beauty and τελος
thanks to bethany, nathan and dan for your insightful comments on my last couple posts. its wonderful to get such thoughtful contributions to the discussion. its given me a lot to consider and made me realize how little i've really thought about beauty in the past.
in my previous post, thinking about the production/marketing/consumption of beauty in our culture led me to think about the distinction between 'using' and 'appreciating' beauty, and the question of whether or not beauty is or should be 'for' something.
this seems to relate directly to the issue raised by dan in his comment of the connection between beauty and τελος (end, goal). with at least some kinds of beauty, it seems that what makes the thing beautiful is connected to the excellence of that thing defined with respect to the thing's end. for example, it seems that we might say that a space shuttle taking off is beautiful, or a tiger running at full speed is beautiful. and in these cases it is the proper functioning of the thing (defined in terms of the thing's end) that contributes to (or grounds or constitutes?) the beauty of the thing. however, if we take the beauty of niagara falls or of a fresh snowfall, then the role of function seems to come into play less, if at all.
even in the case of the space shuttle or the tiger, though, we can make a distinction between: 1) the beauty of the thing being connected to a τελος and 2) the beauty itself having some other purpose or τελος. i'm more ready to accept the first than the second, though i'm not sure what to think about bethany's suggestion that the purpose of beauty might be to foster worship. (i wonder: could we say that to see something as beautiful in a certain way just is to worship that thing? this, i think, takes us into the very interesting set of questions about the connection between beauty and delight and love -i'm thinking especially of augustine here)
what about the beauty of a human body? or a human soul? i am inclined to agree with dan that there is a very promising line of thought which understands the beauty of a body to be connected to the beauty of a soul in terms of the human τελος -that is, in terms of what the goods/ends of a human life are, how a human ought to live, and what kinds of things a human ought to be doing. the idea is that there are certain goods and excellences of a human soul that depend on or involve a certain kind of body. a human body can therefore be excellent because of the way it contributes to the excellence of the person's life. and a beautiful body is the kind of body that contributes to a beautiful life.
but is this quite right? it seems to make sense if we are thinking in terms of well-formed limbs, muscles of appropriate size for accomplishing tasks, the right number of toes, etc. but what about the beauty of a face? it seems that you can have a face that functions very well -sees, hears, smells well- but that is nevertheless not beautiful, perhaps even ugly.
there is an old tradition that thinks of beauty in terms of symmetry or proportion. this way of thinking about beauty can be made to fit with the notion of τελος -a thing's being well-proportioned is defined in terms of its parts fitting together as a whole in such a way that the whole acheives its end.
can a corpse be beautiful the way that a living thing is beautiful? is there a distinct kind of beauty to living things -e.g. the beauty of a bumble bee as it buzzes around flowers, vs. the beauty of a bumble bee pinned to a table and seen through a microscope?
perhaps we need to distinguish between: beautiful bodies, beautiful lives and living beautifully.
in my previous post, thinking about the production/marketing/consumption of beauty in our culture led me to think about the distinction between 'using' and 'appreciating' beauty, and the question of whether or not beauty is or should be 'for' something.
this seems to relate directly to the issue raised by dan in his comment of the connection between beauty and τελος (end, goal). with at least some kinds of beauty, it seems that what makes the thing beautiful is connected to the excellence of that thing defined with respect to the thing's end. for example, it seems that we might say that a space shuttle taking off is beautiful, or a tiger running at full speed is beautiful. and in these cases it is the proper functioning of the thing (defined in terms of the thing's end) that contributes to (or grounds or constitutes?) the beauty of the thing. however, if we take the beauty of niagara falls or of a fresh snowfall, then the role of function seems to come into play less, if at all.
even in the case of the space shuttle or the tiger, though, we can make a distinction between: 1) the beauty of the thing being connected to a τελος and 2) the beauty itself having some other purpose or τελος. i'm more ready to accept the first than the second, though i'm not sure what to think about bethany's suggestion that the purpose of beauty might be to foster worship. (i wonder: could we say that to see something as beautiful in a certain way just is to worship that thing? this, i think, takes us into the very interesting set of questions about the connection between beauty and delight and love -i'm thinking especially of augustine here)
what about the beauty of a human body? or a human soul? i am inclined to agree with dan that there is a very promising line of thought which understands the beauty of a body to be connected to the beauty of a soul in terms of the human τελος -that is, in terms of what the goods/ends of a human life are, how a human ought to live, and what kinds of things a human ought to be doing. the idea is that there are certain goods and excellences of a human soul that depend on or involve a certain kind of body. a human body can therefore be excellent because of the way it contributes to the excellence of the person's life. and a beautiful body is the kind of body that contributes to a beautiful life.
