Visagism
Depending on the perspective, the beauty is seen
in many ways, but the essence is undoubtedly the energy emanating from the Beauty.
Nature has a contagious beauty, which transports
us to dreams in a visual of magic meeting reality, where the grace is a huge
source of pleasure and wealth to our eyes.
The beauty of the being itself is already
favorable for its aesthetics, but other values need to be added in order for
the beauty to be even more beautiful.
Our poet Vinicius de Moraes already said: Beauty
is important... Because we know the first impact is the one that impresses who
is looking at something. Who does not admire beauty in its entire context?
The concern
with appearance is necessary for your presentation.
The concern
with your integrity is important for the inner beauty to flourish.
The concern with your well-being, and to turn it
into a greater good by making you a more beautiful person with pure and healthy
beauty.
I
believe in the point of view of the beauty expert Robson Trindade who, in his
current proposal to see beauty in a flow and reflow, shows the eternal bond of
union with the art that he performs so well where his object of work is
comparable to a magic wand.
He follows the thought of Fernand Aubry, who
transports all the beauty in visagism where Harmony and Aesthetic are essential
factors to admire what is beautiful.
Helô Pinheiro
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Introduction to the Concept
of Beauty
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| 14
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Pre-Socratics
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| 19
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Pythagoras of Samos
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| 20
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Empedocles of Agrigento
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| 22
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Phidias
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| 24
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Heraclitus of Ephesus
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| 26
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Parmenides of Elea
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| 28
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Socrates
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| 32
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Plato
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| 34
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Aristotle
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| 38
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Saint Augustine
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| 42
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Saint Thomas Aquinas
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| 46
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Leonardo Da Vinci
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| 52
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Hegel
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| 56
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Nietzsche
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| 60
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Franz Brentano
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| 66
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Augusto Comte
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| 68
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John Dewey
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| 70
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Final Considerations
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| 74
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Bibliographical References
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| 76
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The contemporary human being
does not save time or money to look well-presented and to wear the correct
clothes for every occasion. Newspapers, magazines, television programs,
websites, and the most varied media stimulate and feed this concern with
information regarding fashion, haircuts, etc.
The history of Beauty is strictly
related to the history of humanity. The ability to recognize and perceive the
beauty of individuals as men and women is listed by several theorists and
philosophers in the most diverse areas of knowledge.
Beauty attracts, provokes
emotions and pleasure, because it becomes part of the experience of the human
existence.
The first theorists of
aesthetics were the Greeks, but as "science of the beauty" the word
appears for the first time in the title of the work of the German philosopher
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetica (1750-1758). Only after the 18th
century with the work of Kant, aesthetics began to be configured as an
independent philosophical discipline.
Poets, artists, and thinkers seek it as a form
of
inspiration. For philosophers it is object of
reflection, for the media is a commercial good, and mandatory for the fashion
industry and its derivatives.
For some people, it is a
source of pleasure or frustration; for others, a dictatorship, i.e., an imposition
that only contributes to support the domination system.
Beauty is part of a set of
puzzles that identify multiple and inexplicable features yet related to the
behavior of the vast majority of humans.
But before we start talking
about the present, we need to review concepts of beauty and forms discovered by
man of achieving self-esteem, well-being, and happiness. Now, everyone wants to
be happy, to have power, to be socially and economically successful - and
beauty is the external and aesthetic representation of this happiness, power,
and success.
We will not decipher any
enigma here. This research will be conducted under different perspectives and
conceptions: Great authors, artists, and philosophers who have tried, in some
way, to do it.
Philosophy is born in Greece
and is considered the
15
first science of humanity. Its
literal translation is "love of wisdom." Philosophy is the study of
fundamental problems related to existence, knowledge, truth, moral and
aesthetic values, mind, and language.
When speaking about
aesthetics, we first think about the question of the beauty. Hence we infer the
following: Beauty has had a considerable place in the philosophy and historical
evolution of the notion of art.
A fundamental question about
this theme is to ask whether the beauty is in the object or in the subject that
contemplates it, in such a way that the history of the beauty conceptions seems
to fluctuate from one position to another.
It takes a transdisciplinary approach that
includes contributions from different perspectives: Time, history,
communication, psychology, art, sociology, anthropology, technology, and mainly
the understanding of gender relations, introducing variables around the
construction of identity.
To understand the question of
the perception of our emotions, Langer (2000, p.15) comments:
The feeling is taken in its broad sense
comprising sensation, sensibility
emotion, or emotional attitude, and
also general condition - physical or
mental. Expressive form involves the
very nature of art and indicates its
importance in culture.
