In Our Time - Beauty

Episode Date: May 19, 2005

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss beauty and its qualities."Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."That was John Keats' emphatic finale to his Ode on a Grecian Urn. It seems to express Plato's theory of aesthetics, his idea that an apprehension of beauty is an apprehension of perfection and that all things in our shadowy realm are botched representations of perfect 'forms' that exist elsewhere. Beauty is goodness and, for Plato, the ultimate of all the forms is 'The Good'.But does beauty really have a moral quality? And is it inherent in things, or in the mind of the observer? How much influence have Plato's ideas had on the history of aesthetics and what has been said to counter or develop them?With Angie Hobbs, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick; Susan James, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London; Julian Baggini, Editor of The Philosophers' Magazine.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, beauty is truth, truth, beauty. That's all you know on earth and all you need to know. That was John Keats' emphatic conclusion to his ode to egregion urn. It seems to express Plato's theory of aesthetics, his idea that an apprehension of beauty is an apprehension of perfection, and that all things in our shadowy realm are partial representation. of perfect forms that exist elsewhere. Beauty is goodness, and for Plato,

the ultimate of all the forms is the good. But does beauty really have a moral quality, and is it inherent in things, or is it in the mind of the observer? How much influences Plato's ideas had on the history of aesthetics and what's been said to counter or develop them? With me to discuss the philosophy of beauties, Angie Hobbes, lecture in philosophy at Warwick University,

Susan James, professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College University of London, and Julian Bajini, editor of the Philosopher's magazine. Angie Hobbes, can you give us an overview of what's often called the key question in aesthetics? Yes, I think there are three main, very briefly, I think there are three main sets of questions we need to consider. First, as you said, we need to ask what beauty is. Does it exist objectively in things and people themselves?

Does it exist subjectively in the mind of the perceiver? Or a third option, do things possess objective quality? which give rise to a perception of beauty in the mind of all perceivers with normally functioning faculties. Now, the second set of questions concerns that the range of objects to which the term beauty may properly be applied, is beauty simply sensible or aesthetic, or can there be such a thing as intellectual or moral beauty? And if there can, does sensible beauty lead one to intellectual or moral beauty, or is it a distraction or even a deception? And connected to this is the third set of issues,

namely how does beauty relate to other value concepts such as the useful or the honourable or the spiritual? And again, does beauty have a pedagogic or even a religious role in helping lead us to those other value concepts? Let's start with Plato then. Who believed that beauty was objective, that there were perfect,

forms perfect properties out there in the world, and we had partial views of it and these partial views. Will you take it on from there? Give us Plato's view of beauty. Yes, well, I think the key thing we need to appreciate here is that the Greek term for beauty that Plato's working with is the callos. As well as the meaning sensible beauty, that also means... Beauty of the sense, beauty that comes into the five senses.

Absolutely right. So when you say sensible, people... This is the beauty that comes from the five, the perception from the five senses. Exactly, yes. Now, as well as that, the callos also means what's morally noble and honourable. So there's immediately, in the language, there's something which tilts us towards a connection between sensible beauty and the morally noble. Now, in the Fiedrus, for instance, Plato makes a very good use of that connection

in a very powerful and I would say beautiful myth. We're asked to believe that the soul is immortal and has lived before, incarnation in a heavenly realm. Now there, in varying degrees, according to its quality, it had access to these pure, eternal, nonsensible principles which Plato terms forms, such as the form of the good and the form of beauty. However, when the soul falls to earth and is embodied, it forgets this knowledge of its former realm. Yet when we perceive a beautiful or person and particularly a person, there is something direct and immediate

and luminous about that perception which arouses our love and prompts jolts our memory of our former habitation in the realm of the forms. So it acts as a spur to the recollection of the form of beauty. And so here again,

we see how beauty is acting as a pedagogical device, if you like, and the lover who is perceiving the beautiful person feels inspired to grow wings, Plato says, and to start to fly and to try to fly back to the heavenly realm where he or she once dwelt. Susan James, why was mathematics the highest form of beautiful Plato? Was that due to the influence of Pythagoras?

