What is called beauty?
Reading Plotinus, treatise I.6[1]: On Beauty
In my previous essay, I spoke about Plotinus’ allusion to the myth of Narcissus:
In what follows I would like to look more closely at the Plotinus treatise I cited from. It is a treatise that goes under the name ‘On Beauty’, but it is about much more. For in fact, this rather short treatise gives a summary both of Plotinus’ vision of what the philosophical life should lead to, and it gives a description of beauty and ugliness. This treatise is amongst the most well-known treatises of Plotinus, and when we read it, we quickly understand why. It is filled with the most beautiful passages, one after the other standing on its own feet, worthy of citing over and over. The most well-known being when Plotinus describes what we should do with our lives:
“How, then, can you see the kind of beauty that a good soul has? Go back into yourself and look. If you do not yet see yourself as beautiful, then be like a sculptor who, making a statue that is supposed to be beautiful, removes a part here and polishes a part there so that he makes the latter smooth and the former just right until he has given the statue a beautiful face.”
(Plotinus, I.6.9. 5-10)
Why read this treatise? There are many reasons, but it seems that reading Plotinus’ thoughts on beauty is particularly interesting in our own times. The modern and contemporary metaphysics underlying the thoughts of contemporary men and women, both of the learned and the common kind, is entirely unfamiliar with the lack of distinction that existed in Antiquity between the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘good’. And Plotinus’ entire treatise is about this equivalence. The beautiful is good, and the good is beautiful. And conversely, the ugly is evil, and evil is ugly. We know nothing about this today. You need only remind yourself of the disgusting arrows and digital-signs that filled up our cities during the lockdowns of the past year, reminding you to step in line and wear your mask, with zero regard for the aesthetic onslaught these signs brought to our streets.
For Plotinus, not all beautiful things are equal, there is a hierarchy. For example, the beauty of a flower is less beautiful than the beauty of a well-turned out man or woman. And none of these beauties comes close to the beauty of a virtuous life. And then there is the truly Good —God or the One.
As simple as this idea of a hierarchy of the beautiful might sound, it is completely in opposition to our contemporary way of viewing things. You hear continuously, that all bodies are equally beautiful, and that the beauty or ugliness of something or someone has nothing to say about the goodness (or evil) present in this person. Plotinus would be perplexed by such ideas. In treatise I.8., ‘On Evil’, he even uses the example of ‘looking at an ugly face’, to illustrate what it would be like to look at evil. However, this does not mean that Plotinus reduces beauty to the display of physical excellence. Rather, physical beauty is only the expression, or the image, of a deeper internal beauty —invisible to the common eye. This inner beauty is most important, but this does not mean that we can disregard physical beauty for Plotinus. Physical beauty might be an image of a deeper beauty, but it is nonetheless very important in keeping us in touch with inner beauty. Plotinus will say that because our deepest essence is beautiful, beautiful bodies can remind us of ourselves, and thus bring us closer to the internal beauty of our essence. There is thus an important role laid out for the cultivation of bodily beauty, and for the arts. For these can aid in the education of individuals, helping them to remember their Divine lineage.
We will go about by reading the treatise, very slowly, chapter by chapter. Going through the arguments, taking some more time when we encounter something of special value. This will be part one of a multiple-part series reading Plotinus’ treatise on beauty. This series will only be accessible to paid subscribers. If you are interested in following along, you can subscribe by clicking the big button that says subscribe. I still post free content, but paid subscribers gain access to more in-depth readings on certain philosophical texts, courses on certain philosophers, series on certain themes, et cetera. It would be my pleasure if you decide to join me. Without further ado, Plotinus on beauty:
“It is not anywhere in another thing, as in an animal, or in earth, or in heaven, or in anything else, but itself by itself with itself, it is always one in form; and all the other beautiful things share in that, in such a way that when those others come to be or pass away, this does not become the least bit smaller or greater nor suffer any change.”
(Plato, Symposium, 211b)
I. §I.6.1
I.1. What is called beauty?
Plotinus starts his discussion by asking himself what it is that we call beautiful. Well, what do we call beautiful? For the most part, things that we see or hear, human bodies, natural phenomena, and also the arts. We call people beautiful, a sunset, we call songs beautiful, and we call paintings or statues beautiful. But, beauty is not only said to be present in what we perceive with our senses.