but is this quite right? it seems to make sense if we are thinking in terms of well-formed limbs, muscles of appropriate size for accomplishing tasks, the right number of toes, etc. but what about the beauty of a face? it seems that you can have a face that functions very well -sees, hears, smells well- but that is nevertheless not beautiful, perhaps even ugly.
there is an old tradition that thinks of beauty in terms of symmetry or proportion. this way of thinking about beauty can be made to fit with the notion of τελος -a thing's being well-proportioned is defined in terms of its parts fitting together as a whole in such a way that the whole acheives its end.
can a corpse be beautiful the way that a living thing is beautiful? is there a distinct kind of beauty to living things -e.g. the beauty of a bumble bee as it buzzes around flowers, vs. the beauty of a bumble bee pinned to a table and seen through a microscope?
perhaps we need to distinguish between: beautiful bodies, beautiful lives and living beautifully.
posted by micah at 10:08 AM
3 Comments:
y’all’s insightful posts have inspired me to contribute some of my own thoughts, specifically on the topics of: beauty as telos, the two movements of beauty, and buying things as a category mistake.
there is a great tradition of thinking about beauty as a category for understanding something’s excellence with respect to its telos, and i see evolutionary biology as a sneaky (and flashy and know-it-all and popular) newcomer to this philosophy. evolutionary biology can, for example, explain why we consider as beautiful large eyes (good vision = good genes = good for reproduction), symmetrical faces (no diseases, good genes = good for reproduction), large breasts and hips (reproduction again, right? – one starts to wonder where the actual telos is in evolutionary biology…). in other words, a person is beautiful because and to the extent that s/he seems healthy and likely to produce healthy children. less convincingly, telos beauty could also explain that we find flowers beautiful because and to the extent that they are well-suited to the reproductive purposes of the plant. but the exoskeleton of an insect is at least equally well-suited to the survival of, say, a roach, and roach bodies don’t seem to be quite as well-represented in poetry as flowers.
similarly, i don’t think i am in the minority in saying that a tiger taking off is beautiful in a way that the taking off of a poodle or a rat or does not approach. even the more comparable running greyhound is orders below the beauty of a running tiger. there is something uniquely beautiful about a running tiger that is irredudicible to its telos. (and – bringing it on home – how not quite coincidental that this image is claimed by an oil company in selling gas, yes?) i am not sure how to delineate the beauty of a thing with respect to its telos (after all – there are some crazy insect-ologists who *do* find a roach’s exoskeleton beautiful because they understand its purpose so well) and beauty irrespective of telos, but i think there is an analogy in these two possibilities for beauty and efficiency and grace. a thing can be so efficient that it achieves some measure of beauty, but generally it is only when that efficiency is also infused with grace that it is found generally beautiful. and a moment of grace is beautiful quite apart from any notion of efficiency. or: extreme efficiency can be an occasion for a kind of grace, but it is not necessarily so, and it is certainly not sufficiently so.
more generally, i have enjoyed reading your discussions on beauty, and would like to highlight the two-fold movement in beauty that seems to emerge from y’all’s thoughts. one is the appreciation of something in itself, outside of oneself. we might think of this as akin to (or preparation for) what Bethany called worship. the other is the participation of our self in that beauty. we might participate in beauty by generating further beauty (art) or cultivating dispositions of beauty within ourselves (a response, perhaps, to a beautiful life or sacrifice) or, as mentioned, consuming beauty. on this last mode of responding to beauty you all have had fascinating insights. for my part, i tend to agree with Bethany that when people buy beautiful things, it is not a category mistake in which they actually desire beautiful souls. maybe at some deep, deep level that is true, but i think the more immediate cause is just that certain kinds of beauty (i.e., physical) are more readily accessible than others (perhaps spiritual or intellectual?), and these latter kinds of beauty require training – as for an artist or connoisseur – but the great lot of us choose to remain novices satisfied with milk instead of progressing to solid food, or with the great U2 when there are also complicated indie rock bands to be cultivated into. or whatever. it isn’t that milk or U2 is bad or that – heaven forbid – we should progress *beyond* either, but that there are other and greater things we miss by stopping with the easier beauty. probably our consumer culture, in replicating so many different forms of the same kind of beauty, has contributed to our beauty slothfulness of remaining on one simple, flat plane of beauty.
also: i am curious about the connection between living beautifully and living ethically. how might the two be distinguished? in thinking more about beauty, it might be helpful to think about the relationships among aesthetics, ethics, sensuality, and the sublime/religious/numinous.
