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.

In an approach that is both brave and perverse, radical and reactionary, Kirwan seeks to revive Platonic beauty and drag it kicking gracefully and screaming melodically into the third millennium. Elaine Scarry tried something of the same approach in her 1999 “On Beauty and Being Just,” though in the end her treatment is much less satisfactory than Kirwan’s. Kirwan’s book is full of fresh ideas and wonderful writing, and it grapples implicitly but continously with what is essentially an obsolete discourse.

In that discourse, beauty is defined as the ultimate object of yearning, as what people really want when they want anything, as the reality behind all appearances that is the only possible surcease of our impossibly profuse desires. We want; we want and nothing in this world finally satisfies us or brings us lasting peace. But everything we yearn for in this life is also a sign of the transcendent. In Western aesthetics from Plato to Hegel, earthly beauty leads us to the still source of reality.

Now that kind of thing was all very well in the late middle ages or even in the early 19th century, the heyday of the speculative metaphysics. But the metaphysics of beauty as it was practiced back then has been spectacularly out of fashion for so long that it seemed beyond revival until Kirwan took it up in a different way.

That is in part because not only metaphysics but beauty itself has come to seem passe during the last 100 years, since its last apotheosis during the reign of such aesthetes as Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater. Modern art ditched or at any rate decentralized beauty as an aesthetic value: Who would assert that what makes Picasso or De Kooning valuable is the beauty of their work?

Somewhere along the line in high modernism, beauty merged with prettiness in art as a kind of bovine aesthetic value that represented vapidity and philistinism. Art, it was believed, should be disturbing, outrageous, incomprehensible, ambiguous, vicious, corrosive, and it should assuredly not be pleasant. The pleasure of beauty was deeply suspect, masking hard truths and propping up the social order.

Beauty has never wholly lost its power in art; the sculpture of Brancusi or the beeswax-and-pollen environments of Wolfgang Laib spring to mind. But beauty, as the ultimate task of the artist and as a metaphysical concept in the 20th century, seemed deader than Immanuel Kant.

Kirwan’s book is impregnated with the sort of ambition one almost never sees in contemporary philosophy: He wants to understand beauty truly and fully and to use that understanding to illuminate the human condition as a whole. And one extremely important feature of the book is that it demonstrates that it is possible to pursue beauty intellectually without destroying it. The book is designed and produced as a typical, though attractive, university press book but, in virtue of its plan and its writing, it is beautiful.

This reflects a tension in the book itself: Kirwan is torn between a beautiful vision of beauty and the attempt to give a respectable philosophical account of the concept. Here is his definition of beauty in the former mode: “Beauty is neither euphoria nor communicable knowledge

That is a lovely rendition of a neo-Platonic aesthetic, and Kirwan connects his account very richly to that tradition. Not the least of Kirwan’s contributions are his showing of the development of the Western concept of beauty in a clear but nuanced way and contributing to that development to an extent unprecedented since George Santayana’s “Sense of Beauty,” which was published in 1896. Beauty is where we are all headed, the absolute inherent in the real, a path to transcendence. But the very odd thing about the situation in which Kirwan finds himself is that words like “the absolute” seem, to our post-metaphysical philosophers, to make no sense.

So Kirwan also gives an unlovely but official characterization of his task: “How can we account for what is experienced by the subject as a disinterested pleasure of the kind beauty appears to be?” The association of beauty with “disinterested pleasure” is also traditional, and what it indicates is that the experience of beauty is not sought for the sake of something else: We don’t want to experience beautiful things in order to get rich or even lucky but rather because the experience itself is intrinsically satisfying.

Kirwan’s view, then, situated beauty firmly and completely in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is for Kirwan wholly subjective, in fact is not a property of Gandhi and Lopez at all but of those who behold them. It is a pleasure rather than an aspect of the things that give rise to pleasure.

One of the serious objections to this position, to which Kirwan gives no shrift at all, is that it violates the elementary grammar of the term “beauty.” Beauty is a quality of flowers and movie stars, but to say that it is a pleasure just seems an error in usage. There could be a beautiful pleasure, but Lopez and her beauty are not a pleasure: She’s a person in the world.

But what is really a problem for Kirwan’s account is how the subjectivity of beauty can be compatible with his neo-Platonic proclivities. If beauty is all in the head, then it cannot connect us with something greater than ourselves. If beauty is our sense of “the absolute in the finite and the finite in the absolute,” then either the absolute is itself subjective or else beauty is a delusion. But of course Plato conceived of the absolute as a supernal objective realm of truth, what is known as “Platonic heaven.” Kirwan is sufficiently a man of his era to be forced to live without the supernal realm of truth.

For Kirwan, then, beauty takes on the deepest sort of poignancy: It is the yearning that could never by definition be fulfilled because it is a yearning for what we cannot believe exists but can never stop wanting. As Kirwan asks, “What is to be done with this newfound knowledge that in beauty, behind beauty, is nothing, the abyss, dust?” What indeed? Beauty becomes for Kirwan a sign of the human condition or the human predicament: We need to know God but there is no God; we need to know the truth but there is no truth; we need spiritual nourishment but we are always only bodies; we need eternity but are always entrapped in history.