“Beauty is also found by those who turn away from sense-perception towards the higher region; that is, practices, actions, habits, and types of scientific understanding are beautiful, to say nothing of the beauty of the virtues.”
(I.6.1. 3-6)
This is evident, we think of the mathematician who speaks of the beauty of a certain proof, or the philosopher who marvels at the beauty of a certain philosophical argument. And, we think of the beauty of a religious ritual, the beauty of a heroic act, or the beauty of a certain way of life. And most of all, we speak of the beauty of virtuous behaviour.
What you must notice here, and what is very interesting and characteristic of Plotinus, is what you could call the ‘phenomenological’ manner of investigation. Often, mostly at the start of treatises, questions are introduced by a certain phenomenological observation. Here, the question that he is going to investigate is ‘what is beauty?’, but he embarks on this investigation by merely, very naively, observing what it is that we commonly call beautiful. He looks at the behaviour of common people, at how we observe things, and what in this observation we call beautiful. The question ‘what is beauty?’ is announced by the question ‘what is it that we call beautiful?’ You see this very often in Plotinus, and in many other Greeks, not the least of which is Plato. This way of setting off a philosophical investigation must have had an influence on the phenomenologists of the 20th century, and you see this very clearly in Heidegger, when he asks not ‘what is thinking?’, but ‘what is called thinking?’(Was heißt Denken?). This is important to keep in mind, that for all their ‘rationalism’, as we like to call it, these Greek philosophers such as Plotinus, are very great phenomenologists and observers. They were very much concerned with the ‘life-world’ as Husserl called it, this world in which we live, act, and think, without any concern for explicit theory. The world, not of theory detached from common life in the world, but of man living in the world. This is the starting point. And when Husserl calls for a ‘return to the life-world’, it is veritably a return, for with the Greeks, the life-world was always the starting point. Man in nature, man in the polis, it is this man who thinks.
Submerged in this life-world, man does not ask ‘what is beauty?’, he merely finds things beautiful. People, actions, sounds, words, paintings, the natural world. He has a spontaneous appreciation for these things, or a spontaneous depreciation. It is only later, in philosophy perhaps, that man will ask the question of being. He asks, ‘what is beauty?’, but he can only do so because ‘beauty’ is already familiar to him, through his spontaneous and natural activity of finding things beautiful. We cannot investigate what is entirely unfamiliar to us, there must already exist a certain closeness, beauty must already be within view, before we can investigate it. If it were not, how could we even know that we could investigate it? And this closeness, this familiarity, is given by our life, our experience of finding things beautiful.
Now, Plotinus asks:
“What, then indeed, is it that has actually made us imagine bodies to be beautiful and our sense of hearing incline to sounds, finding them beautiful? And as for the things that depend directly on the soul, how are all of these beautiful?”
(I.6.1. 8-10).
This line is worth pondering on, for after having observed what we call beautiful, Plotinus does not go on directly to asking ‘what is beauty?’. Rather, he asks, “what is it that has actually made us imagine bodies to be beautiful and our sense of hearing incline to sounds, finding them beautiful?” What sort of question is this? This is not a question for the essence of beauty, for what beauty is. This is a question for how it is possible that we find things beautiful. We find things beautiful, as the phenomenological observation of the previous passage has made known to us. And now he asks, what is it that makes this ‘finding things beautiful’ possible? This is the question that Kant will ask himself in the 18th century: “what are the conditions that make experience possible?” What conditions must be in place, in order for us to have this experience. In our case: what conditions must be in place, in order for us to have this experience of beauty. This is Plotinus’ question. When I see a great painting, I spontaneously find it beautiful. When I see a sunset, I spontaneously find it beautiful. When I see a noble act, I spontaneously find it beautiful. But how, Plotinus asks, how come I find these things beautiful? What must be in place, for me to have this spontaneous experience of finding things beautiful? And it is this question that will lead us to the question of the essence of beauty —‘what is beauty?’. We read:
“Is it because all of them are beautiful by one identical beauty, or is it that there is one sort of beauty in the body and another in other things? And what, then, are these sorts of beauty, or what is this beauty?”
