The Recovery of Beauty: Arts, Culture, Medicine

Corinne Saunders, David Fuller, Jane Macnaughton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137426741
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Arts de la scène

An interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring the complex and conflicted topic of beauty in cultural, arts and medicine, looking back through the long cultural history of beauty, and asking whether it is possible to 'recover beauty'.

Part I

Mind, Body, Soul

1

Beautiful Ideas: The Visibility of Truth

Mark A. McIntosh

As her family were attempting to find a way out of Vichy France, the young Jewish intellectual Simone Weil was struggling to make sense of the grotesque disjunction between true beauty and the brutalising glamour of the collaborationist propaganda, and that of its powerful German sponsor: ‘In ancient times the love of the beauty of the world had a very important place in men’s thoughts and surrounded the whole of life with a marvellous poetry ... Today one might think that the white races had almost lost all feeling for the beauty of the world, and that they had taken upon them the task of making it disappear from all the continents where they have penetrated with their armies, their trade and their religion.’¹ As she analysed the enigma, she viewed the pitiless divorce between authentic beauty and genuine truthfulness as a symptom of humanity’s longing for power and possession: ‘The love of power amounts to a desire to establish order among the men and things around oneself ... the question is one of forcing a certain circle into a pattern suggestive of universal beauty.’²

Weil’s point is that beauty becomes dangerous, deceptive, and a tool, because the human appetite for power leads us to instrumentalise beauty, commodifying it into an object used for some purpose (perhaps to manipulate others), rather than allowing beauty to draw human beings towards a more universal good. We remember how forcefully a powerful early modern thinker, Machiavelli, insists that the successful prince must practise without fail the mask of seeming to prize what is truly admirable or beautiful or just, but only for the sake of maintaining reputation, ‘for a man who wants to make a profession of good in all regards must come to ruin among so many who are not good’.³ If this is really so, then true beauty becomes merely a decorative accessory, and in some sense an inherently deceptive or manipulative one at that: Machiavelli observes that the prince should always appear to embody

all mercy, all faith, all honesty, all humanity, all religion. And nothing is more necessary to appear to have than this last quality. Men in general judge more by their eyes than by their hands ... everyone sees how you appear, few touch what you are ... the vulgar are taken in by the appearance and the outcome of a thing, and in the world there is no one but the vulgar.⁴

But as Weil saw, so clever and cynical a reduction of beauty to mere seeming, to a cloak of simulated appearances, would degrade beauty’s intrinsic unity with truth and goodness, and so coarsen and cheapen its meaning into mere masquerade. La Rochefoucauld quipped knowingly: ‘Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.’

The tragedy of beauty in this modern mode of simulacrum would surely be its fading away as a mode of human access to whatever is genuinely universal, authentically good and true. In fact, Weil contrasts this threatened loss of beauty’s voice with what she sees as lingering authentic quests for beauty in art and in science:

the object of science is the presence of Wisdom in the universe, the Wisdom of which we are the brothers, the presence of Christ, expressed through the matter which constitutes the world. We reconstruct for ourselves the order of the world in an image, starting from limited, countable, and strictly defined data ... Thus in an image, an image of which the very existence hangs upon an act of our attention, we can contemplate the necessity which is the substance of the universe.⁵

It is highly interesting that Weil chooses the patient and attentive minding that science gives to the intrinsic intelligibility of the universe as one of the few remaining quests for beauty.

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) is perhaps superficially remembered for insisting that we must put Nature on the rack to force her to reveal her secrets, thus apparently driving the beautiful appearance of reality even further from its underlying stuff. But Bacon might be more representatively quoted in terms more reverential of Nature’s truth, more contemplative of her hidden wisdom and beauty. In advocating the investigation of efficient causes, this founding figure of modern science argues that such a pursuit of the intelligible laws at work in the material world need not close the mind to any reverence for the ultimate cause of all things in God. In The Advancement of Learning, Bacon twice quotes Ecclesiastes 3.11ff: ‘God hath made all things beautiful, or decent, in the true return of their seasons: Also he hath placed the world in man’s heart,’ going on to remark that here Solomon

declar[es] not obscurely that God hath framed the mind of man as a mirror or glass capable of the image of the universal world, and joyful to receive the impression thereof, as the eye joyeth to receive light; and not only delighted in beholding the variety of things and vicissitude of times, but raised also to find out and discern the ordinances and decrees which throughout all those changes are infallibly observed.⁶

Notice, here, Bacon’s seeming acceptance of the classical notion, much beloved of Renaissance Platonists, that the human mind is in a sense all things, because it can contain the intelligible forms or ideas of all things.

