As I’ve mentioned before, I live on top of a hill. I moved there quite recently, so that its marvels are still new to me. The best thing about living up here is the great expanse of sky that I can see from my windows. Here in south-east England, the sky is very magnificent. On a rainy day, it is a swirling ocean of grey. On a clear one—there have been many this summer—it is a hearty blue. But most often, this being England, the sky is a moving landscape of clouds, great and small, white and grey, processing against the sun. This scene is worth watching at any hour, including by moonlight, but is of course at its most spectacular at sunrise and sunset. English pinks, purples and yellows are delicate, building luxuriant contrasts with the faded blues of morning and evening, and with the clouds’ billowing masses or the great, slanting sunbeams piercing them. All this is free of charge—well, except for my rent—and is on offer morning after morning, evening after evening, never the same, never less than beautiful.
Beautiful … it would take a far better writer than I to do much justice in words to the sky outside my windows. Words are in any case poor tools for rendering the thrills of vision. A gifted painter or photographer can do better. But I am no such thing, and so I resort feebly to the default adjective, proclaiming that the view from my hill is “beautiful”.
What else, besides this big sky, is particularly beautiful to me, as to most others? Other elements of nature: mountains and forests, flowers and meadows, graceful animals The opposite sex. Children. Those man-made things that we call “art”, when they reach the sublime: music, poetry and prose, paintings, statues and buildings, photographs and movies. And, in another register of beauty, nobility and kindness in those around me.
We use this one noun, “beauty”, and adjective, “beautiful”, to designate many things.
A disparate list, with disparate thoughts, emotions and pleasures behind it—and yet we use this one noun, “beauty”, and adjective, “beautiful”, to designate them all. Does some essential sameness or overlap lie behind this semantic unity? There is of course a whole branch of philosophy devoted to that question, but just now, I wish to consider only two answers, at opposite poles from each other. Think of them, if you will, as a grubby little demon at my left ear, and a coldly iridescent angel at my right.
The demon speaks for Evolutionary Psychology. He tells me that I must start from the assumption that all my sensations and ideas are most likely rooted in some evolutionary advantage, some contribution to the perpetuation and thriving of the species homo sapiens. If I find women beautiful, this is an incentive to reproduction. Children are beautiful to me so that I will be urged to care for them in their fragility, and so keep the human show on the road. What I call nobility and kindness are pro-social behaviours beneficial to the survival of my pack. I ask the demon about sunsets and music: what do they have to do with species survival? If he is in a creative mood, he spins me a tale about mating rituals and keeping safe on the savannah; otherwise he just shrugs and reminds me that evolution is a random process, that not every trait serves any purpose. What matters is to remember that I am at all events a clump of cells, governed by the need to make more clumps of similar cells.
The angel, in tingling tones, speaks for Plato (I have been re-reading the Phaedrus). He tells me that all these different sorts of beauty are indeed united, that they partake somehow of the Form of the Beautiful, an eternal, unchanging, immaterial beauty that is (in) God. My soul, if it could only be purified, would long only for unity with that divine beauty. Meanwhile it is drawn toward such lesser beauty as I experience through the senses, the longing an imperfect expression of that higher—indeed highest—drive.
Is this beauty which I feel so deeply a mere surface to be peeled away?
I like the angel better than the demon, but in truth I like neither very much. They are more similar than they seem. Both tell me that this beauty which I feel so deeply is a mere surface to be peeled away, that what I see is not truly what is to be seen. No coincidence, then, that both are markedly at odds with that most poignant and simple source of beauty: the love between man and woman, and between parents and children. For the demon, such love is just a convenient story we tell to foster the species. For the angel, the muck of family life is contemptible: the erotic desire for beauty on which Plato builds the Phaedrus is the barren lust of an older man for a younger one.
So I shoo away both demon and angel, preferring to hold that all this beauty which I sense and ponder is no epiphenomenon, no sign pointing, upwards or downwards, to the true nature of things, but rather an elementary part of that true nature itself. The beauty of the sky above my hill is as intrinsic to what that sky truly is as anything that science or philosophy can tell me about how or why it was made. If that beauty—I shall follow Plato’s angel this far—comes from God, then it is a God who is not elsewhere, but here.
