“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.” — Donna Tartt, The Secret History
For millennia, the subject of beauty has been a source of debate between philosophers. Whilst the ancient Greeks — i.e. Plato and Aristotle — argued for a sensible source of beauty, that beauty being inherent in mathematical simplicities, geometry, and that which is perfect, more modern philosophers — i.e. Hegel and Nietzche — proposed that beauty is more reliant on understanding and our interpretation of beauty itself. Whilst it is not common to deny the loveliness of Renaissance art, proportionality and architecture — that sensible beauty so beloved by the ancient Greeks — we have begun to enter an era, in contemporary society, where the acceptance of beauty in terror, the fearful, destructive nature of beauty, is also more widely discussed. Can something be sensibly lovely, but morally repulsive? Can beauty be found in picturesque destruction? In this essay, I aim to explore the concept of beauty, and whether beauty itself can maintain a moral quality.
The easiest, and the most ancient understanding of beauty rests in physical representations of it. Whether, as proposed by David Hume, it is our reaction to such sensible loveliness that causes something to be deemed beautiful, or instead that beauty is inherent in the object itself and wholly separate from our appreciation of it, the existence of beauty in physical forms cannot be denied. For Ancient Greek Philosophers like Aristotle, beauty was born from order, symmetry, and the definite; mathematics itself was the highest form of beauty, because it was from geometry that all other forms of beauty were built. This is particularly interesting, because — despite how long-ago Aristotle and Plato put forwards the concept of mathematical beauty — they were unnervingly close to a physical truth, that being the existence of a certain number known as the golden ratio, or phi Φ. Phi is an irrational constant known now to be around 1.618…, and it is important in that it is closely related to that which is most universally agreed to be beautiful. For example, Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man’ adheres to the ratio of 1:1.618…, as do conical shells, the Mona Lisa, and the proportions of the faces of many models. Hence, it can be quite easily concluded that there does indeed exist beauty in proportionality and order. Another reason to conclude as such is yet again an opinion held by Plato, that being the creation that is inspired by beauty. Plato believed that one of the purest forms of beauty was music (the ‘Harmony of the Spheres’), and that we were drawn to such expressions of beauty because they brought forth an undisclosed desire that we each maintain: to be immortal. Plato put forth the hypothesis that we are drawn to beautiful things, whether that be people, geometry, or music, because such beauty inspires us to create (either through reproduction, art, poetry, or philosophical thought). It is through such creation that we believe we are able to transcend our mortal lives and because more, rising up even to the level of the gods.
However, can it be said that beauty really resides only in physical appearance? Is beauty so monotonous as to be defined by order and symmetry? Many modern-day philosophers would disagree, and I would put forward that such beauty can be usurped by the concept of moral beauty. Afterall, somebody can be incredibly attractive, but repulsive in that they have morals which do not resonate with your own. Such morals do not take back from their physical beauty, but they may become less lovely to you as a result of such morals; can it be argued, then, that moral beauty takes priority over sensible beauty? Nietzche argued that it is our responsibility to make things beautiful, to make life beautiful, through our acceptance and understanding of the world. Even Plato, with his awe of mathematical precision and order, believed in Kallos, the Greek ideal for beauty, which loosely translates to ‘that which is morally noble’. Thus, despite his fondness of geometry, Plato also believed in a kind of moral beauty that was superior to physical beauty. It is from such interpretations that we are left with an understanding of beauty as being tiered; on the lowest level, we have the concept of physical beauty, proportionality, and order, and then on the next we have moral beauty, the beauty born not from the body, but from the soul. How many tiers can be applied to the concept of loveliness? Is there a superior form of beauty?
Hegel argued that beauty was a representation of our understanding of the world, of meaning, and of beauty itself. Thus, beauty was ultimately relative to the time period in which something was created, and the more we understand beauty, the less we are able to represent it through art, poetry, and philosophy. In such an interpretation, beauty is ultimately doomed: there will come a day where humanity has grown in intellect to an extent where we cannot recreate loveliness. Perhaps such a fate, if one is to agree with Hegel, is the reason for modern day debates over the concept of beauty in terror. It is in the work of Dostoevsky that this is most prominent, though many authors often employ such a philosophy in their work (Donna Tartt being yet another strong example). In such pieces of writing, we find that there is a definite loveliness written deep into the terror and suffering of the main characters, even when such characters have collapsed in their moral integrity, straining towards irredeemable actions and tragedy. Thus, perhaps the purest form of beauty, that beauty that survives when all else has been decimated by understanding, is the beauty we do not wish to face, the beauty we hide beneath our floorboards.
To conclude, it is impossible to try to categorise such a complex concept as beauty, because beauty itself encompasses a number of individual experiences that are wholly different from each other. If we wish to better understand what it is that makes something beautiful, we need not look for the right box, but for new words to describe our different experiences of loveliness. Beauty must not be stifled by modern-day classification. Hegel’s prophecy must not unfold.
Algorithmic-E 