The End of Beauty — And We’re Not Talking Teleologically Here!
First, when the Schoolmen listed the transcendental properties of being—if they did so at all—they ordered them as follows: unity, truth, goodness, and beauty. One first perceives the singular “it-ness” of a thing; then that it can be known as a form; then its worth and function (its good or end); and finally its goodness as a form, its beauty. Without calling into question this ordering, I would suggest that in experience there is no significant temporal differentiation between the perception of these ontologically identical but conceptually different properties. Beauty therefore stands out as the most “inclusive” of the transcendentals, containing all the rest and drawing them into conceptual relation (or proportion). Taking some license with his Scholastic sources, Maritain says much the same thing in a problematic formulation: “Strictly speaking, Beauty is the radiance of all the transcendentals united.” If this is true, then the more we approach perfect knowledge of the reality of a being, the closer we come to its beauty. But also, because beauty is a property of the form of every being, it seems reasonable to argue that it is contemporary with the truth and goodness of a thing; because it is so directly tied to the perception rather than the knowledge (the naming) of a form, it may even, in our experience, seem to come first. Thus, we are left with the possibility that beauty bespeaks both the first perception of a reality and the fullness of knowledge of that thing as good.
Because Maritain was anxious to preserve beauty from the conceptual, he could not fully appreciate the consequences of this: our encounter with reality comes to us as fully and with as much validity in terms of beauty as it does in terms of truth and goodness. As such, arguments from beauty ought to have greater binding force on us than our culture likes to acknowledge. I will say something even bolder: they in fact do have such force on us, but because we, as a culture, suspect beauty, we tend to have no way to explain this power except in terms of misleading clichés about rhetorical “artifice,” “superficiality,” and “image.” The modern age routinely denies the existence of things simply by denying itself a vocabulary to express them, but if we would be true to reality, above all the reality of our experience, we would acknowledge that much of our lives are formed and moved by the perceptions of the beautiful. Proportion is to beauty what reasoning (ratio) is to truth; if this entails that beauty has little logical weight, it also entails that it has a claim on us as real, and so teaches us about reality by distinct but equally strong means. John Keats was correct to declare, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” but not for the reasons he suspected.
A keen sense of the various proportions that contribute to the beautiful is thus necessary if one is to understand what is real. A mere aestheticism that prizes only the sensuously beautiful truth, or a “politicized aesthetic” that registers only the beautiful as noble, serve as just two instances of a myopia before the real. Our culture thus lies to itself in denying the reality of beauty and barbarizes and shallows its intellect in treating aesthetic education as unimportant to the formation of a complete human being. Within that culture, conservatives willfully fragment its sensibility and everyday life by treating only certain modes of beauty as relevant, while liberals perform an even more radical disservice to the society they purport to help “progress” by scouring the public realm of the claims of the beautiful in an effort to reconstruct society along isolated, desiccated, and often perverse forms of rationality.
Though the burden of my argument has been to make a defense of art and beauty in an age and culture that minimizes, deprecates, or denies their function, we arrive now at a second consequence of the reality of beauty that extends well beyond works of fine art. Rather, we arrive back at the concept I mentioned near the beginning of this essay, that of the political aesthetic. Because the beautiful is the mode of our perceptions and our deepest knowledge, it must be one way of knowing that would inform our conceptions of ethical and political life. When we think ethically, we are asking ourselves questions about what a good life looks like—what is its form. So, too, on a wider scale with politics: political speculation tries to imagine the desirable form of communal life. No society can understand itself without understanding and seeking its proper form, and so no society can exist without being graspable primarily in terms of beauty. Such was the insight of Edmund Burke and of the conservative tradition to which he was inadvertent godfather.
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