Sur la Beauté
by
Martin L. Cowen III
“For the sake of the Beautiful … is the
end that belongs to virtue.” Aristotle
In a previous essay, we introduced the
idea that the goal of ethical action is the Beautiful. “The Beautiful as the
Ethical.” The Eudaimonist March 2012.
In the following essay, the idea will be elaborated with an assortment of
observations on the Beautiful.
The five parts I will describe are
these: Performance Art, Objectivism and Life as the standard, Being in the
present, Work as directed toward the Beautiful, Aristotle on Virtue, and Thomas
Aquinas on the Beautiful. These parts, I am suggesting, are related to the
Beautiful and Human Action.
Ephemeral
Performance Art
Lately I have marveled at the common
occurrence of people rehearsing for months to present a play, Romeo and Juliette, for example, on three
different performance nights. Three performances and nothing remains except a
memory. A live play is completely ephemeral; the event is gone as soon as the
curtain comes down. The same is true of a piano recital, a choral performance,
a ballet, a symphony, or an opera. Why do people create ephemeral performance
art with so short an existence? This creation of the ephemeral is, I thought,
quintessentially human, without further elaboration.
Combine this reflection upon the
creation of ephemeral performance art with the idea that ethical action is the
Beautiful suggests to me a relationship between the two ideas. These two
activities, the creation of ephemeral performance art and ethical action are in
essence the same activity: human beings creating the Beautiful. In the case of
performance art, the creation is a beautiful play, recital, concert, dance, or
opera. In the case of ethical action, the creation is a beautiful outcome in
human action. Both activities are the creation of the Beautiful.
Middle class and wealthy people, who because
of their relative wealth are able to enjoy leisure, spend much of their time in
the midst of the Beautiful, for example, by enjoying performance art.
[The Arts were represented in ancient
Greece by the nine Muses:
|
Muse
|
Domain
|
Emblem
|
|
Calliope
|
Epic poetry
|
Writing tablet
|
|
Clio
|
History
|
Scrolls
|
|
Erato
|
Love poetry
|
Cithara (musical instrument)
|
|
Euterpe
|
Song and elegiac
|
Aulos (musical instrument: flute)
|
|
Melpomene
|
Tragedy
|
Tragic mask
|
|
Polyhymnia
|
Hymns
|
Veil
|
|
Terpsichore
|
Dance
|
Lyre
|
|
Thalia
|
Comedy
|
Comic mask
|
|
Urania
|
Astronomy
|
Globe and compass
|
I include this beautiful fact about the
Muses for my own pleasure and, hopefully, yours.]
Objectivism/Self-Interest?
In the philosophy of Objectivism, life
is the standard of value. Life is the goal of all ethical action.
The Eudaimonist study of beauty and
ethics calls the Objectivist position into question.
Consider the virtue of courage. Courage
is, for Aristotle, the first virtue. It is the first virtue discussed in the Nicomachean Ethics and it is the
paradigm Aristotelian virtue. Here is Aristotle’s statement of courage:
“So one who [WHO] endures or fears what
[WHAT] one ought, for the reason [WHY] one ought, as [HOW] one ought, when
[WHEN] one ought, and is confident in similar ways, is courageous, since the
courageous person undergoes things and acts in accordance with what is worthy
and in a way that is proportionate.” Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics1115b16-20.
Aristotle goes on:
“Now the end of any way of being at work
is what corresponds to the active condition it comes from, and to a courageous
person, courage is a beautiful thing, and so its end is something beautiful as
well, since each thing is determine by its end. So it is for the sake of the
Beautiful that the courageous person endures and does things that are in accord
with courage.” Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Ethics1115b 20-25.
A common argument among Objectivist is
whether “life” means “survival at any price” or whether “life” means “the good
life.” I have always taken the second position, that life in the Objectivist
formula meant the good life. Now I suspect that the philosophically correct
answer is that life equals the good life equals the Beautiful. The standard of
value and the proper goal of action is not life, but the Beautiful. Ayn Rand
was an Aristotelian, but she did not have the benefit of Joe Sachs’ translation
of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
(2002). Ayn Rand died on March 6, 1982, twenty years before the publication.
Joe Sachs translates the Greek phase to
kalon as the Beautiful. This change from centuries of tradition makes a
huge difference in the interpretation of the text. (The old translation
rendered to kalon as the noble.)
An example provides a proof of this
point. Most people will agree that the virtue of courage sometimes requires
that one put one’s life at risk. Sometimes one must choose actual death while
enacting courage. The expressions: “he had a beautiful death,” or “that was a
beautiful way to die,” capture our sense of such experiences. All parents would
trade their lives to save their children’s lives. It would be unseemly (ugly,
not beautiful) to run away when one’s children are at risk. Even non-parents
will risk and even lose their own lives in order to protect the children under
the care. Witness the heroism of the teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School
in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14, 2012.
So, it seems that the Objectivist
standard of value, life, might be better formulated as the Beautiful.
Meditation/Being
in the Present/”OM”
Self-help books abound. A frequently
recurring idea in these texts is the idea of living in the present moment. “Be
here now,” I have heard said.
