It is remarkable that Aristotle’s Poetics had practically no ancient history—that it does not seem to have been available to most of those who carried on the study of poetics in the next centuries. What was known of it by later Greeks and Romans came indirectly, for instance through the writings of Aristotle’s favorite pupil, Theophrastus (about 372–287 B.C.). Of most of the latter’s works (including his own Poetics) only a few fragments remain, but he evidently attempted some extension of Aristotle’s theories. One of his proposals (reported by Dionysius of Halicarnassus) was a definition of verbal beauty as “that which gives pleasure to the ear or the eye or has noble associations of its own.” But to explore the implications of this pregnant phrase would take us beyond what we can confirm by any text.
A somewhat later writer who seems to have known a good deal about the contents of the Poetics is the unknown author of the Tractatus Coislinianus, a compilation in Greek, probably from the first century B.C. It deals in some detail with the theory of comedy, and it not only follows characteristic Aristotelian methods but presents a definition of comedy that parallels very closely the definition of tragedy in Chapter 6 of the Poetics. For these reasons it has been taken as a report of the material supposed to be missing from Aristotle’s work. One interesting departure from Aristotelian terminology is that poetry is said to be of two sorts, imitative and nonimitative: the former consisting of drama and epic (narrative), the latter of didactic (historical and educational) works.
From the entire period between Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s Ars Poetica, not one complete treatise on poetic theory has survived. We have plenty of evidence that a good deal of thinking and writing went on—we know a number of titles—but the actual remains are scanty. We possess extremely important scientific and philosophical works, for this was a period of intense intellectual activity. The Academy and the Lyceum continued to exist, and three major philosophical movements came to flower: Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism. Fortunately, a little can be said about the aesthetic theories connected with each of these.
HELLENISM AND ROMAN CLASSICISM
Among the Stoics there was a good deal of interest in poetry and the theory of poetry. The Stoics were deeply immersed in problems of semantics and logic and it was in this school that the allegorizing of Homer flourished most, after Plato’s time. Treatises on poetics (no longer extant) were written by Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus—who also (according to Diogenes Laertius) wrote Against the Touching up of Paintings and On the Right Way of Reading Poetry. We know a little (from Philodemus) of a work on music by Diogenes of Babylon, and more (from Cicero’s De Officiis) of a work on beauty by Panaetius. Apparently Diogenes held that the musician is concerned with sounds in quite a different way from ordinary perception: the latter deals with simple sense qualities, the former with “dispositions” of the qualities of perception (which may mean their harmonious and rhythmic relationships to each other). In a similar vein, Panaetius insists that the beauty of a visible object lies in the arrangement of its parts (convenientia partium, in Cicero’s words), and requires a higher level of perception than that vouchsafed to animals.
In view of the basic Stoic doctrine that right action consists in conforming the individual reason (logos) with the universal logos of nature, it is not surprising to find Panaetius likening the beauty, or orderly arrangement, of objects to the rational order of the soul, and suggesting that the delight in beauty is connected with the virtue that expresses itself in an ordered life. Thus the notion of aesthetic harmony is bound up with the moral doctrine of decorum (to prepon), and a justification found, within the Stoic framework, for the pleasure of poetry. Considering the emphasis they placed on tranquillity and detachment (ataraxia), the effects of art might appear all too risky for the Stoics. But they seem to have made a distinction between two sorts of pleasure here: the pleasure (hedone) that is an irrational movement of the soul is not to be desired by the philosopher, for (like all forms of evil) it rests upon incorrect judgment or deceit; but one who is in the right frame of mind can derive from poetry another sort of pleasure (chara) which is a rational elevation of the soul.
Another interesting line of thought is attributed to Crates (probably a Stoic) by Philodemus. He raised the question whether there is more than one standard (thema) for judging a poem, and argued against certain unnamed relativists who held that there is no natural good (physikon agathon) in poetry. Apparently Crates argued that better and worse poems are distinguished by the ear, which does not employ a plurality of standards. That by itself does not show that the expression “a good poem” has a single meaning, or a single set of criteria of application. But it is significant, for, according to Stoic doctrine, perception is not merely sensation, but always involves a rational element of judgment. Thus to enjoy the pleasure of a poem is in part to judge it, for it is to grasp something in the poem that makes it good—i.e., its being composed according to the right principles of unity or harmony. Thus the pleasure of hearing it is not itself a standard, but a sign or indication, of the poem’s goodness as a poem. It is not clear exactly what Crates thought the criteria of poetic goodness are, but he apparently emphasized the moral benefit of poetry as a final justification.