By addressing these problems,
philosophy distinguishes itself from mythology and religion because of its
emphasis on rational arguments. On the other hand, it differs from scientific
research because it generally does not resort to empirical procedures in its
investigations. Among its methods is logical argumentation, conceptual
analysis, thinking experiments, and other a
priori methods.
For Ivanov (2009), in
Antiquity the Greeks introduced the first thesis assuming that beauty is a
characteristic of beautiful things, and that certain proportions are beautiful
in themselves. The Pythagoreans (6th to 4th century BC) have discovered that there
is a mathematical, and
16
therefore numerical
relationship in all things. They did not use the term "beauty", but
rather the one of "harmony", which was linked to the number, the
measure, and the proportion.
For Valle (2005), aesthetics,
from the Greek aesthesis, is a
specific dimension of man. It has awakened, since ancient Greece, interest and
concern with the being for what it, in fact, pleases. This willingness for
questioning the beauty, the incessant search for the understanding and
delimitation of the beauty concept moves aesthetics through human life as a
philosophical discipline, as mere fruition, as creation, as an ideal, or as a
rupture.
Ivanov (2009) still comments
that the philosophical conception influenced Greek art and particularly
affected music. Another fact of the Pythagoreans knowledge was the golden
ration, a proportionality that is found in nature, and also guarantees the
harmony of art plastic works, when between the whole and the bigger part there
is the same relation between the bigger and the smaller part, corresponding to
1,618. Certainly the Greek architects and sculptors used this relation for
their creations.
According to Diller and
Muir-Sukenick (2011), therapists and former US models, although comfort is
sought in the old saying that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder,"
the beauty works as a coin, a power, and vitality in today's world.
Nádia Senna (2000) says that
for each historical moment there is a way of feeling determined by the dynamics
of the being relations with the world. Sometimes it is idealized, sometimes it
is contained, sublimated, or even virtualized. On the other hand, the evolution
of tools and technical processes triggers the emergence of new forms of
representation under the variations of the conception of the Beauty according
to a time, a particular culture.
The search for beauty - a
subjective concept, whose patterns change throughout history along trends and
fashions differing from one people to another - is often the result of the
appreciation given to it by the labor market and society.
We will take some concepts
about beauty from the pre-Socratic period to modernity.
17
Pythagoras
was a Greek philosopher and mathematician born in the island of Samos around
570 BC. He died in Metaponto between 497 BC and 496 BC.
According to the philosophy of
Pythagoras, the man is a rational being and obedient to all laws, and also
indicates an identity model from where the universe is generated through a
mathematical model: The number. And this number, which is the arche, would be
the cause of all organization, the basis of knowledge.
With the evolution of thought,
the myth lost its force because it could not satisfactorily explain the world
and its origin. Another thought arose and its main characteristic was to
explain the world rationally and through logical arguments.
One of his discoveries is the
so-called "Pythagorean Theorem," which solved the problem of
determining the relations between the sides of a right triangle – a triangle
with two acute angles and a right angle.
Despite his writings were lost
over time, he was quoted by writers who succeeded him with geometric knowledge
being developed based on his studies that influenced works of physicists and
engineers that appeared more than two thousand years later, such as Kepler,
Newton, and Einstein, as well as contemporary professionals who study Visagism
(Proportion and Harmony, Beauty, and Aesthetics).
Face – Work of Art.
Clothes, Accessories, Make up, etc. – Frame.
Profession and Lifestyle – Environment where the
work is inserted.
21
Empedocles
was born around 495 BC and died between 435 BC and 430 BC. He maintained the
idea that the world and all matter would consist of four elements: water, air,
fire, and earth. Everything would be a mixture of these four elements in a
greater or lesser degree.
For Empedocles, two
fundamental forces were responsible for maintaining the universe: LOVE, which
united the elements (roots), and HATE, which separated them. Death, for him,
was simply the disintegration of the elements. According to him, we were all
part of the whole that was renewed in cycles; reuniting (birth) and separating
(death).
According to Empedocles, in
the poem Katharmoi - The purifications - of which remains only a hundred
verses, the intervention of hatred is at the origin of all things and of
individual beings that will keep diversifying until total separation and
absolute evil domain.
However, the principle of love
will triumph again, unifying and combining everything to the configuration of
one thing, Sphairos, the perfect sphere, in which the present world has
beginning and end. For Empedocles, the beauty is closely related to the forms
and configurations of nature, and the union of the four elements.
