to show us a frozen moment unendingly the same. It seems to show us something captured forever as in amber or formaldehyde but, if it does its job, what it will in fact show us is a subject so truly portrayed that it appears to live and breathe only for itself in a state in which no explanation or description could do it justice. When we are able to achieve that shift in consciousness that comes to us from surrendering to the artist's vision, a subject artfully depicted will appear to us as a product of absolute necessity, as it never would appear if we were engaged in a utilitarian relationship with it in the world (can we call this new relationship an I-Thou relationship rather than an I-It relationship?).  We see, by virtue of the artist's depiction, that this phenomenon could never be anything other than what it is and what it is is true and right, "sinless and all-sufficient."

If we are able look at something for itself and not for ourselves, if we take out all the distractions of whether or not we like it, whether or not we need it or want it or if it is just in our way, whether or not it stimulates us in a way that we find pleasurable or provides us with an enjoyable frisson of fear or disgust, then we can accomplish the rare feat of re-producing the object in our imaginations without reference to our grasping, judging selves. Though I am not entirely sure that I can do it justice, I can say that this moment produces such intimacy, more than intimacy- identification!, that we become able to see the phenomenon in all its potential (whether or not that potential is ever to become fully manifest).  We are able to see that what something is can never be fully expressed within the limits of time and space.

A witness who perceived in this way, would not think (at least at first) to wonder whether or not she would have rescued Brueghel's Icarus or like the actual figures in the painting, failed to notice the splash when he hit the water. Instead of identifying with the rash, unfortunate youth or with the plowman who goes on with his work, instead of judging either of them, such a witness would find herself allowing the figures of the painting to inhabit her consciousness-- horses, sheep, shepherds, ships, sunsets and the shock of the plunge, all that she surveyed would begin to take root in her mind so completely that she would be one in essence with, not just each figure in the scene, but with all of them, with the scene itself as a dynamic unity.  Now, she can grow with the scene as its nature tells her that it would surely grow.  As Goethe expressed it when he described his process of "exact sensorial imagination," she would become capable of "animating, developing, extending and transforming" what she saw and, thus, become able to see with her inner eye, not the frozen moment of the unregarded fall, but the scene's inherent dynamism, its perfect aliveness.   She would see that none of its figures are separate, that there is no real division between horizon, sea and land and that all, even the distant buildings, are in some way awake to and within themselves.  All of the manifest and potential stages of a phenomenon, from abortive to stunted to fully in bloom, participate in its dynamic essence, in what Goethe called the Archetypal Phenomenon and Bortoft described as the "omnipotential form."  When we see from this wholeness, this infinitely dynamic wholeness, then all is beautiful.



I cannot resist adding, though it disrupts the flow of my narrative, that, when Goethe described to his friend Schiller the experience of seeing the Archetypal Phenomenon, Schiller replied that Goethe was not "seeing" but "thinking." Goethe later wrote that "there is a difference between seeing and seeing; the eyes of the spirit have to work in perpetual living connection with those of the body, for one otherwise risks seeing and yet seeing past a thing."