The Definition of Beauty: Mystery
Nov 26th, 2007 by Micah Tillman
A Short Intro
[ Kant's Definition | Ezra Pound's | C.S. Lewis's | Husserl/Levinas/James & Mona Lisa ]
I really don’t like definitions that reduce one thing to another (or a collection of other things). Except when I do. But usually I don’t.
For example: “What are humans?” “Animals with big brains.” “What is love?” “A chemical reaction in the brain.”
As Nietzsche says, to “understand” something in this way is to kill it.
So I’m skeptical, along with G.E. Moore, of people who try to define the Good. And I’m skeptical of people who try to define beauty.
Nevertheless, I think I can tell you what beauty is.
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Kant’s Definition
[ Intro | Ezra Pound's | C.S. Lewis's | Husserl/Levinas/James & Mona Lisa ]
Plotinus argued that, while some thought beauty was symmetry, to be beautiful was to participate in the divine Ideas. Which is pretty cool sounding. I like Kant’s definition(s) better, however. In his Critique of Judgment, Kant says:
We dwell on the contemplation of the beautiful because this contemplation strengthens and reproduces itself. (First Part, Section I, Book I, Third Moment, §12, trans. by James Creed Meredith)
A thing is beautiful when it (in addition to doing other things) stimulates the mind to ever new contemplations of itself (of the thing).
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Ezra Pound’s Version
[ Intro | Kant's Definition | C.S. Lewis's | Husserl/Levinas/James & Mona Lisa ]
That’s more of an ostensive definition than an analytic one. (And I prefer ostensive definitions.) If a thing is beautiful, there’s always more to it to discover. It’s always worth going back to it. You’re always finding something new in it.
Ezra pound put it this way:
A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions . . . . It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness. (ABC of Reading, 13-14)
‘Literature is news that STAYS news.’ (ABC of Reading, 29; see also p. 44)
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C.S. Lewis’s Version
[ Intro | Kant's Definition | Ezra Pound's | Husserl/Levinas/James & Mona Lisa ]
And it seems to me another word that describes our experience of something of which there is always more to discover, that’s always worth going back to, that you’re always finding something new in, is “mystery.” A thing is mysterious if there’s a “more” to it that has yet to be uncovered, but that you know must be there.
Mystery is created in pictures by hiding things. This is why hills and mountains are beautiful. They say, “We have other sides and valleys that you can’t see now. But you could if you went exploring. Come see.”
C.S. Lewis described such experiences as “joy” in his marvelous Surprised by Joy. And Kant connects them to “the sublime” in Critique of Judgment.
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Husserl, Levinas, James, and Mona Lisa
[ Intro | Kant's Definition | Ezra Pound's | C.S. Lewis's ]
And mystery is even involved in our experience of human beauty. To see a human is to see something which appears as what it is primarily because of what it hides: its thoughts/mind/soul.
As both Husserl and Levinas (and William James) say, to experience another mind is to experience what it is impossible to experience. Levinas calls this the “infinity of the Other” or the “infinite separation of the Other” (or something like that).
Just think of the Mona Lisa. People to this day are asking why she smiles.
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UPDATED (06-07 July, 2008) to include Ezra Pound references, section divisions, internal links, a transition sentence between the intro and the Kant section, to fix a typo, to change “it” to “them” in the sentence on the sublime, and to move the following sentence from the first paragraph to here:
This post was in response to a discussion Mr. Stevens and I were having, beginning here, about mystery.)
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Poetic Principle”
“In the contemplation of Beauty we alone find it possible to attain that pleasurable elevation, or excitement, of the soul, which we recognize as the Poetic Sentiment, and which is so easily distinguished from Truth, which is the satisfaction of the Reason, or from Passion, which is the excitement of the Heart. I make Beauty, therefore—using the word as inclusive of the sublime,—I make Beauty the province of the poem, simply because it is an obvious rule of Art that effects should be made to spring as directly as possible from their causes—no one as yet having been weak enough to deny that the peculiar elevation in question is at least most readily attainable in the poem.”
[...] in the vein of last night’s post, I have one more thought about beauty. The job of the artist is to discover where beauty is [...]
Of course, Poe’s best poems were always about the death of Beauty (cf. The Raven and Annabel Lee). I think it’s safe to say that nobody in all history has expressed the grief of the widower more eloquently.
” And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea. “
Heidegger eventually came to believe that poetry was higher than philosophy, I think. Interesting that Poe also privileges poetry (though not over philosophy necessarily).
I think I tend to privilege painting.
I haven’t read enough Poe. Thanks to you both for the mini-education.
Heidegger’s another example of your eclecticism. Never read much of him myself. Obviously, I disagree with him about the respective importance of philosophy and poetry. (Though poetry’s fine in its place.) As for Poe, of course he privileges poetry; he was a poet.
[...] Lewis the phenomenon is “joy” (or, as I would term it, “mystery”). For Wright the phenomena are justice, spirituality, relationships, and [...]
[...] The way in which space is handled in this cover allows for mystery. (It allows things to be hidden.) [...]
[...] term through which people get to my site seems to be “definition of beauty.” They land on this post, over and [...]
This link between beauty and divine mystery, if you’ll permit me to combine Plutonius and Lewis, is very intriguing, and helps me understand why the following quotes are so haunting to me:
“Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.”
-Ranier Maria Rilke
“It is a strange and wonderful and embarassing feeling to hold someone in your arms who is trying to detach you from the earth and you aren’t good enough to follow her.”
-Norman Maclean
Thanks, Mr. Stallard!
I’m glad you shared those two quotations, especially since I hadn’t seen either before. I’m finding them both very worthy of pondering.
(Which means I can’t yet formulate a complete, summarizing thought about them. Which, in many ways, is one part of the experience of mystery/beauty . . . .).