Beauty in Thrall

Conflict and Resolution in the Aspiration Toward Justice

It's sad that "Beauty" has been reduced by a heterosexist male gaze laser-focused via mass media to eventually mean, roughly, "physically attractive," or "pretty." Beauty used to be one of the Transcendentals, along with the Good, and the True. While a Beau could be just as beautiful as a Belle (and why not have more options, as well?), the Beauty had more to do with their character and soul than with superficial trappings. (Although to present oneself well can sometimes be contiguous with good character.) Beauty was more about what called us to our Best Selves in pursuit of Wisdom. It was what drew us through Eros to participate fully in our communion with the Cosmos. It's sad to lose it. I weep for its absence.

To whit: a post I saw on Instagram. (I thought I’d screen grabbed the image but, helas, it must’ve happened during one of my blackouts.) The gist of the melody went something like this:

Don’t be beautiful. Be quirky, funny, antagonistic, inspiring, frustrated, ecstatic… there are so many other things to be than beautiful.

I understand and agree with the sentiment, as far as the sentiment goes. The post was put up by a cis woman and was saying “Stop carrying around all this bullshit weight that goes along with the Beauty Myth. All it’s going to do is create internal strife and keep you from being a Happy Being. Furthermore, your worth is so much greater than your physical appearance and allure.” Amen. Amen. One hundred times, Amen.

But that’s not all it means to be beautiful, and often times Beauty isn’t even about the individual at all but, rather, about their creations which, when resonant, participate in greater sets of meaning within the collective.

Here’s a bit of an explainer on what I’m trying to get at. This comes from Paul Krause at Yale on his personal blog:

Because our soul is immortal and comes from the all-knowing One, the soul, when placed into a human body (descending away from the One) retains knowledge of the good, true, and beautiful but must be awakened to return to understanding. For Plotinus, the dialectical progression toward Truth follows as such: Impulse, Memory, Knowledge. According to Plotinus, impulse is the madness involved with first encounter – like the musician who encounters beauty for the first time and is driven by impulse to capture it in his work, “he must be led to the Beauty that manifests itself through these forms; he must be shown that what ravished him was no other than the Harmony of the Intellectual world and the Beauty in that sphere, not some one shape of beauty but the All-Beauty, the Absolute Beauty; and the truths of philosophy must be implanted in him to lead him to faith in that which, unknowing it, he possesses within himself. What these truths are we will show later.” It is also important to realize here, as is common in Plotinus, that Beauty is the gateway to Truth, Beauty leads us to Truth and Beauty awakens the soul to the intellectual-principle.

Of course, nothing from our fair Instagrammer disputes this and, indeed, in many ways what they write enforces it. By rejecting a hetero-sexist, masculinist imposition of a Beauty Standard onto an individual, we shit on the Cardinal Virtue of Justice. When we celebrate that individual’s right to simple be a being, then we can start to allow ourselves to aspire toward greater principles like Character, embodying Beauty in the way it’s supposed to be. Beautiful people are Good and True people who live harmoniously with others, even when that harmony sometimes manifests dissonantly. (One can’t aspire toward arete without valuing Courage and Justice, after all.)

It’s the ultimate work in progress. I pray that we’ll get closer and closer to a point where all feel participant.