Meditation is an ancient practice of
some interest to our present discussion of beauty. “The eternal is in the
moment,” if have heard said. The sacred Hindu word is “Om” or aum. The word
accompanies and facilitates meditation.
Consider that one reason for staying in
the moment or for meditation is the presence of beauty in that moment. We have
all experienced the awe and mystery of watching a beautiful sunset or any
beautiful landscape or seascape. I remember a particular moment in Provence,
France, in the night, when my wife and I, with our hosts, were walking in the
hills and chanced to see down the hill into a beautiful blue pool lighted from
within the water in which two young people in love were embracing. We were all
wordlessly arrested by the lovely scene.
In Goethe’s Faust (Faust: A Tragedy
by Wolfgang von Goethe, lines 1692 to 1707) Faust makes this contract with
Mephistopheles:
Faust:
If ever I
recline, calmed, on a bed of sloth,
You may destroy
me then and there.
If ever
flattering you should wile me
That in myself I
find delight,
If with
enjoyment you beguile me,
Then break on
me, eternal night!
This bet I
offer.
Mephisto:
I accept it.
Faust:
Right.
If to the moment
I should say:
Abide, you are
so fair—
Put me in
fetters on that day,
I wish to perish then, I swear.
Then let the
death bell ever toll,
Your service
done, you shall be free,
The clock may
stop, the hand may fall,
As Time comes to
an end for me.
“If to the moment I should say: Abide,
you are so fair.”
Faust, the scientist, did not believe in
the Beautiful. In the course of the play (Faust I and Faust II) he discovers
that the Beautiful does exist and he ultimately utters the fateful words.
I believe that the self-help gurus are
advising us to stay in the moment, for a moment, in order to discover the
beauty that might be, and that often is, there.
These common practices, meditation and
living in the moment, are intimately related to the Beautiful.
Work
Medical doctors are presented with
illness and injury. Their goal is to cure the illness and repair the injury.
Their activity can be seen as rendering a mess (the illness or the injury)
beautiful (healed). Thus, the goal of medicine is the Beautiful.
The same came be said of any profession.
Lawyers are presented with legal messes, for example, a breach of contract or a
broken marriage or an uncompensated injury or a criminal offense, and the
lawyer’s job is to fix the mess. Even a maid, a house cleaner, has the
Beautiful as the goal of her job.
Most occupations, perhaps all (?), aim
at the Beautiful.
Aristotle
on the Virtue of Courage
Aristotle describes the mechanism of
virtue in the case of courage: “So one who [WHO] endures or fears what [WHAT]
one ought, for the reason [WHY] one ought, as [HOW] one ought, when [WHEN] one
ought, and is confident in similar ways, is courageous, since the courageous
person undergoes things and acts in accordance with what is worthy and in a way
that is proportionate.” Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Ethics1115b16-20.
Who, what, when, where, why, and how—these
are the factors must come together to count a human action as virtuous. This
circumstance suggests that virtue is an art.
Aristotle goes on:
“Now the end of any way of being at work
is what corresponds to the active condition it comes from, and to a courageous
person, courage is a beautiful thing, and so its end is something beautiful as
well, since each thing is determine by its end. So it is for the sake of the
Beautiful that the courageous person endures and does things that are in accord
with courage.” Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Ethics1115b 20-25.
This latter comment (“for the sake of the
Beautiful”) reinforces the idea that virtue is an art aimed at the Beautiful.
Virtue is therefore difficult because it
is an art. Art and virtue are necessarily the products of training from youth
(habituation) and a lifetime of experiences.
Integritas, Consonantia, Claritas
What is the Beautiful? St. Thomas
Aquinas mentions three principles: wholeness, harmony, radiance. “Three things
are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance.”
Here is what James Joyce through his
character Stephen Dedalus says about these principles in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
[Wholeness]
In order to see
that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all separates the basket from the
rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of
apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be appended. An
esthetic image is presented to us either in space or in time. What is audible
is present in time, what is visible is present in space. But temporal or
spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as self-bounded and
self-contained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not.
You apprehend it as one thing. You
see it is one whole. You apprehend its wholeness. That is integritas.
…
[Harmony]
Then, said
Stephen, you pass from point to point, led by its formal lines; you apprehend
it as balanced part against part within its limits; you feel the rhythm of its
structure. In other words, the synthesis of immediate perception is followed by
the analysis of apprehension. Having first felt that it is one thing you feel now that it is a thing. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible, separable,
made up of its parts, the results of its parts and there sum, harmonious. That
is consonantia.
…
[Radiance]
The radiance of
which he [Aquinas] speaks is the scholastic quidditas,
the whatness of a thing. This supreme
quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his
imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to
a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear
radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has
been arrest by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent
stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac
condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost
as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.
This essay is a musing on the relationship
between the Beautiful and Human Action. At present we have only some of the
“parts.” Our views on the Beautiful are not yet “whole.” We can claim that
these parts have an apparent “harmony” among them as described herein. There
is, finally, a certain luminescence (radiance) here present. We approach the
Beautiful, n’est-ce pas?