Yes, I think to some extent it was. These Pythagorean were nuts about number and thought of the cosmos as a sort of beautiful, harmonious, ordered whole, it can be expressed, its order can be expressed numerically because the idea is that there are numerical proportions between its constituent parts. And some of these numbers can also be organized in geometrical form to make up shapes,

which Pythagorean think of as the sort of ultimate building blocks of the universe. And so you can understand the universe mathematically, and you can also understand it musically, because there's a connection between these numerical proportions and musical harmonies. The Pythagorean's knew, of course, about how if you divide a string, for example, in halves and quarters and thirds, then you get harmonious musical intervals. And so they thought that the relationships between these different parts of nature actually are manifested in sounds, in the harmony of the spheres. That doesn't quite answer the question as to why Plato believe that this was the highest form of beauty.

Well, Plato, I think, takes up this idea, and Aristotle too, that geometrical forms are the ultimate building blocks of the universe and the elements out of the blocks out of which the various elements are composed. And I think it's the highest form of beauty because, as well, he thinks that that's what, at least at that point he thinks, that that's what the universe is ultimately and truly and really like. And what it's really like is, as it were, a kind of perfection

so that you get this association of truth and goodness, truth and perfection that Angie's talked about. And then beauty is, as it were, what latches onto that. How does Plato link sensible beauty, beauty that comes from, we appreciate through our senses, with ethical beauty? How does he link the aesthetic and the moral?

Well, there's a wonderful myth in one of Plato's dialogues, the symposium, which is about love, as you know, where Socrates is talking to a very wise woman, diottoma. and De Otomber explains to Socrates that human beings have a sort of urge to make themselves a little bit immortal like the gods by creating something, or she says by giving birth to something. She says they can only do that if they are somehow in touch with beauty. And so human beings are sort of drawn to beauty and to the harmony that is beauty because they are, drawn to create. And there is a sort of sequence of stages by which you can do this. Initially, you're drawn to the beauty of a single person. You love a single beautiful individual. And in the

symposium, the conversation runs very much on the love of philosophers for beautiful boys. But then the lover comes to realize that one body is much like another and that what's really an object of beauty is the soul. After that, comes to realize, that what is really beautiful is wisdom and finally comes to realize that there is one form of wisdom a sort of understanding of beauty itself which is the true object of love

in the highest sense so that sensible beauty acts as a kind of ladder by which you climb up by stages to an appreciation of the beautiful the form of the beautiful that Angie was talking about and then you can kick it away. Did Aristotle take this up?

Why did he contradict this notion of Plato? Well, there are certain similarities, but I think the differences are perhaps immediately more striking. I mean, Plato, as we've seen, is a very otherworldly philosopher for him to understand the true essence of reality. You have to look to this realm of the forms, which is probably the sensible world. Aristotle, in contrast, looked at the world we live in,

the world of actual objects, and he thought, to understand the real essence of things, You don't look to some otherworldly form. You look at what the appropriate sort of function and goal of any particular thing is. Now that informed his way of looking at beauty, I think, because for him, beauty is very much about things having their appropriate magnitude and order. I mean, these are the expressions he uses when he talks about beauty. He says, for example, the chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness.

So it's all about things being arranged in a way which is appropriate to them, and that gives us the sense of beauty. I mean, it does need some strange conclusions. He says that a very small animal cannot be beautiful. For example, nor can a very big thing. These things are just of the inappropriate magnitude. But it's very much rooted in the way things actually have to kind of function. And in that way, you could see it's a bit of a precursor

to the way in which certain kind of contemporary sort of designers and architects have seen beauty as being an expression of the perfect marriage of form and function rather than an expression of some kind of otherworldly ideal. Do you see Aristotle and Plato, as it were, the two horses dragging this idea through for the next few centuries, and it's between those two that the picture gets composed? I think they certainly do set the agenda, perhaps Plato even more so than Aristotle.