(I.6.1. 10-12)
I find things beautiful, but how come I find things beautiful? This must be because there is something we call beautiful. This is Plotinus’ inference, silently laid out here. As is often the case, he goes very quickly, so much so that his arguments are almost invisible.
I find things beautiful, once I realize this, I realize that there must be a reason why I find things beautiful. How is it possible that I find things beautiful? What is this reason? Well, the reason must be that these things that I find beautiful are beautiful, or at least that there is something called ‘beautiful’ in them. This must be the case, for how could I possibly find something beautiful if there wasn’t something beautiful in this something? It is the phenomenological observation, that leads us to the question of the possibility of experience, and it is this question that leads us to claim that there is such a thing as beauty, for otherwise we couldn’t experience it. And this then leads us to the question that will take over this treatise:
“What, then, are these sorts of beauty, or what is this beauty?”
(I.6.1. 12)
This progression, or this ‘ascent’ so you will, from the observation of the life-world to the question as to the being of beauty, is very important. It tells us a lot about Plotinus’ method. The philosophy that we have here is not a mere rationalism, it is a complete philosophy, taking into account the entirety of human experience, both the experience of beauty in the flesh, and the abstractions of thought. And both lead to each other. We can only come to ask ‘what is beauty?’ because we experience beauty. And we can only experience beauty, and this experience can only be questioned, because beauty is.
I.2. Stepping-stones to Beauty
Plotinus now makes a bold claim, he says that some things, among which bodies, are not beautiful because of themselves, but by participation. But other things are beautiful in and by themselves, such as the nature of virtue. Why is this? Well, you can confirm for yourself, sometimes we experience bodies as beautiful, and at other times we do not experience them as beautiful. Some bodies, take human bodies, we find beautiful, and other bodies we find ugly. And sometimes, the same body can appear beautiful at a certain time, and ugly at another time. When, for example, a beautiful athletic body succumbs to gluttony and turns into a horror for the eyes. Or, when the exact same body appears beautiful under certain lighting conditions, but ugly under different conditions. Or a face appears beautiful when it shines with happiness and joy, and ugly when it is held down by a depression. All these examples make clear that “what it is to be a body is distinct from what it is to be beautiful.”(I.6.1. 15)
So, if bodies sometimes appear as beautiful, and at others not. What is it then, that is sometimes present in bodies, and that makes them beautiful? We are now asking what this beauty is that is present, and the way of finding out will once again be through phenomenological investigation. Plotinus asks:
“What is it, then, that moves the eyes of spectators and turns them towards it and draws them on and makes them rejoice at the sight? By finding this and using it as a stepping-stone, we might also see the rest.”
(I.6.1. 18-20).
This, observing closely when eyes are drawn to bodies and when they are not, will serve as a stepping-stone to the true question: ‘what is beauty?’ Why? Well, evidently, because when eyes are spontaneously drawn to a body, this must mean that the body is beautiful, and when eyes spontaneously turn away from a body, this must mean that the body is ugly or just uninteresting, neither excessively attractive or repulsive. The idea of observing bodies as a stepping-stone to gaining knowledge of what beauty is in itself, is derived from Plato’s Symposium. There we read:
“One goes always upwards for the sake of this Beauty, starting out from beautiful things and using them like rising stairs: from one body to two and from two to all beautiful bodies, then from beautiful bodies to beautiful customs, and from customs to learning beautiful things, and from these lessons he arrives in the end at this lesson, which is learning of this very Beauty, so that in the end he comes to know just what it is to be beautiful.”
(Plato, Symposium, 211c)
First we look at what we spontaneously find beautiful, and then we look at other things we find beautiful, until we are able to see what it is precisely that we call beautiful in all these different things, and from this, we will be able to gain knowledge of what the beautiful is in itself.