And from the Stoic Strabo (Geography I, i, 10; I, ii, 3) one gathers that the Stoics in general maintained this view—approving of the use of poems for moral teaching in schools, conceiving of poetry as a kind of allegorized philosophy and a vehicle (superior, it may be, to prose philosophic discourse, said Chrysippus) of the highest truths.
It has often been claimed that the Epicureans disapproved of music and of the pleasure to be derived from it. Apart from the report of Sextus Empiricus (Against the Professors; Book VI, Against the Musicians, § 27) that Epicurus denied that music contributes to happiness, the evidence for this view seems to be based on an interesting confusion. According to Plutarch (That It is Not Possible to live Pleasurably According to the Doctrine of Epicurus, 13), Epicurus
declares in his book called Doubts that the wise man is fond of shows and takes pleasure more than others in the Dionysiac recitals and spectacles; and yet he will not allow musical discussions and the learned inquiries of critics at parties.
All this proves is that Epicurus liked listening to music more than listening to music critics—which is surely a consistent position. As for poetry, we know this much, that Lucretius could think of no greater service to render to the immortality, not only of Epicurus but also of Epicureanism, than to put that philosophy into poetry.
Our most important source of information about Epicurean ventures in aesthetics is a remarkable writer of the first century B.C., Philodemus of Gadara, who spent much of his life in Italy. In papyri recovered from Herculaneum, there are (1) parts of Book IV of an essay On Music (Peri Mousikes), which suggest that—unless he was drawing heavily on a lost work of the same title by Epicurus himself—he took a fresh look at some important problems in musical aesthetics, and (2) parts of Book V of an essay On Poems (Peri Poiematon), which attacks with vigor some of the principles of other writers.
The Pythagorean theory that music (1) is capable of arousing and quieting the emotions and (2) is capable of exercising an influence on character, was, as we have seen, developed by Plato and accepted in modified form by Aristotle. After him, the Peripatetics, as well as the Stoics and Academics, continued to defend these propositions—though it is also worth noting that Aristoxenus (one of Aristotle’s best pupils, whose book on the Elements of Harmony grasped the concept of music as an organic and dynamic system of sounds, and aimed to carry out a scientific analysis of music based on what is actually heard by the human ear) acknowledges that “one class of musical art is hurtful to the moral character, another improves it” only with the qualification, “—in so far as musical art can improve the moral character” (II, 31; trans. Macran).
It was these two propositions that Philodemus attacked, with arguments that sharply define one side in a recurrent dispute, as we shall see. He suggested that because the term mousike denoted poetry and dancing as well as what we would now call pure music, earlier theorists had been confused, and had attributed to the music itself effects that are (if they occur at all) due to the words. “Qua musicians they gave pleasure,” he says of Pindar and Simonides, “and qua poets they wrote the words, and perhaps even in this capacity did not improve men, or at all events improved them only to a small extent” (trans. Wilkinson, Class Quart XXXII, 175). Music by itself cannot imitate character, and cannot have significant emotional effects.
No melody, qua melody, being irrational (alogon), either rouses the soul from a state of tranquillity and repose and leads it to the condition which belongs naturally to its character, or soothes and quietens it when it is aroused and moving in any direction. . . . For music is not an imitatory art (mimetikon), as some people fondly imagine, nor does it, as this man [Diogenes of Seleucia] says, have similarities to moral feelings which, though not imitative, yet express all ethical qualities such as magnificence, humbleness, courage, cowardice, orderliness and violence—any more than cookery [p. 176].
Philodemus’s reasoning is that a sound cannot imitate things or abstractions, but only another sound—an evident insistence on using the term “imitate” in a restricted, and therefore clear, sense. Note that he is, however, not merely denying that music is imitative in this narrow sense; he is also denying that music can express (epiphainesthai) ethical qualities, even in some broader sense. And he bases this conclusion on the observation that different listeners (while they will no doubt all recognize the musical imitation of a thunderstorm) will respond very differently to the same piece of music, once it is separated from the words.
Both in the case of the Enharmonic and the Chromatic scale people differ, not in respect of the irrational perception, but in respect of their opinions (doxas), some, like Diogenes, saying that the Enharmonic is solemn and noble and straightforward and pure, and the Chromatic unmanly and vulgar and mean, while others call the Enharmonic severe and despotic, and the Chromatic mild and persuasive; both sides importing ideas which do not belong to either scale by nature [p. 177].