The second time Bacon refers to this verse from Ecclesiastes, it does indeed come as the capstone to his retrieval of the study of forms or ideas, the intelligibility of things. He insists that the

invention of Forms [that is, their uncovery through his method] is of all other parts of knowledge the worthiest to be sought, if it be possible to be found. As for the possibility, they are ill discoverers that think there is no land when they can see nothing but sea. But it is manifest that Plato in his opinion of Ideas, as one that had a wit of elevation situate as upon a cliff, did descry that the forms were the true object of knowledge; but lost the real fruit of his opinion, by considering of forms as absolutely abstracted from matter. (II, p. 196)

What has to happen, says Bacon, is that we need to investigate not the complex concatenation of forms at the level of appearance, but the underlying simple forms out of which physical entities emerge, just as we can learn to find out ‘simple letters’ in order to understand the words that such letters compose. As it happens, says Bacon, humankind too quickly turns away from the particular matter in which it needs to discover the alphabet of laws and intelligible forms that govern in nature, and so the human mind too easily distorts the forms into its own faulty conceptions. Yet for Bacon two things could yet be done that would be right and good: we could ground our knowledge more humbly in a more patient investigation of nature herself, and we could take the resulting natural philosophy, natural history and physic, and ‘refer all things to the glory of God’ – and for those who do that with their sciences, says Bacon ‘they are as the three acclamations, “Sancte, sancte, sancte”; holy in the description or dilation of [God’s] works, holy in the connexion or concatenation of them, and holy in the union of them in a perpetual and uniform law. And therefore the speculation was excellent in Parmenides and Plato, although but a speculation in them’ in regard to the ‘Forms or Differences of things’ (II, p. 197).

What did the father of modern science (as Bacon is often called) have in mind with his reference to the Platonic ideas? And could there be, at least implicitly, a stance within his views that might have allowed modernity to ‘save the appearances’ and avoid seeing the visible phenomena of things in all their beauty as merely a veil to be rent in the service of investigative truth? Could Bacon’s willingness to use the language of the ideas, even with reference to the sub-phenomenal level, leave his discourse open to a recovery of beauty?

Bacon was of course connecting his argument to a long tradition in Western thought, especially religious thought. Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Bonaventure, among countless others, had all understood the beginning of all things to have existed before their beginning in time. In this view, usually closely integrated with references to the biblical Wisdom literature, all things have a primordial existence as God knows and desires their eventual coming to be in time and space. But since they exist as God’s ideas or thoughts, these creatures-to-be have a matchless intensity and beauty, and it is the shining forth of this primordial intensity of form – within the created order of finite beings – that gives rise to much of medieval aesthetics.⁷ For many medieval thinkers, as Umberto Eco notes, ‘there is an aesthetic element when the intellect freely contemplates the wonder and beauty of earthbound form’; and this aesthetic or contemplative moment called forth a very special capacity in the human person, ‘discerning in the concrete object an ontological reflection of, and participation in, the being and power of God’.⁸

As the great Franciscan scholastic theologian Bonaventure (1217–74) was to observe, the human race thus has a particular calling within the cosmos, precisely in virtue of being a conscious and willing participant in this ordered cosmos; for we combine in ourselves the individuality of matter, the universal radiance of intelligible form, and an understanding capable of perceiving and delighting in that intelligibility:

As long as man stood up, he had the knowledge of created things and through their significance, was carried up to God, to praise, worship, and love Him. This is what the creatures are for and how they are led back to God. But when man had fallen, since he had lost knowledge, there was no longer anyone to lead the creatures back to God.⁹

What troubles Bonaventure is the possibility that fallen humanity is not only failing to live up to its capacity to perceive and appreciate the divine meaning or intelligibility in things, but that the universe might turn out to be so put together that, should we continue to fail in this ability, our world in its entirety might suffer a kind of semiotic, aesthetic and (in time) literal dissolution into un-meaning. The follower of St Francis might not be surprised, though he would surely be terribly saddened, to see that modernity’s apprehension of the world, reduced to the successful technological manipulation of its sub-phenomenal matter, seems to be leading it into a bewildering environmental crisis. Could it be that in Bacon, the same impulse that led to the technological mastery of the world was still, at least vestigially, in touch with this older tradition of reverence for the radiant beauty of creation – that Bacon still sensed that humankind’s calling was not simply to use our fellow creatures but to rejoice in them?

Whatever Bacon’s own deeper or hidden purposes (a discussion for another time), his era was certainly still echoing with many voices in this Christian Platonic tradition that both appreciated and gave thanks for the Maker’s forms in everything. Perhaps this can be seen most clearly and immediately in the thought of the Anglican priest and poet Thomas Traherne (1636–74) who, like Augustine...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Mind, Body, Soul
• Part II Art, Ideas, Ideals
• Part III Surgery, Reparation, Imagination
• Part IV Rescuing Beauty
• Select Bibliography
• Index