I.3. Experience confronts opinion
Plotinus mentions that it is generally agreed upon by everyone that “the symmetry of parts in relation to each other and to the whole added to fine coloration makes something beautiful to see.”(I.6.1. 21) This is the classical view, beauty is determined by symmetry and measure. When there is proportion, there is beauty. This is what Plotinus sees as the most common opinion that people have as to what makes something beautiful. What follows from this view is that beauty will always be the property of a composite. If beauty consists in the symmetry of parts, then there must be multiple parts to a beautiful thing, and beauty cannot exist in these parts, but only in how they work together.
“The whole will be beautiful to them, while each of the parts will not have its own beauty but will be a contributing factor in making the whole beautiful.”
(I.6.1. 26)
Plotinus cannot accept this view, for how can things which are not beautiful (the parts) all of a sudden create something beautiful when taken together (the whole)? This is impossible, you cannot make gold from shit, however symmetrical you would arrange the shit. If the whole is to be beautiful, then the parts must also be beautiful. Take a beautiful human body. A person with a perfectly athletic body, a clear skin, and a great face. How could this body be beautiful, if its parts were not? If the arms were lacking in muscle, if the skin was full of acne, if an eye was missing, if there was excessive fat? It is impossible. The whole is the product of the parts, and if the whole is to be beautiful, then the parts must also be beautiful. “For beauty is indeed not made up out of ugly things; all of its parts are beautiful.”(I.6.1.29)
Another strange thing would follow from the view that beauty consists in the symmetry of the parts in relation to each other and in relation to the whole, but not in the parts individually. This would mean that colours, or the light of the sun, cannot be beautiful, because they are simple. This would also mean that simple tones cannot be beautiful to the ears. Of course, one can say that all of these things are already composites, of certain frequencies, of certain chemicals, et cetera. But Plotinus does not think in this way. Why not? Because we are not doing science here, we are doing phenomenology. We are looking at how we observe things, and how in this observation we value things as beautiful or not. And in this simple observation, we see the light of the sun or a certain colour as simple things. Whether or not they are actually made up of different parts is irrelevant. They appear as simple things, and they appear beautiful, thus contradicting the common opinion that beauty consists in the symmetry of parts in relation to each other and in relation to the whole. What has Plotinus done here? He has looked at what people generally say that makes something beautiful —symmetry. And then he has refuted this claim, because there are certain simple things like colours or the light of the sun, that we also call beautiful. He has said, look you people who say that beauty consists in symmetry, you have not been observing well. He refutes the claim on phenomenological grounds, it is experience here that contradicts common opinion.
I.4. Expressing life
Plotinus now brings in a new argument against this view that beauty consists in symmetry, an argument that will give a whole new dimension to his discussion of beauty. It is worth quoting in full:
“Further, when the identical face sometimes actually appears beautiful and sometimes not, though the symmetry remains identical, would we not have to say that beauty is other than the symmetry and that the symmetry is beautiful because of something other than itself?”
(I.6.1. 35-40.)
We already touched on this problem earlier, when I spoke of the same face appearing beautiful at one time, and not at some other time. Now Plotinus radicalizes this problem; sometimes a face appears beautiful, and at other times it appears as not beautiful, even though the symmetry remains identical. You are familiar with this. In the morning you look in the mirror, and you like what you see, your eyes shine with passion, and there is a gentle smile on your face. You go through your day, and you encounter the mirror again at the end of the day. You look, and something is different, you look the same, yet somehow, you look less alive. You can’t quite put your finger on what it is, but for some reason, you look less passionate, less vibrant, less alive. The smile is still there, in exactly the same way, but it no longer expresses joy. It is now the smile of a worn down person, weary of life. We all know this strange phenomenon, from seeing ourselves or from seeing others. And we cannot really say what it is, but sometimes we just seem more alive, and this makes us more beautiful than at other times. And if this is the case, then beauty cannot consist in symmetry. Rather, this symmetry only appears to be the cause of the beautiful, but what makes this symmetry appear to be the beautiful, is in fact something other than this symmetry. Plotinus expresses this beautifully in treatise 6.7., where we read:
“Beauty is that which shines from symmetry, rather than the symmetry itself; this is what is loveable. For why is there more light of beauty in a living face, and just its trace in a dead face, even if the face has not decayed in its flesh and symmetry? And living beings are more beautiful than statues, even if the latter are more symmetrical.”