But if music cannot improve character by imitating virtue and arousing an impulse to follow, neither can it corrupt; being non-rational, its pleasure must be perfectly harmless.
The term alogon suggests the way in which this view of music was connected with the general Epicurean theory of perception. Against the Stoics, Epicurus held that sensation as such is devoid of cognitive value. Thus it would not be until doxa becomes connected with sensation that knowledge can occur, or any reference to the world. And not until there is knowledge, or reason, can the emotions be brought under control. “It is unthinkable that sounds which merely move the irrational hearing should contribute anything towards a disposition of soul capable of distinguishing the expedient and the inexpedient in our social relationships,” says Philodemus (p. 178).
The book On Poems, or what remains of it, concentrates on another important thesis that cuts deeply into the controversies of that day. Philodemus holds that a great deal of critical theory rests upon a separation of two aspects of the poem, inspiration and technique, or (in Peripatetic language) matter (pragmata) and style (lexis). This is not only an untenable separation, for in the work itself they exist in a unity, but it leads to mistaken ideas about the real nature of poetic goodness (to poiētikon agathon). (1) Some insist that matter is the important thing, and argue that the primary function of poetry is to instruct and improve. But this is not so, for it is doubtful whether poetry can do these things at all, and, even if it can, it does not do them qua poetry, but only accidentally, as is shown by the fact that approved subject matter is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of poetic merit: “There is no good thought which, if the diction be poor, can make a piece of literature, as such, meritorious; nor any content essentially so trivial, that, if the form be good, the contrary effect is not produced” (trans. Wilkinson, Greece and Rome II, 150). But (2) others say that the form is the important thing, and argue that the primary function of poetry is to give pleasure. For example, Eratosthenes (we learn from Strabo, I, ii, 3) held that poetry aims, not at instruction (didaskalia) but at delight (psychagogia). Though an Epicurean, Philodemus rejects this too. Moreover, most subtly of all, he rejects the view that there are two functions of poetry, that its worth consists in a mere sum of the hedonic and cognitive (plus moral) values. We do not have enough information to know exactly how far Philodemus himself went toward formulating his own answer; it seems that he thought the goodness of a poem consists in a unity of form and content, and a consequent individuality contributed by the poet.
The Skeptics sought their ideal of tranquillity, or impassivity, through a renunciation of the irremediably painful philosophical thinking that aims at objective truth, and they attained this renunciation by leading thought into self-paralyzing paradoxes. We know a great deal about the sorts of argument they employed—many of them of the greatest philosophical value—from the works of Sextus Empiricus (second century A.D.). It may be that the Skeptical doubts about the possibility of knowing the nature of substance were partly responsible for their rejection of an imitative theory of art in either an Aristotelian or a Platonic sense, for this theory presupposes that we know something of substance and can grasp universals. Sextus questions whether poetry contains truth (Book I, entitled Against the Grammarians, of his work Against the Professors, § 297) and (along lines similar to the thinking of Philodemus) whether music has an ethos (Book VI, Against the Musicians). In Book VI, he presents a curious double argument against music. “Music,” here, he is at pains to make clear in an initial distinction (§ 1), is to be understood as “a science dealing with melodies and notes and rhythm-making and similar things” (trans. Bury), not in its other two common senses, (a) instrumental skill (the “female harp-player” as a musician), (b) aesthetic merit (a “musical painting,” meaning a good one). First, he lays out many examples supposed to prove the affective power of music, and analyzes them away, with counterarguments to show that music has no meaning (“It is not by nature that some are of this kind and others of that kind, but it is we ourselves who suppose them to be such,” § 20) and no therapeutic value (like wine, it may distract the sufferer, who, however, relapses into his trouble when the music ends). Then Sextus turns to the more fundamental skeptical line of thought: there is no such thing as a science of music (§ 58) because in fact sound, melody, and rhythm do not really exist (§§ 39–67). (The Skeptical attacks on the reality of sense qualities need not be reviewed here.)
Many works on literary problems were produced during the centuries of Roman ascendancy, and some of them are of great and lasting value. But it was not a period of very philosophical interest in the arts; much of the poetic and rhetoric was practical, pedagogical, or polemical. Even the two outstanding works, that by Horace (65–8 B.C.) and that attributed to Cassius Longinus (and certainly not by him, though possibly by a Greek named Longinus who lived during the first century A.D.), while they contain much of interest to the history of literary criticism, yield little that can be counted as a contribution to the progress of aesthetics.