23
A famous Greek sculptor,
painter and builder, Phidias (490 BC - 430 BC) was the founder of an aesthetic
school of great influence and an acclaimed author of the most perfect works
(sculptures) that had ever been seen, according to the Roman poet Cicero.
He formulated his own ideal
conception of beauty and reportedly stated that "an idealized, exalted
human form was useful to elevate the spirits of those who could not imagine by
themselves the true object of their veneration."
Phidias found
Greek sculpturing going through a period of deep and rapid transformation, and
he was, in fact, one of the main engines of that process.
The background of this change
was in archaic sculpture, which produced a formalistic and rigorous style
favoring generalists and abstracting conventions.
25
Little is
known about Heraclitus’ life (535 BC - 475 BC). The information that has come
to us refers to his own writings and to ancient biographies, which are nothing
more than inferences or inventions used to illustrate his thinking.
A descendant of the kings of
Ephesus, an Athenian colony on the coast of Asia Minor, Heraclitus gave up the
honorific title on behalf of his brother. Haughty, he despised the populace and
harassed the nascent democracy in Ephesus, refusing to write its constitution.
For
Heraclitus, we have no identity, because we change every moment. There is a
constant "becoming", because everything is given by contrasts
originating a complete harmony; we only know one thing, because of its contrast
(ugly only exists because we know what is beautiful). No one should claim that
is something, because tomorrow may not be it anymore. Everything is in constant
transformation.
In this
context the Greek word logos arises, which means reason, discourse, languages.
Logos is the sum of the movement and the opposite. It is through this that man
understands the movement, the transformation, the "becoming," the
flow of things in the world.
For Heraclitus of Ephesus,
everything changes infinitely. A beautiful ephebus, for example, is beautiful
only because it participates in Beauty itself. Plato also thinks that the
emotion of love, the emotion that opposes the soul before Beauty is the means
of a dialectical conversion.
Heraclitus says that fire is
the symbol of movement, because, wherever it passes through, a complete
transformation takes place.
Our existence only makes sense
if there is a movement. Even to learn about something, we must not take the
movement away from it. We acquire knowledge through transformation as
everything is constantly changing. When we stop observing the transformations,
we stop ourselves in time, we become late.
In short, for Heraclitus, the arche is the
movement.
However, when this philosopher
says that even knowledge is in motion, a crisis arises in knowledge. How to
know what is right or wrong? Relativism is then created, a dependence of the
one who observes. The truth is for one what may not be for the other.
27
Parmenides was born in 530 BC
in the city of Elea and died in 460 BC. Parmenides lived in a time when the
myth dominated Greece. That is why he wrote his work in the form of a poem,
"From Nature," to convince the Greek people of his ideas, because, in
mythology, only gods know the truth. He was a philosopher who expounded his
thoughts through poetry in the Homeric style, but nevertheless fails to use
rigorous deductive arguments with his ideas; he is the founder of the Eleatic
school and aroused great admiration from Plato.
In the poem, divided into a
prologue, the way of truth is the way of opinion, and goddess Diké (justice)
teaches what Parmenides must learn and pass on to his people.
It is interesting for Parmenides
that the goddess Diké has taught him because such divinity is the daughter of
Themis (law). Thus it is up to Diké to discern the whole cosmos. Cosmo is a
word used in nature as an orderly totality, and then it is worthy to be
contemplated, it is beautiful. Order and beauty appear related and Cosmo is an
orderly and ornate totality.
Parmenides also uses a
specific word in his poem to express a double negation: Aletheia. The
"a" means a negation and the rest comes from the verb lanthanum,
which means unseen. Thus, aletheia means the presence of something by the
negation of its absence. It's an unconcealment.
According to Moliterno (2001),
Parmenides was the first philosopher to affirm that the world perceived by our
senses is an illusory world, of appearances, at which we formulate opinions.
With him, the distinction between truth and appearance is born. He was also the
first one to oppose this changeable world, the idea of true thought and
discourse concerning what it really is, the being.
In this sense, human reason
has the ability to find the hidden order in the nature of things because it is
part of the nature of the ordered Cosmos. If there is rationality in nature, we,
human beings, possess such rationality because we participate in the
rationality of the Cosmos. We say that the human logos mirrors the logos of the
Cosmos.
We may conclude that truth
then is the discourse of reason and the truth of things. But the people did not
distinguish what reason can say and what the thing is, the truth of thinking
and the truth of reality. Therefore, aletheia can also be translated as reality.
Parmenides
philosophy presents itself as a contrast between truth and appearance.
