Beauty is Divine

Years ago I was glancing at the headlines on a paper in a newspaper vending machine when one tagline caught my eye, Science Confirms Plato, Beauty is Absolute. Unfortunately I did not buy the paper and subsequently did not read the article. For all I know it was an op-ed piece on gardening tips. Still, my interest remains piqued. I have tried to Google variations of the title but have never found any writing that presents definitive proof demonstrating categorically that Beauty is an Absolute.

When talking about Plato’s term “absolute” it might be more appropriate to say “beauty in itself.” Anyone who is even vaguely familiar with Plato’s theory of ideal forms understands that Beauty is not tied to things that we would describe as beautiful, like a flower or a woman. Instead beauty leads us to a love of truth, which for Plato was the divine. In Plato’s world, everything that is good or noble must be beautiful. The lover of truth purifies the mind of desires and appetites and focus instead on knowledge that wells up from within.

You might ask how can beauty be thought of as objectively separate from the thing that we call beautiful? Shouldn’t beauty be a relative value instead of an absolute principle? Isn’t what I call beautiful and what you call beautiful necessarily going to vary? Beauty changes over time. The flower wilts.

Plato says that the absolute is independent of thoughts existing in men's brains. At the same time Plato identifies his universal Ideas with characteristics of a particular objects, such as the chair-ness of a chair, which would not appear to have an independent reality. I suspect this is the character of the divine that is necessarily resident in Plato’s understanding of the Absolute. These absolutes must exist as some emanation of God’s thought, otherwise, if they are just the stuff of our thoughts they are mortal and not eternal.

So beauty is divine, and if the newspaper headline is to be believed, science has proven it.  I begin to think that my memory may not be as accurate as I once imagined, and that the article might be less about Plato’s world of heavenly forms than I once believed.

Another possibility that occurs to me is that we may be dealing with a problem of semantics, and just as the Eskimos had a hundred words for “snow”, or as C.S. Lewis had his 4 loves, shouldn’t there be many types of beauty, one for every taste and imagination?

Anyway, I was talking with a friend a few days ago and she suggested I start dusting off my writing skills when it comes to the topic of aesthetics. Mainly because I have been thinking about going back to school again to study the philosophy of art know as aesthetics. So be warned faithful readers, the next few blog posts will probably be more of the same.