Horace’s Epistle to the Pisos (more widely known as Ars Poetica—the name given it by Quintilian) presents in marvelously terse and memorable language, but in loose order, certain practical principles of style and dramatic construction—and this work is supplemented by passages in his Satires and Epistles. A poem, he asserts, is the product of both Nature and Art; it must either please (delectare) or improve (prodesse), or, better, do both at once. The general spirit of the work is that poetry is something to be taken seriously, because it can serve an important moral and civic function.
One of Horace’s most famous remarks, “Ut pictura poesis” (line 361), was destined (as we shall see) for a notable career in the modern period, when it became the text for various theories about the essential similarity of poetry and painting. In the context of the Ars Poetica, it was a casual introduction to some uncomplicated comparisons: “A poem is like a picture: one strikes your fancy more, the nearer you stand; another, the farther away . . . ” etc. (trans. Fairclough). But this was not the first—or the last—aesthetic phrase to be abstracted from its context and made into a doctrine.
The lively book On Elevation in Poetry (Peri Hypsous, usually translated “On the Sublime”) is another largely pedagogical work, brilliantly carried out. It evidently disappeared soon after it was written, and (except for some lost manuscript pages) it was rediscovered and published only in the sixteenth century; in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries its influence was enormous. “Longinus,” the supposed author, is primarily interested in giving detailed advice about writing, and illustrating his suggestions with a wide variety of apt and nicely analyzed examples. There is a certain quality that marks a great literary work, he says—hypsous. And the problem he sets himself is to show by what means, including stylistic devices, this is to be achieved.
The attempt to identify such a quality as the necessary and sufficient condition of literary greatness is not without interest, and some of the features of “Longinus’s” method are worth noting. Is there, we might ask, just one such quality? “Longinus” discusses five features that contribute to this quality, of which the two most fundamental are (1) large and important (“full-blooded”) ideas, and (2) vehement emotion. These he calls conditions or, sometimes, “constituents,” of the “sublime” (VIII, 1). It is possible to have the “sublime” without emotion (VIII, 2), but “nothing makes so much for grandeur as genuine emotion in the right place. It inspires the words as it were with a fine frenzy and fills them with divine afflatus” (VIII, 4; trans. Fyfe). On the other hand, “a great style is the natural outcome of weighty thoughts” (IX, 3–4). When we now inquire what the quality of “sublimity” is, “Longinus” seems to hold that it can be defined only by its effects. He is impatient with aesthetic problems, and is satisfied to say that the “sublime” is what produces in the reader not mere pleasure or intellectual conviction, but transport (ekstasis): the sense of being carried away, as though by magic (I, 4). “The true sublime, by some virtue of its nature, elevates us: uplifted with a sense of proud possession, we are filled with joyful pride, as if we had ourselves produced the very thing we heard” (VII, 2). This doesn’t tell us what the “sublime” is, but what it does. Indeed, just as “Longinus” sets up one aesthetic puzzle by not making a consistent distinction between the “sublime” and its conditions, so he sets up another by not keeping clear the difference between the “sublime” and its effects: note how objective, subjective, and affective terms are brought together when he says (XXXIV, 4) that Demosthenes “shows the merits of great genius in their most consummate form, sublime intensity, living emotion, redundance, readiness, speed—where speed is in season—and his own unapproachable vehemence and power.” Much of what “Longinus” says can be interpreted either as showing how to move the reader deeply and yet nobly, or as showing how to make the work itself more intense and elevated in its qualities—for example, when he gives examples of colloquial phrases in Herodotus and says (XXXI, 2), “These come perilously near to vulgarity, but are not vulgar because they are so expressive (semantikos).”
PLOTINUS
The philosophy of Plato continued to be taught by his followers, during the first centuries of the Christian era, at Alexandria and Rome, and in the Academy at Athens, until it was closed by the Emperor Justinian in 529, as a rival and threat to Christianity. But in the hands of creative thinkers, like Philo of Alexandria, at the beginning of the first century A.D., and Numenius of Apamea, a century later, it evolved into a somewhat different system that became known as Neoplatonism. The most distinguished and original of the Neoplatonists was Plotinus (204/5–270 A.D.). Though his thinking ranged widely, and was especially important in philosophy of religion, he also has a significant place in the history of aesthetics.
