In the Eye of the Beholder

Beauty is peculiar stuff. It is not clear whether it appeals to our highest spiritual aspirations or to our sweatiest mammalian desires. It is not clear whether it's about pure form or raw sex. The character of Gandhi is beautiful, but then again so is the massively insured physique of Jennifer Lopez. The one moves the soul; the other the crotch. If beauty is what connects Gandhi and Lopez, angel and mammal, spirit and body, love and sex, truth and yearning, then understanding it is central to understanding what it means to be human.

James Kirwan in "Beauty" leads us into a huge if somewhat elusive metaphysical truth, as described by a great philosopher; Dorothy Schefer Faux in her "Beauty" explores the female sex object as described by typically insouciant French fashion writers. The one calls for yearning without object, the other for the extreme focus of the masturbatory fantasist. They explore the twinned aspects of the human experience of beauty: cosmic and cosmetic, Being and Beehive.

In the "Symposium," the founding document of the Western conception of beauty, Plato depicts an intellectual and spiritual ascent that starts with sexual desire for pretty boys and ends in a vision of beauty purified of animality. This established a tradition, which seemed interminable, of seeing the world as a sign of a higher realm of spirit, of seeing natural beauty as a sign of heavenly beauty and of seeing beauty itself as the source or the core of all human values.

Lopez, as viewed by Plato, is a zone of aspiration, a place where the particular gets transformed into the general, the real into the ideal, the animal into the angel, the fleeting into the permanent. (And as we look at Botticelli's Venus or a publicity still of Pola Negri--the silent film star whose pallor, surrounding eyes into which one tumbles as into an infinitely deep well, touched off a wave of male suicides--we can see that the beauty itself outlasts its body.)

This metaphysical conception of beauty in philosophy ("aesthetics") has been spectacularly out of fashion for a very long time. It died, for philosophers, about the same time as God, say, 1885. But of course beauty as a matter of personal appearance and the design of celebrities (also "aesthetics") is everywhere all the time, an absolutely central dimension of culture that deeply affects how we experience ourselves and one another. We've still got Plato's boys--Leonardo DiCaprio, N' Sync--but we no longer have his metaphysics.