Michelangelo’s Pietà “… not made of marble by a mortal hand, but divinely descended from Paradise!”
by John Hartley
“Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible.” Noted the Russian novelist Fydor Dostoevsky, “God and the devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.”
When 18th century Scholars used anthropology, physiognomy, and phrenology to apportion value according to race and beauty, clearly something has gone terribly wrong. Yet what is now dismissed as pseudoscience was then seen as a perfectly legitimate means to qualify human ‘beauty’. What, then, can be learnt from examining the critical juncture, as the departure from objective standards of beauty upon which such pernicious conclusions where not merely possible, but actively promoted?
The Enlightenment’s quest for knowledge and reason carried a darker side—one that linked ‘beauty’ with superiority. This fusion of science and aesthetics shaped European thought, whereby the pursuit of an aesthetic ideal became a gateway to racial ideologies. Read more »
How does Leonardo’s masterpiece, arguably representative of the fatal juncture of Western Art, provide the philosophical basis for pornography? And how does the lost work of an obscure German painter seek to correct what Pavel Florensky called ‘dis-integrated personality’?
In 1888, Georg Cornicelius, a relatively obscure German artist known primarily for his landscapes, produced the portrait “Christ Tempted by Satan.” Cornicelius’ background in capturing vast vistas is brought to bear on Christ’s faculties of perception: the universal reality of nature is transposed upon the personal perspective of Christ.
In the third and final temptation in the wilderness, Satan offers Christ dominion over all the kingdoms of the earth if he will only bow down and worship him. The result of the interplay of proportions gives Christ’s eyes a striking depth—a metaphysical quality—that seems to penetrate the very essence of the beholder.
This temptation is profound, proposing a shortcut to salvation that bypasses the necessary suffering and sacrificial death Christ must endure for the sake of the world. According to St. James, temptation arises from concupiscence, the innate human proclivity towards moral evil. As Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor accuses Christ of burdening humanity with the heavy responsibility of free will, and consequently responsible for the disordering of nature, Satan aims to arouse in Christ the concupiscence of the eyes—the desire for personal control over the visible world.
If evil arises as the will freely yielded to the one who seeks humanity’s eternal ruin, then all of temptation, it seems, is contained here within a single portrait. *Admittedly, there is a lack of critical opinion on this work (what would Morgan Meis make of this painting, one wonders?). Read more »
The author with Esin Çelebi Bayru, Rumi’s granddaughter (22nd generation) in Konya
I was so excited to meet Azra Bayru Kumcuoğlu, Rumi’s granddaughter (23rd generation) for breakfast on my latest visit to Istanbul— that I wore my pearls early in the morning and popped into a salon across from Boğaziçi University campus where I had been staying. Halfway through the blowout, it began to rain and by the time I stepped out, there was a proper downpour. I was irked, as was the hairstylist, but somewhere in my Pakistani heart, rain remains a thrill, a secret, contradictory gift that comes to awaken our dormant spark. Waiting outside the museum where we had planned to meet, I saw Azra Hanim rushing towards me; her spirit was instantly apparent. With the smile and embrace befitting a descendant of Maulana Rūm himself, she held her umbrella over me as we walked down slippery stairs; a stranger a millisecond ago suddenly felt like a sister. As we negotiated the traffic, the whipping wind and wet streets, Azra Hanim kept one arm firmly hooked into my mine to prevent me from slipping. This moment inspires a reflection on courtesy but its sweeping grace defies language; words slip like “a donkey in mud” when it comes to love— to offer that unforgettable metaphor of Rumi’s making. Azra Hanim’s was no ordinary social courtesy but a courtesy shaped by love, a value rigorously honed in the Sufi cultures as Adab.
Earlier on my visit, I had met Azra Hanim’s mother, the honorable Esin Çelebi Bayru in Konya and had interviewed her regarding her new book Love is Something Beautiful. The book is part family memoir, part history of the Mevlevi school of Sufism, and reveals, amidst the ebbs and flows of circumstance and socio-political demands, how the Mevlevi culture has survived in recent centuries. The theme that prevails throughout the book is the centrality of Adab. When I met her, I immediately felt her warmth. She carries herself with the ease of a satiated spirit, happy to pass on to others the peace she feels. We had multiple conversations in the days I spent in Konya, each was memorable. The two things that interested me most in the context of my own work of original poems and translations of Iqbal, was Mevlana Rumi’s early life and influences, and the practice of Adab in the Mevlevi culture and beyond. Read more »
Beauty is nothing more than the promise of happiness —Stendhal
Colours of Lake Maggiore (Photo: C Horner)
How can beauty promise happiness? And what kind of beauty would this be? What sort of happiness? Happiness and Beauty have been central issues for thinkers since antiquity, and the question of what they really are, and whether we should even prize them as we do, have been subjected to sustained critique and discussion for millennia. I don’t intend to join that debate here. Happiness and Beauty: the more we try to get clear about them, the more they seem to recede from us. But, like Stendhal, we cannot do without them.
The origin of the quotation at the top of the page is his On Love, in a footnote in about the possibility of loving that which is ugly. He gives an anecdote about a man who falls in love, not with a woman who is conventionally beautiful but rather one who is not good looking, is too thin and is scarred with smallpox. He falls for her because she reminds him of a past love. Stendhal’s claim here is that beauty isn’t based on physical perfection. The idea of beauty is distinct from the physical form of the thing we desire. This may seem an odd way of conceiving of beauty, but it has a lineage that goes back to Plato. Beauty is kind of message or sign of something else.