Plotinus wrote fifty-four essays or “Tractates,” which were arranged and published in six “Enneads,” or groups of nine, by his pupil Porphyry in the first decade of the fourth century. The text, as we have it today, is in quite good condition, but Plotinus’s terminology is idiosyncratic and often mysterious, so that some parts of his elaborate and complex metaphysics are still subject to doubt or dispute. In main outline, we may say this: Behind the visible world, as its ultimate source and ground, is what Plotinus calls “The One” (to hen) or “The First,” which is, in itself, beyond all conception and knowledge. Yet it can not untruthfully be described under certain aspects by certain terms, if they are taken deeply enough: it is the Good, for example, and the Infinite (Ennead II, Tractate ix, section 1). When we speak of the One, we are taking ultimate reality in its first “hypostasis”—a term for whose meaning one must rely on contextual specification, since no safe synonyms present themselves. The One has also a second and a third hypostasis, which are identical to the first, yet constitute different functions or, perhaps, roles. The Second Hypostasis is Intellect or Mind, the Divine Knower (nous), which is identical with what it knows (noeta): the Platonic Forms (or Ideas) that constitute the Intelligible World, the ideal archetypes or patterns of the visible world. The Third Hypostasis is the All-Soul (psyche), or principle of creativity and life. Together, the three Hypostases make up a single transcendent Being, from which all other Reality proceeds by “emanation” (tolma), and to which all other Reality aspires to return as its primal source (the epistrophe). Emanation is not a temporal process, but timeless; from Plotinus’s metaphors of Being as overflowing like a spring (V, ii, 1), and of a central source of light that grows dimmer with the distance from it (V, iii, 12), we may think of the various parts of reality, including nature and the visible world, as participating in the light of Being, but in various degrees, from the most real things of spirit and intellect down to the lowest grades of matter. The Platonic dualism of Being and Becoming is in one sense overcome by this conception of all things as ordered in a continuous degree of greater and lesser reality, but the contrast between the Visible World and the Intelligible World remains in the distinction between nature and the Forms of the Second Hypostasis.
A fully developed philosophy of beauty is central to this metaphysical system, and pervasive throughout the Enneads, though it is presented most systematically in three of the Tractates—principally in I, vi (“On Beauty”), but also in parts of V, viii (“On the Intellectual Beauty”) and VI, vii (“How the Multiplicity of the Ideal-Forms came into being; and on the Good”). Its major inspiration is Plato’s aesthetic theory, especially the Symposium, though it also owes a great deal to the Phaedrus and the Timaeus. Nevertheless, it strikes out on its own in some highly original ways. Plotinus’s exposition is frequently obscure, and sometimes almost impenetrably so, but his attempt to preserve and deepen what he takes to be Plato’s most important ideas, while giving the concept of beauty a new and most significant metaphysical status, is worth patient study.
The tractate “On Beauty” was the first one written, according to Porphyry’s biography of Plotinus, and it does not develop all of the aesthetic theories characteristic of his mature thought. But it contains some important ideas, and since its argument is difficult, we may well begin our consideration of his aesthetics by tracing its thought with some care, supplementing it from time to time with material from other tractates.
Plotinus begins (I, vi, 1) by reviewing the variety of things that can possess beauty: most obviously things seen and heard, but also (for “minds that lift themselves above the realm of sense to a higher order”) “beauty in the conduct of life, in actions, in character, in the pursuits of the intellect; and there is the beauty of the virtues” (trans. MacKenna and Page). The searching question is, “what, then, is it that gives comeliness” to all these things? “What . . . is this something that shows itself” in them?
The first answer Plotinus formulates and rejects is
that the symmetry of parts towards each other and towards a whole, with, besides, a certain charm of color, constitutes the beauty recognized by the eye, that in visible things, as indeed in all else, universally, the beautiful thing is essentially symmetrical, patterned.
We cannot be sure whom he is referring to when he says that this is what “almost everyone declares,” but he is clearly including the Stoics; the theory is a plausible misinterpretation of Plato’s Philebus, and something close to it can be read from Aristotle’s Poetics. In any case, Plotinus argues, it is false. His reductio ad absurdum argument has several parts. (1) “But think what this means. Only a compound can be beautiful, never anything devoid of parts . . . ” In short, if symmetry is a necessary condition of beauty, then simple things cannot be beautiful. But (a) they must be beautiful, otherwise complexes, which are made up of simples, could not be beautiful either: “beauty in an aggregate demands beauty in details.” And (b) some simple things clearly are beautiful: colors, single tones, the light of the sun, gold, night lightning, and so on. Moreover (c) spiritual qualities, such as “noble conduct, or excellent laws,” can be beautiful, but what sense does it make to call them symmetrical? How, for example, could virtues be symmetrical? Finally (2) Plotinus inserts an argument that symmetry cannot be a sufficient condition of beauty, because an object that remains symmetrical can lose its beauty: “one face, constant in symmetry, appears sometimes fair and sometimes not”—and when the body becomes lifeless, it loses most of its beauty, though not its symmetry (VI, vii, 22).
