Illustration by Nicole Ruffell @nicoleruffellart

What is beauty? Traditionally, it was held among ultimate ideals: truth, goodness, love and justice. In our modern scientific world, raising such an abstract question at the coffee table would be likely met with raised eyebrows or vacant redundancy, despite the question being at the heart of aesthetics and the arts – not least the arrangement of our daily lives, Instagram, and our idea of happiness. We think we know what beauty is. We describe things as “beautiful” in that they inhabit beauty as a property; yet, we rarely have the humility to inquire into beauty itself.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” constitutes the popular post-modern quip, admitting the concept to a mere personal attitude to pleasure. On this view, beauty per se becomes a meaningless topic exiled from serious discussion, primary aims of the arts and its comparability with ultimate ideals.

Alain De Botton, however, suggests we don’t entirely believe this “deeply troublesome” maxim. For if all tastes were relative, he says, we could reasonably proclaim “a rubbish dump smelling of urine and decomposing fecal matter was a lovely place.” [1] Moreover, the subject of beauty retains a vital seriousness when we regard its impact on environmental attitudes.

In academic philosophy, attempts to define beauty centre on just this argument: whether it is a subjective phenomenon – located in the mind of the beholder – or a property inherent to beautiful objects in the world.

Beauty as expression

In contrast to the post-modern subjective view, many of us ironically agree with the classical notion with which contemporary commercial ideals align: beauty exists in sensory expression. On this account, beauty is the ascription of an objective characteristic in the world that is perceptually experienced - articulated most notably in human form, poetry, sculpture, painting, architecture, fashion, or even nature.

In fact, the Greek root of “art” means “to put together.” Beauty, on this slant, is formulaic. According to the likes of Aristotle, Euclid, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance, it is expressed in relation among parts in a harmonious whole containing symmetry and proportion. Pythagoreans therefore equated the orderliness of mathematics to beauty, exemplified in the sensory pleasure of the ‘golden ratio’ heard in certain harmonic musical scales.

This idea of mathematical melody continues in modern discourse. In De Botton’s equation, “a thing is beautiful when it is at an ideal midway point between being very ordered and very complex.” Similarly, “In the case of a beautiful person,” says Milan Kundera, “the play of coincidence happened to select an average of all dimensions.” [1,2]

But is beauty really something “put together?” Can it be quantitively  expressed? The idea that it can lends significance to so-called beautiful artefacts, cinemas, museums, galleries, theatres, the embellishment of our homes, literature - the whole business of modernity.

In John Keats’ poetry, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” we find a deeply emotive description of it. [3] But even Keats admitted the concept of “beauty” is not beauty. Words are human conventions born from thought, which like all symbols – including great works of art – are forever eluded by the thing they attempt to express. Any object purported to express beauty in itself, therefore, always contains a hint of artificiality.

This is not to condemn all mediums of human expression, but we have become so enamoured with ideas that the signifier is often mistaken for the signified. Far from the common rhetoric that current society is materialist (in the actual sense), we instead give credence to tokens of beauty because we idealise the symbolic value represented by such artefacts, physical characteristics, brands or possessions. Attaining the immaterial ideal symbolised by a material object is, of course, an attitude pre-eminent in consumerist culture.

Desire, pleasure and suffering

The image of transcendence marks the idealist view of beauty. As in Plato’s analogy, art is a ladder from the material to the spiritual, that is, an instrument which points beyond itself toward beauty (or truth). Plato resumed this in his idea that erotic love is a state of longing or desire to possess beauty. Crispin Sartwell echoes the claim that beauty is “the object of longing,” a fundamental condition of a finite being in time, he said, that “directs our attention and our desire to everything else we must learn or acquire in order to understand and possess.” [4]

In this idyllic sense, beauty is a promised land of psychological freedom, wholeness, or happiness. Most of us harbour such an image at the back of our minds, hoping to permanently arrive there some day.

Many of us therefore frequent art galleries, for example, with a tacit desire for self-betterment. As in Plato’s cathartic ladder, when we are immersed in a painting, a film, a book, a sunset, and so forth, thought is suspended and our self-image is momentarily dissipated, as in such phrases as, “I read to get away from myself.”

But “if you listen to Bach because you think it’s good for you,” Alan Watts once said, “you’re not listening.” [6] Consuming something in order to attain something beyond itself is a fatuous process. Through this cycle we become dependent upon the particular experience to satiate our longing and escape our inner disquiet, a default state we return to once the fleeting experience ends and so renewing the merry-go-round of desire indefinitely. We are analogous to a child absorbed by a toy who subsequently cries when they don’t have it. Traditionally, humanity has never attended to this self-effacing process. Instead we have harnessed such mechanisms as art, music, books, sex, alcohol, drugs, attending mass, and so forth, as means of escaping suffering, and therefore, ourselves.