(6.7.22. 25-30)
We cannot say that symmetry is entirely unrelated to beauty, but it is not the end all-be-all. What is more important, is “that which shines from symmetry” —beauty—, which Plotinus here seems to equate with the quality of life, of living. The more life a face expresses, the more beautiful the face.
For us, it is still a mystery what Plotinus means here with this ‘quality of life’. We will return to it later, for now, let us follow the argument of treatise I.6.
After having said that beauty does not consist in symmetry, but in something that is sometimes expressed through symmetry, Plotinus leaves the discussion of beautiful things seen and heard, and looks at practices, habits, virtuous behaviour, scientific understanding, and other things of the sort that we call beautiful. If beauty would consist in symmetry, then what would this mean when applied to these things? We would have to say that a scientific understanding is beautiful because it is proportional, or that a certain action is beautiful because it is proportional. Very well, this could mean that a scientific understanding is beautiful when there is concordance between theorems or arguments. When everything lines up, and truth shines through the symmetry created by the theorems, this is when it is beautiful. Or a noble action is beautiful, when the parts out of which it is made up, say the qualities of the individual acting it out (his self-control, his courage, etc.) all concord to the whole that is his virtuous action. This would seem like a valid claim, that both in noble action and in scientific understanding, symmetry is what makes it beautiful. But, Plotinus says, “it is also the case that there is agreement or concord among bad theorems.” (I.6.1 45) How so? Well, let us say that ‘self-control is wisdom’. There is concord here between the two things, ‘self-control’ and ‘wisdom’. And now let us say that ‘self-control is stupidity’. How would there be less concord between these two things? There isn’t, there is just as much concord. And if we take noble actions, here all the characteristics of the individual (his self-control, his courage, etc.) conspire to create the noble action. There is a symmetry between the characteristics. But now let us say that a man engages in a vicious act, wouldn’t there also be symmetry in play? For his base characteristics (his lack of self-control, his anger, his wickedness , etc.) would all have to concord to achieve the vicious act. What Plotinus is trying to say is that, whether for good or for bad, there is always symmetry, there is always a co-operation of various parts making up a whole. But this does not necessarily mean that the whole is beautiful. Whether it be a valid claim or an invalid claim, the different parts that make up the claim are related to each other in the mere fact of the claim. And whether it be a noble action or a bad action, the different parts that make up the action concord with each other in the mere fact of there being an action.
I.5. All beautiful things are beautiful by the Beautiful
In Plato’s Phaedo, we read:
“-I think that, if there is anything beautiful besides the Beautiful itself, it is beautiful for no other reason than that it shares in that Beautiful, and I say so with everything. Do you agree to this sort of cause?
-I do. I no longer understand or recognize those other sophisticated causes, and if someone tells me that a thing is beautiful because it has a bright color or shape or any such thing, naively and perhaps foolishly cling to this, that nothing else makes it beautiful other than the presence of, or the sharing in, or however you may describe its relationship to that Beautiful we mentioned, for I will not insist on the precise nature of the relationship, but that all beautiful things are beautiful by the Beautiful. That, I think, is the safest answer I can give myself or anyone else.”
(Plato, Phaedo, 100c-e)
We have arrived at a similar point as Plato has. We try to define what makes something beautiful, and we come up with all sorts of explanations: it must be the symmetry, the colour, the form, the shape, or any other thing. But the moment we try to define it, a counter-argument pops up. We say beauty consists in symmetry, but then we see that also ugliness needs symmetry. We say it is in the colour, but then we see beauty in something that has no colour. We say it is in this shape or that shape, but then we see that any shape or form can posses beauty. In the end, we are exhausted, and we can only exclaim: the beautiful is beautiful because of the presence of the beautiful. To modern readers, this might sound like an insane belief, born only out of the incapacity to see what the real cause of beauty is. But we must not be too fast in passing judgement. For go through it yourself, try to find out what it is precisely that makes something beautiful. Try it, take a day. And perhaps you will be led to the same point as Plato. You cannot put your finger on it, on what makes something beautiful, and thus your safest bet is to say: “all beautiful things are beautiful by the Beautiful.” Is this a weak argument? Perhaps. But maybe it is only what remains, when all possible arguments have been thrown up and refuted. Maybe it is not the claim of a weak mind, too lazy to think, but rather the result of a strong mind, having thought everything through to the very end.