Thus we come back to the original question: what is the “Principle that bestows beauty on material things” (I, vi, 2)? The answer of Plotinus is stated most fully in the tractate “On the Intellectual Beauty”:
Suppose two blocks of stone lying side by side: one is unpatterned, quite untouched by art; the other has been minutely wrought by the craftsman’s hands into some statue of god or man, a Grace or a Muse, or if a human being, not a portrait but a creation in which the sculptor’s art has concentrated all loveliness.
Now it must be seen that the stone thus brought under the artist’s hand to the beauty of form is beautiful not as stone—for so the crude block would be as pleasant—but in virtue of the Form or Idea introduced by the art. This form is not in the material; it is in the designer before ever it enters the stone; and the artificer holds it not by his equipment of eyes and hands but by his participation in his art. The beauty, therefore, exists in a far higher state in the art. . . . [V, viii, 1; p. 422].
It is, then, by virtue of matter’s capacity to take and hold the Forms that “the Beauty of the divine Intellect and of the Intellectual Cosmos may be revealed to contemplation” (V, viii, 1; cf. VI, vii, 42). Nothing less than Being itself, as a mirror of the One and the Divine, can so stir the soul in contemplation. Since the One, in its second Hypostasis, is both the knowing Intellect and the knowable Forms, and it is form itself that makes the difference between a beautiful and an ugly object (“an ugly thing is something that has not been entirely mastered by pattern, that is by Reason, the Matter not yielding at all points and in all respects to Ideal-Form”), beauty is the mark, and the resultant, of this participation of the object in Ideal-Form.
But the experience of beauty, Plotinus also holds, is not the mere observation that matter is fit to receive Ideal-Form; this fitness is
something which the Soul names as from an ancient knowledge and, recognizing, welcomes it, enters into unison with it. . . .
Our interpretation is that the Soul—by the very truth of its nature, by its affiliation to the noblest Existents in the hierarchy of Being—when it sees anything of that kin, or any trace of that kinship, thrills with an immediate delight, takes its own to itself, and thus stirs anew to the sense of its nature and of all its affinity [I, vi, 2; p. 57].
In putting on beauty, then, matter acquires a deep “affinity” for the soul. And the soul takes joy in recognizing its own nature objectified, and in thus becoming conscious of its own participation in divinity. Here in Plotinus is the origin of the mystical and Romantic theories of art that we shall encounter later.
At first glance, it seems that Plotinus, having rejected symmetry as a necessary condition of beauty, now brings it in under another name, “pattern,” and states his own conditions of beauty in a way that runs counter to his previous argument. How can the light of the sun be beautiful, if simple, and therefore incapable of pattern? But he has a different emphasis in mind.
But where the Ideal-Form has entered, it has grouped and coordinated what from a diversity of parts was to become a unity: it has rallied confusion into cooperation: it has made the sum one harmonious coherence: for the Idea [i.e. the Form] is a unity and what it moulds must come to unity as far as multiplicity may.
And on what has thus been compacted to unity, Beauty enthrones itself, giving itself to the parts as to the sum: when it lights on some natural unity, a thing of like parts, then it gives itself to that whole. Thus, for an illustration, there is the beauty, conferred by craftsmanship, of all a house with all its parts, and the beauty which some natural quality may give to a single stone.
This, then, is how the material thing becomes beautiful—by communicating in the thought that flows from the Divine [I, vi, 2; p. 58].
It is unity, then, that is essential here. Speaking of a complex with heterogeneous parts, such as a house or painting, we can say that it becomes beautiful when and only when it is unified, and thus becomes a mirror of the One. But a single spread of color, or a sustained mellow tone, being homogeneous throughout, is unified by that very homogeneity, and so it too can be beautiful. Thus all beauty is the “outcome of a unification” (I, vi, 3).
So with the perceptive faculty: discerning in certain objects the Ideal-Form which has bound and controlled shapeless matter, opposed in nature to Idea [i.e., Form], seeing further stamped upon the common shapes some shape excellent above the common, it gathers into unity what still remains fragmentary, catches it up and carries it within, no longer a thing of parts, and presents it to the Ideal-Principle as something concordant and congenial . . . [I, vi, 3; p. 58].