Appearance is perceived
29
by the senses that show us the being and the
non-being, and lead us to various errors. But truth can only be sought by
reason, which for Parmenides it demonstrates that we cannot think the non-being
as we cannot think if this thinking is not about something. Thinking about
nothing is not thinking, just as saying nothing is not saying. We can only
think and express what we think through an object and if that object is already
something, already a being. He concludes that the being is and cannot stop
being, and through this idea he expresses his main philosophical thesis that
will lead all his rational investigation. He then creates the main foundations
of ontology, which is seen as metaphysical because the being is not only the
being of nature, but also the being of man and his actions, and, moreover, is
the being of anything that can be thought out.
The truth about a thing is the thing itself, and
a problem about nature must be researched in nature. Thinking and being are the
same thing.
Parmenides indicates two ways for the research:
The way of truth, which concerns the "what it is", and the way referring
to "what it is not." It is only possible to think and discuss the
“what it is”, because speaking about the non-being is impossible. Therefore,
non-being equals nothing.
This same philosopher still
concludes that the being is unborn and indestructible, because there is no
transience
between being and non-being. Non-being is
something non-existent and the reason only explains what it is now, that is, the
being. The being alone is. The Cosmos is eternal.
Parmenides says that by committing himself to
the way of truth, the wise man will realize that there is evidence of what he
is; their attributes are revealed as an absolute necessity, necessities related
to the being and thought at the same time, since both are identical.
With the search for truth, man
reaches the essence of the beauty being part material and part thought.
What the philosopher of Elea affirmed was the
difference between thinking and realizing. To realize is to see appearances.
The beauty is realized. To think is to contemplate reality as identical to
itself. Therefore, to think is to contemplate the being. Thus multiplicity,
change, birth, and perishing are appearances, illusions of the senses.
Another way that Parmenides finds is the one of
the opinion of the mortals (doxa), because they are incapable of discerning the
being from the non-being. It is an erroneous way, lacking logic, but this does
not imply that it is false.
The question lies in the difference between the
logical knowledge and what is given by the sensible experience, being that the
use of logos provides a reliable truth.
30
Socrates was born in Athens in
the year 469 BC and died in 399 BC. We can say that Socrates founded what we
know today as Western philosophy and became one of the leading thinkers of
Ancient Greece. He was influenced by the knowledge of another important Greek
philosopher: Anaxagoras. His early studies and thoughts discuss the essence of
the nature of the human soul.
According to Madjarof (2011),
Socrates was considered one of the wisest and most intelligent men. In his
thoughts, he demonstrates a great need to take knowledge to the Greek citizens.
His method of transmitting knowledge and wisdom was the dialogue. Through the word,
the philosopher tried to teach knowledge about the things of the world and of
the human being.
Introspection is the hallmark
of Socrates' philosophy and it is expressed in the famous motto “know thyself”
- that is, become aware of your ignorance - as the apex of wisdom, which is the
desire of science through virtue. And would attain Socrates such intensity and
profundity that it would materialize, personify in the divine inner voice of
the genius or demon.
"Know thyself" - the motto in
which Socrates summons his entire life as a sage. The perfect knowledge of man
is the goal of all his speculations, and the moral, the center to which all
parts of philosophy converge.
According to Socrates,
pleasures are false when they are caused by a false opinion. In these cases,
the experience from these pleasures is based on ignorance. Such pleasure could
never be associated to what is beautiful, because the beautiful, and with that
everybody agrees, is praiseworthy and desired, and ignorance cannot be praised
or desired by anyone.
Indeed, in Socrates' criticism
of the music of his time in the Republic, the philosopher is concerned
precisely in preventing the children of the city to be exposed to bad stories,
which lead them to take for granted opinions that actually are false and
harmful.
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Plato was born in Athens
probably in 427 BC and died in 347 BC. He is considered one of the leading
Greek thinkers because he profoundly influenced Western philosophy. His ideas
are based on the differentiation of the world between sensible things (world of
ideas and intelligence) and visible things (living things and matter).
In Ancient
Greece, Plato was the first to explicitly ask the question: What is the Beauty?
For him, the beauty exists in itself, separated from the sensible world. One
thing is more or less beautiful according to its participation in the supreme
idea of beauty. Socrates thought that the Beauty was an agreement observed by
the eyes and ears.
For Plato, the beauty is the
splendor of truth. In the Hippias Major dialogue, he aims to answer the
question about what beauty is, what its essence is, and the text examines several
possibilities of defining beauty as harmony, as a function of good and as a
function of pleasure, and, in the end it has to admit that no definition would be
enough to explain the concept of beauty at the time.