Plotinus has now offered some counter-arguments to the view that beauty consists in symmetry between parts in relation to each other and in relation to the whole. Beauty must then be something else, but what? For an answer, we look at chapter 2.
II. §I.6.2.
II.1. Recognition
Plotinus repeats his question once again: “what, then, is the primary beauty in bodies?” And in observing once again what we spontaneously take as beautiful, Plotinus already senses an answer.
“There is, of course, something that is perceived at first, and the soul speaks about it as it does about that with which it is familiar, and takes it in as something that it recognizes and, in a way, is in concord with.”
(I.6.2. 1-5)
Ponder on this sentence, and remind yourself of what we said earlier about Plotinus’ method. First, there is the observation: ‘what do we call beautiful?’ Secondly, there is the question, ‘how can it be that we call these things beautiful?’ And thirdly, there is the definite question as to the being of the phenomenon: ‘what is beauty?’ Here, by looking at what we call beautiful, and why we call things beautiful, Plotinus senses an answer. Why do we call things beautiful? Because beautiful things appear to the soul as something familiar to it, which it recognizes, and is in concord with. For example, you are visiting a museum with a friend, and you are both staring at a painting. You exclaim: ‘this painting is truly beautiful.’ And your friend asks you why you find this painting beautiful. Perhaps you will answer something like: ‘it perfectly expresses my own feelings, the sadness, the joy, the essence of what it means to be alive.’ You say that the painting is beautiful, because for you, it expresses the essence of what it means to be alive. And what it means to be alive, well, you know this better than anyone else, because you yourself are alive. Thus, you know what it means to live in a knowledge so intimate that it is impossible to put into words, you know so intimately the sadness that accompanies being alive, and the joy that is also part of it. And now you see a painting, and it expresses these things perfectly, and this is why you call it beautiful. Because you recognize your soul in it, because it is in concord with your soul. This is what Plotinus is saying. And likewise, when you encounter something ugly, your soul “holds back and rejects it and recoils from it as something with which it is not in harmony and as something that is alien to it.”(I.6.2. 5) Let us say that you are in the same museum again, in front of a different painting. And you exclaim to your friend: “this painting is so ugly, I can hardly look at it, let us go to the next room.” And your friend asks you why you find it so ugly. You might answer something like: “nothing is expressed here, these shapes, the expressions on these faces, it expresses nothing of life.” Intuitive recoil, but why? Because the art doesn’t bring you closer to yourself, or express something of this life you know so intimately through living. Rather, it brings you further away from life, it forces you to look at colours that have no vibrance to them, lines that have nothing of the force you associate with life, the emotions that the faces express are not affirming of life’s tragedy, but seem dead, weak. You tell your friend that you can’t quite put your fingers on what it is precisely in this painting, there is perfect symmetry, the artist is certainly skilled. But there just isn’t any life to it. When all is said and done about art, when we have done all the theory, you can’t argue with the intuitive sense of beauty or ugliness that we feel when confronted with something. The intuitive sense of being brought closer to ourselves, or the intuitive sense of recoil.
II.2. Substantiality
Plotinus continues:
“We indeed say that the soul, having the nature it does, and finding itself among Beings in the presence of the greater Substantiality, when it sees something to which it has a kinship or something that is a trace of that to which it has a kinship, is both delighted and thrilled and returns to itself and recollects itself and what belongs to itself.”
(I.6.2. 7-10).
