What is Beauty?

 
I suppose if you love horses as many people do, you and they might have appreciated the previous image of the two horses and a donkey at peace with their world. The fact that they were in that particular spot on a Tuscan promontory may have heightened the experience of an incidental kind of beauty even further. The tail swishing as the shutter clicked was certainly opportune.

It is a truism to say no one can define beauty. Perhaps it can be described but mostly we can only give examples. Even to ask, what it is, is not done to get a straight answer but to explore the notion of wanting to know with the emphasis on the wanting rather than on the beauty itself.

Beauty can cause the most atrocious, intoxicating transformations in both thought and feeling. In fact its face, thoughts and feelings merge into a single state of being. That is its power. With regards to women as sexual beings, there is such a thing as 'physical beauty'. We cannot always be sure of someone's moral character just by looks but for those so inclined, in the folly of infatuation or in the greatest of longings for her only, the total loss of nerve before her presence is real. You become a fool and she rightly sees this and goes instead for the more dispassionate one; he, the one who is just as aloof and seemingly even uncaring of her delicious charms. Once there and taken the uncaring can extend to her whole person. C'est la vie!

The romantic poet John Keats throws out the most serious of challenges by tying beauty to truth. Being merely a line in a poem, one can enquire into the 'truth' of that statement but it is a marvellous insight to make that connection at the moral base between beauty and fact. What Keats would do is turn two words with distinctly different meanings into synonyms. In this sense, beauty matters unconditionally as the thing uttered and thrown out into time and space. Fact and truth are merely those events, those uninvented things that actually happen or may happen. Fiction is not necessarily a lie. It is an exploration into the realms of possibilities. Beauty could be said to be that simple as a necessary faculty of altruism in all of us.

When something good or lucky happened, say while we were watching some 'Footy' pronounced 'fuddie', my Aussie classmates would exclaim "Beauty!" pronounced 'Bewdy', or "You Beaut!" prounounced 'U Byute' in that slightly torsioned way. We talk about beautiful shots in Cricket and beautiful solutions when a banking crisis is resolved. Mostly it is used to describe certain ephemeral but delightful weather conditions, such as when the sun shines or indeed in a melancholic mood when it rains. Beauty is mostly associated with the arts as a critical factor but as a notion it operates deep inside the human psyche in all its dealings. The best architecture is one that people do not really notice but lulls you into a sense of well being without being aware how. The lovers kissed. It was beautiful.

"Why Beauty Matters" as a statement is quite different from "What Beauty Is". Why would beauty ever 'matter' as such? Let us see if its speaker can explain the instrumental reasoning even as he would acknowledge the exclusivity of those who are more sensitive. That is to say that beauty matters more to some than to others, yet it is said that a thing of beauty is a joy forever. Beauty is universal but in these late modern times some see it and then sort of deny it, not vocally but by not mentioning it. There is one who mentions it a lot. Please welcome Sir Roger Scruton.