Plotinus versus Romantics. The Greeks have some-
how created the impression on romantics of all ages—
perhaps beginning in antiquity with early Hellenophile
Stoics, and certainly in modern times with the very
early romantic Johann Joachim Winckelmann—that
dualities were the embodiment of an indissoluble union
of beauty, harmony, symmetry, etc., and that promi-
nent Greeks were likely to have statues of Pindaresque
symmetry, even if a Herodotus, Socrates, Aristotle, and
even Plato would hardly conform to this physical ideal
au naturel.
The first to dissent was, most unbelievably, Plotinus,
one of the most nonrealistic of philosophers, and he
turned his dissent into a major philosopheme about
symmetry, which he presented in his renowned essay
“On Beauty” (Enneads I, 6) and in some other passages.
Plotinus asserts and reasons that symmetry (ἡ ουμμετρπία,
τὸ ούμμετρον)
is neither a necessary nor a sufficient
prerequisite for beauty (τὸ καλόν), even if, admittedly,
“beauty is in the eye of the beholder” (this cliché is
Plotinus').
The context suggests that it is the purpose of Plotinus
to refute a widely held tenet. Being a good philosopher,
he first gives a clearly formulated version of what it
is that he is going to refute. He announces that he is
going to refute the thesis
that the symmetry of parts towards each other and towards
a whole, with, besides, a certain charm of color, constitutes
the beauty recognized by the eye, that in visible things,
as indeed in all else, universally, the beautiful thing is
essentially symmetrical, patterned
(cf. Beardsley, p. 80;
trans. Stephen McKenna).
Plotinus' refutation of this thesis goes as follows. A
thing cannot be endowed with symmetry unless it can
be decomposed into parts which are symmetrically
paired. Therefore, if symmetry were a necessary con-
dition of beauty, a beautiful thing would have to be
decomposable, and a simple, that is, indecomposable
thing could not be beautiful. This would, according
to Plotinus, exclude from the contest for beauty such
things as monochromatic colors, single tones, the light
of the sun, gold, night lighting, and so on (ibid.), which
Plotinus finds absurd. On the other hand,
Symmetry cannot be a sufficient condition of beauty, be-
cause an object that remains symmetrical can lose its
beauty: “one face constant in symmetry, appears sometimes
fair, sometimes not”—and when a body becomes lifeless,
it loses most of its beauty, though not its symmetry
(ibid;
also, Enneads VI, 7, 22).
Plotinus of course, did not convert a single romantic.
In the nineteenth century, the ultra-romantic historian
(a very good one) Johann Gustav Droysen impressed
an Apollo-like “symmetry” on a monumentally de-
signed figure of Alexander the Great, which the twen-
tieth century is taking pains to redress (cf. G. T.
Griffith).
Still, there have been indomitable romantics even
in the twentieth century, as there always will be.
Hermann Weyl, after quoting a brief poem in adoration
of symmetry—the poem was published in 1921 by the
poetess Anna Wickham—also transcribes it into purple
prose thus:
Symmetry, as wide or as narrow as you may define its
meaning, is one idea by which man through the ages has
tried to comprehend the created order, beauty, and perfec-
tion
(Weyl, p. 5).
To which a Plotinus could retort that it might also be
the beauty of a corpse, or the order and perfection
of a row of tombstones.