We must here take a step back from our present investigation, and give some context for Plotinus. He is clearly here speaking with some philosophical framework in mind, a framework with which we are not yet familiar. ‘Beings’, ‘the greater Substantiality, what are these things? I will explain this in my next post, summarizing Plotinus’ philosophy, so that we can gain more from our further reading. For now, reflect on what we have seen, and understand the importance of Plotinus’ method —from the phenomenological observation, to the question of being, and from the question of being, back to the phenomenological observation. For let us summarize what we have done here. We have asked ourselves: ‘what is it that we call beautiful?’ And we have seen that what we call beautiful is that which accords to our own soul. It is then here that our answer to the question ‘what is beauty?’ will find an answer, in the nature of the soul. What is the soul? We will find out next week. Important is this aspect of observation. We like to speak of the Greek philosophers as ‘rationalists’, and of course they are, but they are also amazing phenomenologists and observers. Gifted with reason, but also with the eye of a poet. And this eye observes, that however much we might theorize about what beauty is, whether it consists in symmetry or in this colour or in that form or in anything else, the soul will always find beautiful what it finds beautiful, and it will always find ugly what it finds ugly. You cannot cheat this, you intuitively find certain things beautiful, and you intuitively find other things ugly. And no amount of art-theory will be able to make you find shit beautiful. So Plotinus tells us that the soul just does what it does, and as philosophers, we must merely observe this activity. And if we observe closely, we will find an answer to our question: ‘what is beauty?’
Heidegger famously defined phenomenology as the method of letting “that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.” (Being and Time §7) And this is very much what Plotinus is trying to do. We look at ourselves, at our souls, and observe what we naturally call beautiful, when this calling-beautiful has not yet been distorted by all sorts of theories about ‘symmetry’ or anything else. What is the natural way of looking of the soul, this is Plotinus’ question, and if we can answer it, we will naturally be afforded an answer to the question: ‘what is beauty?’
You notice that here, with Plotinus, there is an enormous trust in the human capacity for truthful observation. There are no questions of how to learn to look properly, how to educate ourselves to see beauty. No, Plotinus trusts that the human being, left to himself, will naturally call beautiful what is beautiful, and ugly what is ugly. There is an enormous trust in our own judgement concerning the beauty of people, art, music, actions, and everything else. This to me is interesting in itself. When I was educated in art-history, we would always be reminded that you have to ‘learn what is beautiful.’ And this is especially true for contemporary art of the conceptual variety. The common man on the street hates these things, but this is what separates the common man from the cultured man it is said, the cultured man has ‘learned’ how to appreciate what is beautiful, he has trained his eye. No one would doubt that education helps in appreciating certain works in more depth; if we can compare a certain painting to what was painted before and after it, we are more appreciative of its singular place in the history of art. If we know something about the technique required to paint, then perhaps we are more appreciative when we see a painting, for we see what skill it must have taken to create this painting. And if we read a certain philosopher, we will read him with more depth if we also have knowledge of the philosophers that inspired him or to which he is reacting. But is this really the case with the mere fact of beauty? Is the eye, un-educated, ‘un-cultured’ and left alone to itself, really a bad judge as to what is beautiful? We can ask this question because for Plotinus it really isn’t that much of a question, for the soul, “when it sees something to which it has a kinship or something that is a trace of that to which it has a kinship, is both delighted and thrilled and returns to itself and recollects itself and what belongs to itself.”(I.6.2. 9-10) This happens naturally, for the soul has kinship with what is beautiful. And kinship is not something that you acquire, it is much deeper, much more robust, and given by nature. We will see later that it is not really as straight-forward as this, for when it comes to higher intelligible realities, not everyone is familiar with these, and thus, not everyone will appreciate them or see them as beautiful. This is because those who do appreciate them as beautiful first have to be familiar with them, they have to experience them, so that they can recognize them. And most people are not familiar with higher realities. But what is this ‘becoming familiar’ with higher realities? It is an acquisition of knowledge, but we will see that it is also an un-learning, a detaching from that which drags us away from our essence, and to which we have become attached: matter. And those who have drifted far from their essence, having become attached to matter entirely, will turn away from what is beautiful, and turn towards what is ugly. The soul naturally recognizes what is beautiful. But the problem for Plotinus will be that we have drifted far from our essential nature.
We will return to all of this in more depth. For now, I leave you with a fragment of Heraclitus that captures the essence of this problem; that we can drift from our natural way of seeing, and come to admire the ugly instead of the beautiful.
“Eyes and ears are poor witnesses for men if they have barbarian souls.”
(Heraclitus, XVI. (D. 107, M.13))
Sources:
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie, and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962.
Plato. Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper. Cambridge: Hackett, 1997.
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