Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

21. Approaching Beauty

‘Beauty is a body bowed from the weight of a life fully lived. Beauty is hair bleached in the light of a life fully loved. Beauty is the angular, bony edges of a life fully risked.’

Sharon Blackie — The Enchanted Life

Thomas Moore suggests: ‘A world considered without its beauty is a world perceived without its God.’ (Care of the Soul.) In this first chapter on beauty, our paradoxical treatment of beauty is put under consideration. Out of our three big themes of philosophy — truth, goodness and beauty — it is very often beauty that is the poor cousin of the other two. In approaching the question of beauty, we can ask: Is there an absolute beauty that exists somewhere outside of the everyday world, or is beauty in some way relative?

In his Meno, Plato used the word ‘anamnesis’ for what might be described as innate knowledge — the idea that knowledge is just remembering. In Phaedrus and The Symposium he suggests that the experience of beauty causes a recollection of the perfect forms.

It is notable that Pythagoras used the word ‘cosmos’ to denote beauty. So the word has a

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