Because beauty for Kirwan lies at the heart of human values, we begin to get a sense of ourselves that has a certain undertow of despair. “All values are ultimately rooted in beauty, in the sense that they finally rely upon what is desired for its own sake, what is absolutely, and therefore impossibly, desired.” It is hard not to interpret this as the view that all human values are entirely subjective and also finally delusory because they aspire to an objectivity and transcendence that is not offered to us in reality.

“Beauty: The Twentieth Century,” the first installment in what is promised as “a universal history of beauty,” shows in a way just how eccentric Kirwan’s lovely dark vision is. Because if there is a dominant way the term “beauty” is used these days, it is surely the one used in this book: to refer to hairstyling and cosmetics. In addition, this book provides a breathless history of the entire world as interpreted by staff writers for French Vogue and Elle in order to provide a context for Claudia Schiffer: “The exuberance of the Renaissance was displaced by the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. Spain supplanted Italy, reason supplanted the senses, the mind supplanted the soul.” There are charming references, for example, to “Boccacio, Petrarch, and other repentant painters” being burned by Savonarola. But perhaps some of these glitches have been introduced by the translator.

These are quibbles with regard to a book that has dozens of pictures of beautiful women (Negri, for example) with rich accounts of how their faces were “created” and their hair piled up. The book actually gives samples of the experiences it describes, actually provides objects of yearning from representations of Nefertiti to Lucretia Borgia to Mary Pickford to Lauren Bacall to Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. There are wonderful fragments of fact nestled in the questionable historical framework. Consider this list of ingredients in medieval makeup: “arsenic sulfide, quick lime, bat blood, bees’ wings, mercury, and slug slime for waxing, polishing, and whitening; decoctions of green lizards in walnut oil, sulfur, and rhubarb for bleaching.” We learn too of a law that came before the British parliament in the 18th century that declared cosmetics, perfumes and artificial teeth to be signs of witchcraft.

Now in one way, the history of beauty traced by the fashion writers seems to comport perfectly well with Kirwan’s account. The job is always to idealize the body, to smooth over its singularities and idiosyncrasies to produce a generalized object of desire. The beauty of Lopez is supposed to be universal in the sense that it is a general representation of femininity, a kind of skinniest common denominator of nubile womanhood. It is universal also in the sense that it is designed to be an object of desire for everyone: It is supposed to have the greatest possible cultural diffusion and penetration. And it is universal in that it is supposed to display what all men want and what all women want to be.

It is a familiar point that ideals of human beauty differ from time to time and place to place, a fact which is richly documented in “Beauty: The Twentieth Century.” But what does not appear to change very much is that all the ingenuity at the disposal of our species is dedicated at any given time to transforming actual human bodies to realize or represent whatever ideal happens to be in place.

But if the book shows anything, it shows that Plato and Hegel and Kirwan are desperately wrong, that maybe they’ve got the whole thing backward. “Beauty: The Twentieth Century” is above all about artifice; it’s about concealment, disguise; it’s about how to manufacture appearances. Beauty itself is not the reality underlying the appearance; it is the apotheosis of appearance. That was also Wilde’s view, by the way. The mammalian body of Jean Harlow is the reality on which the makeup artist creates a face. The words “nature” and “natural” appear continually and uncritically through the book, but always “nature” is itself an artifice: “natural” refers to the style of Chanel in contrast with that of Dior, for example.

And Kirwan’s idea of “disinterested pleasure” would be absolutely foreign to this approach. The point is to be a beautiful object and hence to achieve a kind of continuous seduction of everybody. This gives you power, and it gets you sex and money and fame and all the things you want.

Vogue and Elle writers think about beauty so differently from Kirwan that you really wonder whether they can possibly be dealing with the same concept. For Kirwan, beauty is a route to truth; for Vogue, it is a concealing of truth. For Kirwan it is a matter of the utmost seriousness and cosmic significance; for Vogue it is a delighted playing with appearances, “charm”; for Kirwan it is a metaphysical aspiration; for Vogue it is an art of sexual allure. And both are able to trace their conceptions through the history of the West, though Kirwan is, putting it kindly, more conversant with that history.

So where do we go from here? It seems very unlikely that the Platonic conception can be revived in the face of the cultural stranglehold of fashion writers, but it would be sad to think that beauty is always a mere appearance or a flimsy facade disguising the repulsive reality. We want to have our beauty and, um, eat it too: We want beauty to be a real thing in the real world: partly or sometimes a feeling or an ideal or an artifice, perhaps, but also available for mammals from mammals. We want it to be the object of our yearning and the object of our satisfaction.

Where we need to go, it seems to me, is toward a conception of beauty that calls us toward immanence rather than transcendence or that identifies transcendence itself as perfect immanence. The character of Gandhi or even the body of Lopez does not call us beyond itself but further and further into the character of Gandhi or the face of Lopez itself. We might think of the locus of beauty as the real-world situation in which Gandhi, Lopez and we ourselves are embedded; it is the flower and our yearning toward it; our yearning moves us toward the real thing.

We might, then, entertain the idea that beauty is really a quality of the world, that beauty is really the sign that physical and spiritual yearning are finally the same, that mammals are angels, that Gandhi and Lopez have something in common after all.