I mean, I think we do have this tension here about whether beauty is seen as an insight, at a bridge to the other world, as it were, the world beyond perception, or whether or not it is very much rooted in the real world, a sort of a natural versus more spiritual or supernatural view of beauty. And I think that runs through even to today. I think, you know, today you might see perhaps some of the sort of evolutionary attempts to try and explain beauty in terms of how it helps us, you know, give us advantage with reproduction and so forth,

as being direct descendants of Aristotle's view, because again, it's very much seeing beauty as being part of the natural functioning of things, in the organic world. In the Renaissance, we could say broadly, Susan James, that the classical learning, having been retrieved, didn't happen in a flash happened over a couple of centuries or so. By the West, it had been continued in other parts of, let us loosely call it Europe and North Africa. This came back as a sort of neoplatonism.

What impact did classical ideas have on the Renaissance ideas of beauty and the figures we know, which can easily reach out for, Leonardo and Michelangelo. What impact is it having on them, on their idea of beauty? Well, I think these new platonic ideas, which, as Andy says, are always there, but get a kind of new lease of life in the Renaissance, have a tremendous impact, first of all, on art because of this obsession with the question of beauty as proportion. And the idea that you can recover, particularly through architectural manuals, for instance,

the idea of the particular proportions that give you, a beautiful building, a perfectly symmetrical and ordered building. And so we see that very much in Renaissance architecture, in the work of theorists like Alberti and so forth. And similarly, in a great interest in the sort of proportion of the perfect human figure. I guess we all know that sort of touristic icon of Leonardo's figure, the perfectly proportioned man. But there are lots and lots of manuals,

like that in Renaissance art. Dure, for example, has an incredibly exact one where he measures the proportion between, you know, the bottom of the chin and the top of the shoulder blade and between the nose and the ear and so forth with great exactitude. And then I think that has a connection with this idea that you can, as a way, use outwardly beautiful things, sensibly beautiful things in art as well as in nature as a kind of indication. towards higher sorts of beauty and particularly the beauty of God within. And art can sort of facilitate this process, if you like,

by producing perfectly beautiful figures, the most beautiful nose, the most beautiful ear, and so forth, organised in perfect proportion, and then you sort of see through that to the soul within and beyond that to God. On the other hand, Hamlet, for example, is full of references to corruption behind beauty. Oh, yes, yeah.

One may smile, smile, and be a village for example. So where's that taking us? Oh, yes, and there's that other, those savage lines at the end of Hamlet, when I think Hamlet's in the graveyard and he's picking up the skull of Yorick and looking at this, you know, bear skull

and he says to Horatio, you know, get you to my lady's chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick to this favour she must come, make her laugh at that. I mean, it's really powerful stuff, and you get this notion of the decay and the corruption and sort of putreepact,

action within. And so you start to get questions raised about what is the relation between the beauty of appearances and moral beauty and spiritual and intellectual beauty. Julian, can I come to David Hume, who, as it were, we can use him, because there are a cluster of thinkers at the Dhabel can use him as someone who put forward a different philosophical position on beauty. Absolutely. Although I think in a sense he's again the ancestor of Hume in lots of ways on this. Sorry, of Aristotle. Yeah, well, Hume was basically growing out of the empirical tradition

that had grown up. We got the birth of science as an experimental technique for understanding the world. And here, to understand what anything is, we have to refer to experience and see what we learn from experience and not appeal to sort of a priori concepts, things which exist prior to experience

in something like Plato's realm of the forms and so forth. and so if you look for what beauty is in that way human other people like him such as Hutchinson and so forth came to the conclusion that really if you want to understand what beauty is you have to look much more at the reaction of the beholder as it were it's our response to objects which really defines beauty now that does leave I think Angie at the beginning sort of said

this leaves a certain question there as to whether or not this makes it a purely subjective matter The beauty is purely a matter of what we respond to things and we find them beautiful and there's no real beauty out there. Or whether or not there are certain properties objects have which a well-ordered, a healthy individual as it were, will find beautiful. But either way you look at it, so that it's shifting the focus from beauty from objects and seeing the response to the individual as being vital there. Can I move now to Susan? And if you can you briefly tell us what Kant brought to this particular argument? Yeah, well Kant takes up this set of questions that Julian has just outlined so beautifully.

