Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

the general disregard our culture sometimes has to questions of aesthetics. But beauty seems to need a different approach from questions of truth and even to questions of morality. It seems to call forth a personal response.

Thomas Aquinas, following the ancient Greeks, said beauty consists of wholeness, harmony and radiance. James Hillman (The Soul’s Code) interpreted Aquinas’s views to give us a slightly expanded version of these three aspects. There is physical beauty — that is, the beauty of particular things. (Wholeness.) There is intellectual beauty — that is, the beauty of things in general. (Harmony, especially mathematical harmony.) And then there is spiritual beauty — the beauty of things in the light of eternity. Hillman suggests that beauty is not a reliable guide to truth. But he talks about seeing things clearly as the means by which we can properly know the world. Other authors (Elaine Scarry, Tielhard de Chardin, Iris Murdoch) connect seeing with beauty, in that clearly seeing others will lead us into discovering their underlying beauty. 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.

Plotinus likewise recognised moral as well as physical beauty. For him, moral beauty is a person’s character and a reminder of the individual soul’s connection with the world soul.

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