1. Metaphysical Foundation.
The most famous and
influential account of the apprehension of beauty
is
in Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus. The primary
theme of the former work is love, and
beauty is dis-
cussed in this perspective.
Plato describes the way in
which the love of beauty is kindled and how it
develops
in a sequence of steps. He seems to think that to
proceed in
a sequence is essential. At the beginning
is the admiration of beauty in a
human body; one
advances to the love of inward beauty, from there to
the contemplation of the beautiful as it appears in
observances, laws, and
knowledge, and thence to the
study of the beautiful itself, “so
that in the end he
comes to know the very essence of beauty”
(
Sympo-
sium
211), which is absolute, always the same, and of
which the multitude
of beautiful things partakes. In his
Phaedrus Plato speaks of the “kind of madness
which
is imputed to him, who, when he sees the beauty of
the earth is
transported with the recollection of the
true beauty,” which he
saw once, before passing into
the form of a human being (249-50). This
reminiscence
is the reason for our yearning after beauty and explains
the awe and reverence we feel in the perception of
beauty. Love seeks
beauty, and beauty in turn inspires
love, so that love becomes creative of
beauty.
The ideas of a right process and of an ascent in our
knowledge of love
(Plato uses the image of the ladder
which we climb, leaving the lower rung
beneath us),
of a state of rapture and frenzy accompanying the
intellectual vision of the highest beauty, and of the
essential creativity
of the love of beauty have formed
a powerful tradition; we find the themes
again and
again, either singly or together, either in their original
form
or modified, in later theories of beauty. In the
eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries the renewal and
transformation of Plato's ideas in Shaftesbury's
thought
is of fundamental importance.
For Shaftesbury the conditio sine qua non of
our
response to beauty is that our perception be disinter-
ested, i.e., unselfish and without bias. Our
knowledge
of the beautiful is contingent—as in
Plato—on the
ascent from sensuous to intellectual perception;
the
process is stated, however, in different terms and is
connected,
in sharp contrast to Plato, with art.
The artist who wishes to bring perfection into his
work must have
“the idea of perfection to give him
aim.” He must be above the world “and fix his eye
upon that consummate grace, that beauty of Nature,
and that perfection of
numbers [harmony] which the
rest of mankind, feeling only by the effect
whilst igno-
rant of the cause, term the
je ne sçay quoy, the un-
intelligible...” (Advice to an Author, in
Charac-
teristics
..., I, 214).
In The Moralists the steps of ascent are defined;
from
the admiration of beautiful objects we rise to the in-
sight that it is art, the beautifying, which is
beautiful;
from the love of beautiful bodies we pass to the recog-
nition that their beauty is founded not
in the body qua
body, but in a forming power (or inward form), in
action and intelligence, i.e., in the mind. Ultimately,
we understand that
the mind, in turn, is fashioned by
the principle which is the very source
and fountain
of all beauty (ibid., II, 132-33).
Among the kinds of beauty formed by man are also
his sentiments,
resolutions, principles, and actions.
Beauty, in turn, provokes and
furthers our social and
sympathetic emotions, quickening a pulsation of
bal-
anced, harmonious feelings.
Shaftesbury's emphasis on beauty as a creative force
in man, an emphasis
which is even stronger than in
Plato, the strong bond which he establishes
between
our feeling for beauty and the forming of the person-
ality of the
“virtuoso,” the fact that he relates the
principles
of order, harmony, and proportion on which
beauty is founded to the
principles of the new mathe-
matical
sciences, as well as the link between these ideas
and the “high
strains” (II, 129) of creative enthusiasm,
make Shaftesbury's
conception of our apprehension of
beauty and the effect of beauty on our
life a unique
and highly influential combination of the ancient and
the modern.
The idea of the harmonizing effect of beauty has
been developed further by
several thinkers and linked
with the inner state achieved in the
contemplation of
Being: the restlessness and uneasiness of our
inquiring,
searching mind, the strain and intricacy of discursive
thinking, our volitions and desires, all are resolved and
come
to rest when we behold beauty. In its contem-
plation our faculties are attuned in free and harmonious
interplay; we find fulfillment in self-forgetfulness and
abandon.