He's not satisfied with this Cumian account of what it is about us that enables us to react, you know, that means that we all react in the same sort of way to things and can have some consensus about what is beautiful. and he is trying to maintain the idea that there's something distinctive about aesthetic judgments, judgments of beauty, which makes them different from things that you can prove and also different from things that you can just say, well, I like beetroot and, you know, but I hate apricots or whatever. And trying to find a middle way. And then he's trying to do that within the scope of a very elaborate transcendental philosophy,

which is interested in identifying the conditions of all our judgments. So roughly it goes like this, that Kant thinks that when we make ordinary cognitive judgments, we bring together various sense experiences in imagination, and then we bring those under a concept. So I might have a clutch of sensory experiences of colour and sound and things like that, and I might bring that under the concept blackbird, so here's a blackbird. Now, Kant thinks that sometimes when we look at a landscape or something of that sort, we have a certain pleasure in it which arises from the fact that our imagination is giving us this sensory manifold and our understanding is trying to bring it under a concept.

Each one is sort of harmoniously inspiring the other, but we're not getting any resolution. and that gives us a kind of pleasure in something in the landscape because it reveals to us the harmony of our faculties, of our imagination and our understanding. And Jehobs, what's the difference between the aesthetic and the sublime in Kant? Well, yes, in the critique of judgment and in earlier works, like the observations on the feeling of the beautiful and the sublime, we get this distinction.

The sublime is what it's to do with immeasurableness, things which are illimitable, either in power or in size, and they inspire in us sort of feelings of awe and reverence, and an intimation of the power of our own minds and trying to grapple with such limitless objects or forces, whereas the beautiful is certainly in his earlier works, it's more connected. with charm and what is pleasing. And as Susan was saying earlier, as I see it, a lot of the debate in Kant, particularly in earlier Kant, is very gendered.

Particularly in the works before the critique of judgment, we get this notion that it's particularly appropriate for women to be beautiful. And it's not at all appropriate for women to be sublime or to respond to the sublime. That is not their territory. And in that, I would say that Kant is very influenced by another extremely influential 18th century thinker we've not discussed so far,

namely Burke, of course, and his distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, and in Burke it's absolutely gendered, and the beautiful in Burke is soft and delicate and smooth and round, and, you know, it's very, very feminized. Hagle, Susan Jones, brought a historical context to the argument which I don't think it'd been in until now. He put beauty in its time and in the context. Can you explain what that added to the argument? Yes, I think this is a really important move. Hegel is not so interested in natural beauty, which is what mainly interests Kant. He's interested in beauty in art.

And Hegel thinks of human history as the process of, as it were, coming to understand the meaning of the world. But that being a meaning which is not there all along waiting to be discovered. It's a meaning which is sort of realized. And changes. He has phases, doesn't it? There's this stage which I think. Exactly. But each culture, as it way, expresses its understanding of the world and itself in art and religion and best of all, of course, philosophy. And so art is important and there are different stages of it. There's sort of pre-classical art which Hegel describes as symbolic, where people, as it were, try to grasp their understanding

of the world through symbols. There's classical art which focuses on a sort of sensory understanding of the world and is manifested in images, so in classical sculpture particularly and in epic poetry. And then with Christianity you get a turn inwards and an attempt on the part of art to express the character of inner experience and the highest form of things. art that does that, Hegel thinks, is poetry, which is sort of sensuous philosophy. I mean, it's nearly a philosophy. So then if you want to ask, well, you know, what's a really beautiful work, what's a good work, you have to ask sort of within a particular period. And it's difficult

to say, compare the poem by Keats that you began with and a classical sculpture, because each is an attempt to express a different sort of consciousness. And so that, yeah. But as if I'm right in the long run, for Hegel, this means art is in the sense doomed to wither away, isn't it? Because he says, though, the historical inevitability we're moving towards is the full realisation of spiritual geist or so forth. And philosophy is the highest way of understanding that.

Both religion and art are, as it were, imperfect ways of trying to grapple with that. So I think if I've got him right, eventually, you know, the important art is diminishing in importance, the more humanity. moves towards its destination of fully realising the nature of reality. Yes, absolutely. Hagle seems to think, doesn't he, that Greek art is really the most perfect sort of art, because, as well, the understanding that it's trying to express is best expressed in a sensuous form. And so, in a way, we're all on the way down. But Nietzsche wouldn't have thought that, would he, Angie, Holmes?