This explains sensuous beauties. “But there are earlier [i.e., logically prior] and loftier beauties . . .” (I, vi, 4)—“the beauty of noble conduct and of learning,” seen not with the physical eye but with the eye of the soul. These are capable of thrilling and exulting us, too, and even more deeply (I, vi, 5). But how? There is “No shape, no color, no grandeur of mass,” only the “hueless splendor of the virtues . . . loftiness of spirit; righteousness of life; disciplined purity”; and the like. To see what makes the virtuous soul beautiful, consider first, Plotinus suggests, the opposite: ugliness. The ugly soul is “dissolute, unrighteous: teeming with all the lusts; torn by internal discord; beset by the fears of its cowardice and the envies of its pettiness . . .” etc.—“What must we think but that all this shame is something that has gathered about the Soul, some foreign bane outraging it, soiling it . . .” In short, this “ugly condition is due to alien matter that has encrusted” the evil man, “and if he is to win back his grace it must be his business to scour and purify himself and make himself what he was.”
According to this theory of evil as something “foisted” on the soul, the evil soul is impure and inwardly discordant (cf. III, vi, 2; I, viii, 13; V, viii, 13). Its moral discipline therefore consists in “purification” of the alien, harmonization of the discord—in a word, unification (I, vi, 6; cf. I, ii, 4; III, vi, 5; IV, vii, 10). So the spiritual beauty of the soul rests on exactly the same condition as the sensuous beauty of art or nature. “And it is just to say that in the Soul’s becoming a good and beautiful thing is its becoming like to God” (I, vi, 6; cf. II, ix, 2). From this point of view, and considered in ideal terms, Beauty appears to be almost identical with Good. “We may even say that Beauty is the Authentic-Existents and Ugliness is the Principle contrary to Existence . . . and hence the one method will discover to us the Beauty-Good and the Ugliness-Evil.” “The Good and The Beautiful,” says Plotinus in another place (V, v, 12), “participate in the common source”; the goodness and beauty of the Forms derive from their ideal properties (VI, vi, 18), but in the hierarchy of Being, nevertheless, The Good has priority (I, viii, 2).
At this point (I, vi, 7), in the spirit of Plato’s Symposium, Plotinus turns to a description of love—which is always, in every form, a love of beauty (cf. III, v, 1), and consequently a love of goodness and of being. Its hunger and its delight are directed, whether the soul knows it or not, toward the divine, which, in one aspect, is “the Beauty supreme, the absolute, and the primal . . .” (I, vi, 7; cf. VI, ii, 18; V, viii, 8–10). But by what path are we to rise to acquaintance with this absolute Beauty? Our experience of sensuous beauty gives us the foretaste, the intimation of what lies beyond, but to go beyond we must turn away from “material beauty” (I, vi, 8). “You must close the eyes and call instead upon another vision which is to be waked within you, a vision, the birth-right of all, which few turn to use.” This means first fixing our attention, not on music and painting, but on “all noble pursuits, then the works of beauty produced not by the labor of the arts but by the virtue of men known for their goodness” (I, vi, 9). But even that is not enough: you must make yourself beautiful in spirit, morally excellent, to know perfect beauty.
When you know that you have become this perfect work, when you are self-gathered in the purity of your being, nothing now remaining that can shatter that inner unity, nothing from without clinging to the authentic man, when you find yourself wholly true to your essential nature, wholly that only veritable Light which is not measured by space, . . . when you perceive that you have grown to this, you are now become very vision: now call up all your confidence, strike forward yet a step—you need a guide no longer—strain and see.
This is the only eye that sees the mighty Beauty [pp. 63–64].
About this last progression, by which we ascend from the experience of sensuous beauty, through the contemplation of moral beauty, to truth itself, more can be added, from passages elsewhere in the Enneads, to make our account more accurate if, at the same time, less decisive. For the monism of Plotinus’s system does not wholly heal or conceal something of the same ambivalence toward the arts and toward beauty that we discovered in Plato’s philosophy.
What role, exactly, is played by the beauty of art, sensuous beauty, in the soul’s passage to ultimate knowledge of, and immersion in, the full light of Being that the Plotinian philosopher craves? It is a path, says Plotinus: for when we recognize the beauty of a picture we are after all recollecting, however dimly, the eternal Beauty that is our home, and so, since
the sight of Beauty excellently reproduced upon a face hurries the mind to that other Sphere, surely no one seeing the loveliness lavish in the world of sense—this vast orderliness, the Form which the stars even in their remoteness display—no one could be so dull-witted, so immovable, as not to be carried by all this to recollection, and gripped by reverent awe in the thought of all this, so great, sprung from that greatness [II, ix, 16; p. 149].
