Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

different, he is not yet in beauty, but he is in it most perfectly when he becomes it.’ Brian Hines (Return to the One), commenting on this passage, says: ‘It is in spirit, the first emanation from the One, where beauty per se, intrinsic beauty, will be found. Not the beauty of something, but Beauty alone in its fullness. If the One is King, beyond beauty, then spirit is Queen, the epitome of beauty. When we are immersed in spirit, we are immersed in beauty.' Wittgenstein touched on similar themes when he said: ‘It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world is eternally justified’.

Thomas Moore (The Soul’s Religion) says: ‘For the soul … beauty is not defined as pleasantness of form but rather as the quality in things that invites absorption and contemplation.’ When faced with a beautiful person it is understandable that there will be an emotional response of some kind. So — whilst the word beauty can be used in the context of simply describing a person’s physical appearance — it also carries with it at least some connotation of a more general ‘rightness’. This is not necessarily to equate it with moral rightness, but it is certainly a wider affirmation of aesthetics.

Back in Chapter 2, we noted the changed meaning of the word ‘intuition’. The remembering of which Plato spoke might well have been considered a kind of intuition. Now, however, we probably see intuition as something of a magical process, and therefore somewhat suspect. But there is a third use of the word, which suggests intuition to be about

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