On Beauty

In the usual sort of internet discussion, in which one gropes for ages to find out his opponent's position only to lose him or her just as one begins to make some traction, someone once argued against me that it was Plato's great contribution (to what?) to conceive of beauty as a concept.

I didn't think that was much of an achievement: Indoeuropean languages form nouns with great ease: small children do it, why not Plato. The more important further point which I was aiming to make, but couldn't because the offended champion of Plato suddenly disappeared, was that Indoeuropean languages make nouns out of adjectives without any regard as to whether doing so makes any sense or serves any purpose. And because nouns are easily made, and easily understood, such constructions appear to make sense -- strike us with a certain force of conviction -- even when they are actually utterly meaningless.

This is what trips up Mary Mothersill in her On beauty: she put a lot of energy into trying to narrow down the concept of beauty, which is not a concept but a meaningless grammatical construction. If she owe this to Plato, then she owes him a great deal of confusion; his supposed great contribution would therefore seem to be not to knowledge or understanding; but to rendering the debate confused and therefore potentially endless.

(Perhaps this is what my interlocutor had meant when he praised Plato for it: perhaps he is one of those pomo people who think that knowledge is impossible anyway but meaningless and circular discourse in itself represents value and should be kept up; and anything that does is therefore virtuous).

But, in truth, while it makes sense to say "X is beautiful" (it really means "I find X beautiful"), the term "beauty" makes no analytical sense at all. There is no such thing.

Mothersill spends a great deal of time trying to identify the "good-making characteristics" of the Wordsworthian phrase "trailing clouds of glory". (The term she takes to mean "beautiful-making", but this surely is a mistake since good and beautiful should not be presumed to be the same). Now, she looks for the good-making characteristics with the expectation that such characteristics might tell us something about beauty. In fact, nothing is further from the truth: if they could tell us anything at all it would be something about Mary Mothersill: about the sort of things she finds beautiful and therefore about the special manner in which her brain works. (Mine, by the way, works differently: "trailing clouds of glory" leaves me cold).

If one were to insist on making nouns using the word "beauty" one could propose that there is such a thing as "the experience of beauty" - a certain state of mind, similar in nature to such states as fear or sleepiness - "feeling" seems a better word to describe it than "emotion". One could add that the state is almost certainly produced in us by a dedicated brain gizmo, or set of brain gizmos working in tandem (because that's how the experiences of fear and sleepiness are produced); that the experience feels similar enough from person to person for us to be able to describe it ("phenomenologically") with reasonable hope that most our listeners will understand what we mean by comparing our description with their own experience; and that the experience serves an important role in natural selection and survival, helping us pick suitable sexual partners, wholesome food, safe dwellings, etc. One could then say that when we are faced with such objects, we experience beauty (or "we find them beautiful"; or "we say: they are beautiful").

But that really is all one could say about "beauty". As there is nothing a suitable sexual partner has in common with a wholesome apple, except that we find them both beautiful to look at, there is nothing we can abstract from their common characteristics. Indeed, there is often nothing that two suitable sexual partners have in common (since all the things that a large buxom blond and a petite brunette have in common are not their "beautiful-making characteristics" but ordinary primary and secondary sexual traits). The most the two can have in common is that they both excite the same experience of beauty in someone else's mind: i.e. stimulate the same gizmo but probably each by a different pathway.

And that is all that can be said sensibly using the Indoeuropean noun "beauty". Everything else is a waste of time -- as over two and a half millenia of western aesthetics clearly shows.