But on the other hand, sensuous beauty may take us in a different direction:
Beauty is all violence and stupefaction; its pleasure is spoiled with pain, and it even draws the thoughtless away from The Good as some attraction will lure the child from the father’s side [V, v, 12; p. 413].
Again, Plotinus distinguishes three ways to truth, those of the musician, the lover, and the metaphysician (I, iii, 1, 2). Being “exceedingly quick to beauty,” the musician tends to respond sharply to “measure and shapely pattern”;
This natural tendency must be made the starting-point to such a man; . . . 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, . . . and the truths of philosophy must be implanted in him to lead him to faith in that which, unknowing it, he possesses within himself [I, iii, 1–2; p. 37].
But on another occasion, Plotinus collapses the lover and the metaphysician into one hopeful and likely seeker after truth, who is “not held by material loveliness,” and the path of the musician seems to disappear (V, ix, 2).
As the last quoted sentence suggests, the beauty of the visible world is its mirroring of the invisible, and Plotinus has much to say on behalf of natural beauty. “Even in the world of sense and part, there are things of a loveliness comparable to that of the Celestials” (II, ix, 17). The objects around us are expressions of Nature, and “the Nature . . . which creates things so lovely must be itself of a far earlier beauty” (V, viii, 2).
Thus there is in the Nature-Principle itself an Ideal archetype of the beauty that is found in material forms and, of that archetype again, the still more beautiful archetype in Soul, source of that in Nature [V, viii, 3; p. 424].
How easy would be the transition, then, from one to the other. Moreover,
The arts are not to be slighted on the ground that they create by imitation of natural objects; for, to begin with, these natural objects are themselves imitations; then, we must recognize that they give no bare reproduction of the thing seen but go back to the Reason-Principles from which Nature itself derives, and, furthermore, that much of their work is all their own; they are holders of beauty and add where nature is lacking [V, viii, 1; pp. 422–23].
Here is Plotinus’s gentle answer to Plato’s doubts about imitation: a tree and a picture of a tree share alike in the Form that bestows on each whatever beauty it may possess, and such is the freedom of the painter that his picture may in fact capture and exhibit that Form even more fully than the tree. “Thus Pheidias wrought the Zeus upon no model among things of sense but by apprehending what form Zeus must take if he chose to become manifest to sight”—a famous, and in a way revolutionary, statement. But even more significantly, and originally,
Any skill which, beginning with the observation of the symmetry of living things, grows to the symmetry of all life, will be a portion of the Power There which observes and meditates the symmetry reigning among all beings in the Intellectual Cosmos. Thus all music—since its thought is upon melody and rhythm—must be the earthly representation of the music there is in the rhythm of the Ideal Realm [V, ix, 11; p. 441].
Art need not be representational to be revelatory. (And for the full meaning of “the symmetry of all life” see III, ii, 16, 17; iii, 1.)
On the other hand, it must be remembered that Absolute Beauty itself is invisible: the “Authentic Beauty” is “Beyond-Beauty” (VI, vii, 33), since it surpasses shape and form, without which beauty cannot be experienced. Thus, paradoxically, to achieve absolute Beauty is not to see it; to know fully is to become the divine, no longer to be external to it, and he who is one with Beauty does not behold the beautiful (V, viii, 11). At this point, the argument has come full circle: or, in a perhaps now too familiar figure, the mystic, having climbed beyond the top of his ladder, kicks it away. Plotinus comes close to exalting Beauty at the expense of beauty, or Beauty at the expense of art; in the framework of his metaphysics, determined as he is to fix the transcendental Beauty as an essential aspect of ultimate reality, he sometimes carries the tension between sensuous and spiritual beauty to the snapping point—since the unseeable Beauty we are after will hardly satisfy the appetite aroused by the seeable beauty that sets us after it. But, on the whole, Plotinus means to bring the two orders of beauty together more closely than Plato could, and despite passages in the other direction he has had some success. For if Reality consists of a continuous series of planes, each farther from the central Light of Being, each in a way an imitation of those that are nearer, all beauties, however dim, must be connected ultimately with the Absolute Beauty that they allude to. And at all levels, as we have seen, some consciousness of its affinity with the divine is present in the soul.
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