I don't know that this sheds much light, but Emily gave the interesting examples of how smoking and drinking can show up on a person's face. it seems clear that excessive drinking prevents having a beautiful soul as well as face, and one might be inclined these days to say the same about smoking. Not to deny, of course, that someone can be perfectly functioning with an ugly face. But it's not clear what that shows - simply because there are cases where ugly face is paired with beautiful soul doesn't show that there is no connection between ugly soul, ugly face (to think otherwise would be to succumb to a version of the argument from illusion). Drinking and smoking are importantly different since the former messes with your mind in a way that the latter doesn't, but what both cases suggest, at least to me, is that the gap between causing oneself physical harm and causing oneself soul-harm can sometimes not only go together but actually be hard to tease apart - it seems that certain ways of treating one's body don't simply *signal* that one's soul is unhealthy as well, but also *count as* treating one's soul badly. but i'm not sure about this..
as for telos-free beauty...i'm skeptical there is such a thing. or, if there is, it's a very thin, uninteresting sense of beauty. but that's for another time.
enjoying the posts..
DG
I would also like to add my two cents regarding some of these reflections on beauty:
first, micah says, "perhaps we need to distinguish between: beautiful bodies, beautiful lives and living beautifully."
second, natalie writes, "i think the more immediate cause is just that certain kinds of beauty (i.e., physical) are more readily accessible than others (perhaps spiritual or intellectual?), and these latter kinds of beauty require training – as for an artist or connoisseur – but the great lot of us choose to remain novices satisfied with milk instead of progressing to solid food, or with the great U2 when there are also complicated indie rock bands to be cultivated into... i am curious about the connection between living beautifully and living ethically. how might the two be distinguished? in thinking more about beauty, it might be helpful to think about the relationships among aesthetics, ethics, sensuality, and the sublime/religious/numinous."
my reflections on these statements:
beautiful bodies are somehow, whether biologically, spiritually, or ethically, something from which and to which we are attracted. why is it that perfumes or clothes or shapely furniture attract some deeper desire within us? 'shopping for beauty' seems to me to touch on a deeper desire, that is, a need to be satisfied with physicality. but, to go further, aren't beautiful bodies originally sexual, as seems to be the case in Genesis 2? are not our desires of the body those which yearn to become one with another? how do physical objects satisfy, even partially, this yearning? if we were to take the next step, from beautiful bodies to beautiful lives, then we begin to question what it is about this desire that is good? how do we order these desires? certainly, it is not intrinsically bad to shop for beauty? it is only when our shopping for beauty replaces that which is the telos of all beauty that shopping becomes disordered. an example of this can be seen in my desire to buy a recent c.d. by, to name a band that i like alot, 16 horsepower--the case is attractive, the photography, even the music. i come to the store where everything is attractively presented, but in arriving to the store, i am more attracted to the madonna cd, and i buy it instead. although this sounds like a silly example, and maybe it is, i think that this is where shopping for beauty has displaced my desire for beauty. now, there are many other factors at work, some of which matter with regard to beauty. namely, 16 hp in my opinion is a Godly band that recognises the true telos of beauty in their music. they are also much more savvy and musically talented (again in my opinion) than madonna, but they are not as good at marketing, neither are they females who pose with very little clothes on their album cover(s).
this says something with regard to natalie's comment regarding U2, solid food/milk, and the accessibility of beauty. Now i am very mixed about U2. i used to love them (which somehow speaks to their attractiveness), but now their music does not interest me much. if i could always choose my own musical likes, i think that i would always choose classical (say, Bach) over any rock music due to its more complicated beauty. but that is not the case. most of the time, i would prefer listening to an obscure alternative band to someone like Josquin Desprez. why is this?
lastly, natalie asks about the relationship of living beautifully and living ethically, or: what has ethics to do with aesthetics, let alone theology? my prepatory answer to this lies in the earlier comments relating soul and body, their oneness, and my comment above regarding the ordering of desires, loves...
we all yearn for that which is beautiful, but as soon as that yearning becomes the instance in which we justify beauty over the good, or as Micah said regarding politics, nationalism over God, then we are neither living beautifully nor ethically. certainly, it seems to be that neither can beauty be reduced to the good, nor good to beauty--their intrinsic natures are somehow different and yet related. that is what is so special about human nature in a way, and thomas aquinas recognised this, as did kant and others...that is, beauty satisfies something in our nature that just being good cannot. let us say that we lived perfectly ethical lives, did everything that was right and Godly, but did not recognise beauty. we did not listen to the birds sing outside of our windows, or smell the flowers as we passed by them, then something would be intrinsically missing from our so-called 'good' lives. that is basically why, in speaking of beauty and the good or the religious, none of these can be purely understood by themselves. there is a lot more to be said, especially with regards to natalie's comment of 'the relationships among aesthetics, ethics, sensuality, and the sublime/religious/numinous,' but that calls for another post.
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