In each scenario we self-consciously seek the experience, that is, the memory of an instant of joy or selflessness which is subsequently desired to be repeated and sustained. In remembering these moments and longing for their repetition, we conflate the thought of beauty with pleasure. By craving sensory pleasure in things we purchase or partake in, we seek a distortion of those same ultimate ideals.

Unsurprisingly, the abiding definition became hedonistic: beauty is synonymous with pleasure. Even in the classical view, examples like the ‘golden ratio’ or physical attractiveness are acclaimed for their ability to arouse sensory pleasure in the perceiver. Eventually, without being able to demarcate beauty into either category the subjective-objective argument waned. So much so, that by the eighteenth-century pleasure was held to be the origin of beauty, not the effect. “An object cannot be beautiful if it can give pleasure to nobody,” declared Lord Shaftesbury. Or in David Hume’s words, “Pleasure and pain, therefore, are not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence.” [4] Today, neuroscience and psychology corroborate that so-called beautiful objects elicit a pleasurable cognitive response, leaving serious inquiry into the true nature of beauty receding into obscurity.

But is beauty pleasure? Crucially, our conflating beauty with pleasure is intrinsically related to desire and despair. When beauty is beheld as an idyllic, permanent state and therefore something to be aspired to, it concurrently introduces the belief that one is not that, and the subsequent psychological suffering of lacking such a thing. To quote Lao-tzu: “Recognise beauty and ugliness is born.” [5]

Therefore is a concept of beauty itself the problem? Beauty ideals have shifted over time according to cultural norms and the media, becoming the basis of despair for many in attempting to live up to these impossible depictions. Beauty, therefore, has always been sought in an idea of perfection, a vision of psychological harmony and satisfaction – a destination motivating action toward its attainment. As we know, this very movement is contradictory.

Therefore, is not the desire for pleasure itself the condition of psychological suffering? Despite our common sense, when observing our own inner processes, pleasure and pain cannot be separated. Seeking pleasure is pain. Seeing this duality is of grave importance because a mind that idealises beauty as an acquirable standard, in any form whatsoever, implies an immutable sense of incompleteness.

Sensitivity without thought

But has beauty, in the actual sense, anything to do with self-conscious endeavour toward the acquisition of an idea? Is it something created by thought? From our own experience, we might note that the idea of everlasting wholeness is in fact fictional. Such is the insatiable nature of desire, there never is, and never will be a permanent state where all our yearnings are fulfilled. Consequently our conception of “beauty” is a projection of thought, which is subsequently longed for. (The prefix “idea” in “ideal” provides a major clue.) But in doing so, we desire something entirely illusory.

Is beauty a concept at all? Has it a name, contour, measurement, definition, or description; is it a category of thought? Of course not. In itself, beauty has nothing to do with knowledge, cultivation, experience, expression, or sentiment.

Through positive conceptions of beauty, we accumulate in order to become something. But, echoing Sartwell, in this very classification the idea of beauty is finite and fragmented because it is the content of thought. Instead of accumulating definitions of beauty, it is only through negating every possible conception of it that we have a profound sensitivity for what we refer to. The very seeing that beauty (or truth, and so on) has no image means an ending of self-conscious desire for a mistaken conception. Without definition there is no division, and therefore wholeness. Nothingness is wholeness.

Is it, rather, in the complete abandonment of this self-conscious endeavour that beauty comes about? Abandoning self-conscious pursuit of an ideal fabricated by thought involves the abandonment of any idea of a separate self who must pursue: the inner monologue, the anxiety, the idea of a ‘me’ entity who desires beauty is itself an accumulation of memory or thought. As Krishnamurti concurred, “Beauty is when the self is not.” [7]

Unlike, for instance, the temporary cessation of our sense of self upon contemplating a work of art or having a drug-induced experience, such perception is an on-going act. By awareness of the entire field of thought, the sensitivity for beauty therefore requires a completely unembellished austerity (in the pure sense).

Though this does not necessitate a puritanical approach. Rather, we can continue to give a place to all conventions created by thought, including marvellous forms of artistic expression. For we have seen through taking them literally in order to possess.

If art (“putting things together”) is anything at all, it is the art of living: the on-going awareness of the entire field of thought and convention. In this sense, art does not merely play a role in our lives, it is life itself. The art of living surpasses the art of great painters. “Art is not truth,” said Picasso, “Art is a lie that makes us realise truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.” [8] Again, this does not undermine the artist, but it is to inquire deeply into what we call “beauty,” or “truth,” something not created by thought.

It is no secret that many artists from Beethoven to Van Gogh were, to say the least, psychologically troubled. Granted, it is not uncommon that a disturbed mind is a prelude for creating profound works of expression, but such a mind is antithetical to an aesthetic life. After all, aestheticism is the capacity to perceive with great attention and care. Clear perception, in being aware of all the conventions thought creates, is uncontaminated by thought and does not involve adherence to any image whatsoever.

These might sound like platitudes, but they are not. This requires acute observation in oneself – something obstructed by any apparent form of authority purporting to define beauty. This complete emptying of thought, however, is in itself psychological freedom.