He writes about living an aesthetic life, and he puts aesthetics at the heart of his ethics. What did you think an aesthetic life was? And have we got to the stage with him where beauty is everything really? Well, there's a very interesting New Year's Resolution that he writes. And we get it in the gay science, and it's a lot more uplifting than my New Year's resolutions. That's for sure. He says that he wants to be, from now on, he wants to be someone who sees what is necessary in things as what is beautiful in them. And he says, hereby, I want to be one of those people who makes things beautiful.

He thinks that you can take all the mundane mess of your life and the painful tragedies of your life and if you view it in the right way with the right kind of acceptance and the fitting it into a greater hole and pattern, you can make your past beautiful and that way you can be the creator of your own life and your own becoming self.

That sounds rather like an Eastern notion, doesn't it? What we would call, I would call it, ignorantly loosely called it. There's a fatalism now. He does. I mean, yeah, that quote I've just been talking about it, goes on Amalfati, love of fate, let that be my cry from now on. And I think we can connect this with a much earlier work. The gay science, I think, is 1882, but about 10 years before he wrote the birth of tragedy. And in that we get this tension between, or this partly reconciled tension between what he calls the Dionysian and the Apollonian vision. And it's, the Dionysian is that the chaos and the darkness and the destruction of life. And it's just too painful a vision for humans to bear without a mediating veil. And that mediating veil is the Apollonian vision of art and beauty.

So for Nietzsche, we absolutely need art to survive. We just can't bear life without it. We need beauty. And we have to do our best to make things beautiful, otherwise we can't survive them. Is there a sense in the 20th century, Jeremy Gini, the idea of the discussion of beauty, the place of beauty, as something to be interested in, diminished? It certainly seems to be the case in philosophical aesthetic,

certainly, where previously beauty was very much the focus of discussion and now it's not so much. I think it's partly because people... Well, actually, I'm not entirely sure what the reasons for that are. I think one reason, perhaps going back to, perhaps Hegel in some way, Hagell introduced a kind of historical way of looking at these things and placing things in a kind of a social context. And also I think we also have the scientific advances,

meaning that we're trying to put our understanding of beauty in a scientific context too. So I think the way in which we're trying to understand what beauty is and how art functions in the 20th century moves away from the kind of the idea of pure beauty. That seems a rather sort of naive, romantic way of looking at it. and instead trying to understand, you know, it's social and psychological and biological embeddedness. Do you have anything to... Sorry, Susan, you looked as if you wanted to come in there.

Well, I was thinking that also another perhaps element of this complicated story is a sort of Marxist one. That Hegel gives us the idea that different sorts of appreciation of beauty will belong in different historical areas. And Marx gives us the idea that beauty is part of the currency of power. and so that you have to ask, who is in charge of these standards of beauty and these arguments? Andrew? Yes, I mean, I tell what Julian says about there being perhaps slightly less a philosophical concentration on beauty.

That may be changing a little now. But it seems to be one of the things that happened in the late 19th and the 20th centuries was a return to some of the more ambivalent feelings about beauty that maybe we saw touched on earlier in the Renaissance. And Nietzsche perhaps accepted, after. after Kant, you could argue that the beautiful and the sublime merge much more closely together. Now, one of the effects of that is that beauty is going to become something much more terrifying and frightening. And so you start getting people like Dostoevsky saying that the beautiful

is terrible as well as mysterious, and you get Yates writing in Easter 1916 that a terrible beauty is born. And of course, we've all grown up with stories of Schumann recitals being organized in Auschwitz, you know, after a day implementing the final solution by the commandants at the camp and their doctors and so on. So perhaps there's been a lot more questioning about the relation between beauty and other forms of goodness and morality and perhaps more an emphasis on that the fearful nature of beauty and perhaps it's amoral possibilities. Thank you all very much. Thank you, Angie Hobbes, Julian Burjini and Susan James.

Next week we'll be discussing the terror in the French Revolution. and while we have philosophers among us, we're launching a vote on this program to discover the nation's preferred philosopher and nominated are open today. Whether you revere Plato, the father of Western philosophy, Wittgenstein, Locke for his style, Nietzsche for his passion,

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