Happiness, it seems, is elsewhere. We recall it or anticipate it, and the thing desired is somehow Other to where we are in space and time. The pursuit is not necessarily pleasurable, as the recollection of past happiness can be painful [1]. For Stendhal it is prompted by an erotic encounter, but presumably anything might serves as a trigger:the smell of autumn leaves, the hills in summer, a piece of music. One is reminded of Proust’s Madeleine, and the onrush of unbidden memory in his In Search of Lost Time. We are a long way from conventional ideas of harmony of form, or pleasing combinations of colour or tone. It seems to be less about beauty as it is usually understood, and more about a longed for state of felicity, however it is imagined: for past loves, for home, for childhood. Read more »
First things first. Am I happy that Notre Dame Cathedral burned? Don’t be silly. Of course not.
Do I wish it hadn’t burned? Absolutely.
If I could wave a wand and undo the fire, would I? Without hesitation.
This isn’t about my intellectual understanding of the building’s historical or architectural significance, it’s beauty, or what it has meant and continues to mean to millions of people. Rather, It’s about my emotional response, or more specifically, lack thereof, and the surprising reactions I received.
I learned about the fire when I texted a friend about a completely unrelated issue. Coincidentally, she happens to be a Medieval European Art Historian. As you might expect, she was very upset. I was sympathetic to her pain. Yet my own emotional response to the fire was largely nonexistent. I felt nothing.
Then, much as the flames engulfed the church, the story of Notre Dame’s burning engulfed the media. This came about for reasons I understand and really have no problem with. I did not resent the press coverage at all, but it did bring my own emotionless response into even starker relief.
The day continued. I met an old friend who was in from out of town. We had dinner and a couple of drinks. We caught up and talked for about three hours. Neither of us mentioned the fire. I went home and got online. The story was still all over my Facebook and Twitter feeds. At about 11:00 PM, I posted the following self-deprecating joke:
More proof that I’m a horrible person: Don’t really give a shit about Notre Dame.
Despite the late hour, the posting got many responses. Most of it was what I expected. One friend quipped: This is why we need fewer opinions. Others were more aghast. They wanted to know how it is I could feel this way? Some of their comments reflected a sense of betrayal. I get it. I understand that people were deeply touched by the structure and hurt by its burning, and I was sorry for their pain. I just couldn’t find it within myself to care about the building despite understanding its beauty and history. Read more »
Beauty is not solely in the eye of the beholder so I argued last month. This month I can't resist taking on the other platitude that harms our understanding of beauty—that beauty is only skin deep.
The word "beauty" has fallen on hard times in the art world despite occasional signs of a revival. Yet, in everyday conversation the word "beauty" is so ubiquitous it has fallen into cliché. Perhaps these two phenomena are related. It is routine to say a flower is beautiful; and almost all flowers would seem to qualify regardless of how ordinary. But that just reduces the concept of "beauty" to meaninglessness. I want to rescue the term by arguing that to grasp the nature of beauty we need an aesthetics of depth, not of surfaces, which is to say that beauty is not skin deep.
There is, it would seem, an obvious counter example to my thesis. I suspect the word "beauty" is most often applied to women largely because throughout history most people who publicly wrote about or depicted beauty were men. And this seems to apply to physical features especially in the way the beauty industry uses the term. But this is not because beauty is superficial; it is because beauty is an object of longing, especially the kind of "ideal", unattainable beauty portrayed by the beauty industry. It's the depth of something out of reach, illusive, a consummate idealization, of satisfaction infinitely deferred that is at work in this form of allure. The whole process of cosmetics is to make something desirable and is thus no longer only about appearances but rather something more subterranean.
The idea that beauty is about superficial qualities readily apparent in our experience is an assumption adopted by much of modern aesthetics since Kant and Hume. Aesthetic experience is made possible by a bundle of qualities and if the qualities are alluring enough we call the object beautiful. Yet to report that a painting is red, rectangular, depicting figures of a certain shape, and suitable for hanging tells us nothing about its aesthetic appeal.
In philosophy the most important development in the last 300 years has been the idea that what can be intelligibly said about reality is constructed out of our subjective responses, suitably constrained by social norms and intersubjective communication. This is the essence of Immanuel Kant's so-called Copernican Revolution in philosophy which converted us from naïve realists who took reality at face value to sophisticated anti-realists constructing reality via the structures of consciousness and language.
Kant's argument is sound but preposterous. One would have thought that reality's stubborn resistance to our ideas and expectations and the fact we are often surprised by this resistance might lead us to take the idea of a real world more seriously. The performative contradiction of claiming all reality is a social construction while traipsing off to the doctor when ill renders truth and knowledge the exclusive purview of scientists who have never shown much inclination toward anti-realism. But once these "naïve" realist thoughts are cast out in favor of Kant's fastidious, critical skepticism, common sense can't find a way back in. And so for 300 years we have been denying what to non-philosophers seems obvious—there is a real world out there with which our senses put us into contact.
In light of this revolution in thought we were, by now, supposed to be basking in the friendly solidarities of intersubjective agreement, a consequence that unfortunately appears to be increasingly remote. This idea that reality is a social construction ebbs and flows outside the philosophy class but in today's "post-truth" society it seems ascendant. Perhaps a new way must be found to anchor truth in something more substantial than contingent, collective agreements.