In addition, we can emphasize
the effort of Aristotle to break with the Platonic idealism, bringing the
beauty of the ideal to the reality, although both are objectivists, that is,
they attribute the beauty to the object and not to the spectator (as all
Antiquity would do).
Beauty, for Aristotle, is what
pleases the subject by the simple fact of being apprehended and enjoyed by him.
This demonstrates that the author sought to analyze Beauty from the point of
view of the subject, adopting a psychological analysis of the effects caused by
the enjoyment of the beautiful.
According to Valle, the beauty
is the good, for Plato, the truth, the perfection; it exists in itself apart
from the sensible world, residing, therefore, in the world of ideas. The
supreme idea of beauty can determine what is more or less beautiful.
In "The Banquet,"
Plato defines love as the union of two parts that complete each other,
constituting an androgynous being that, in its spinning walking, perpetuates
human existence. This being, which exists only in the world of Platonic ideas,
gives to its nature and form a peculiar kind of beauty: The beauty of
completeness, of the indivisible whole, and not a beauty that simply imitates
nature. Thus we have in Plato a conception of beauty that moves away from the
interference and participation of the human judgment, that is, man has a
passive action regarding the concept of beauty: it is not up to him to say what
beautiful is or is not.
35
This indecision is recognized
in the saying "beautiful things are difficult," which closes the
dialogue. The Philebus text indicates that beauty consists in the measure and
proportion. In the later dialogues, the beautiful is presented by Plato as an
idea, which forms a triad with good and true. Things are not beautiful in
themselves, but they are only a presentation (appearance) of the idea of the beauty.
Plato's dialectic points
towards two directions: The world of ideas, on a higher plane, of knowledge,
which is, at the same time, absolute and static; the other direction goes to
the world of things, of humans. The latter, of sensitive appearance, is
constituted by the imitation of an ideal conceived in the world of ideas,
therefore, in a copying process.
Gilles Deleuze points to a
third possibility that breaks the Platonic dichotomy: Faithful copy and
simulacrum, no longer regarded as a degeneracy of resemblance to the world of
ideas, a mere ghost. For the Greeks, the artistic beauty was in the clash between
the good copies and the simulacrum.
Phaedrus regards beauty as the
only one, among all ideas, that has affinity with visible things, because it
offers itself to the sight and is shown more clearly in what is visible and
attracts by itself our love; the other ideas, on the contrary, are understood
through our effort. So that clarity and attraction are in the very essence of
beauty.
Visible beauty invites us to a change in our view about the things and
the world, similar to the change that philosophy leads us from the perception
of things to the comprehension of their essences (ideas).
In "The Banquet" it
is mentioned that the contemplation of beautiful things makes possible and
prepares the ascension of the mind, as a stairway, passing from the beautiful
bodies to the beauty of the bodies universally, then to the beautiful
occupations, to the beautiful sciences, to the supernatural beautiful, finally,
to the essence (idea) of the beautiful.
Aristotle, disciple of Plato,
says that beauty is property of the object (objectivist and realist), which
must have harmony between the parts and proportional greatness, being possible
from the enjoyment to contemplate the beauty without needing to go to the world
of ideas. The Aristotle’s beauty conceptions remained forgotten for a long
time, emerging again only at the end of the Middle Age.
According to Aristotle, we are
obliged to admit the existence of the beauty in itself, of an ideal beauty,
founding normative aesthetics. It is necessary, then, to understand the
Aristotelian concepts.
36
Aristotle was born in 384 BC
in Stagira, on the Macedonian peninsula of Chalcidice (hence also called the Stagirite),
and died in 322 BC. He was the son of Nicomachus, a friend and physician of the
King Amintas II – father of Philip and grandfather of Alexander the Great.
When he was 16 or 17,
Aristotle moved to Athens, the intellectual and artistic center of Greece at the
time, and studied at Plato's Academy until the death of his master.
But what is beauty? Can you define it objectively or is it a subjective
notion?
Aristotle, disciple of Plato,
unlike his master, conceived the beauty from the sensible reality where it
stops being something abstract to become concrete, the beauty materializes. The
beauty in the Aristotelian thought was no longer immutable, nor eternal, being
able to evolve.
The Aristotelian beauty
derives from a certain harmony (ordering) that exists between the parts of this
object in relation to the whole, besides containing a certain greatness or
grandiosity. In this sense, we can affirm that the Aristotelian beauty is in
the proportion and harmony of the parts with the whole, beyond greatness.
In Aristotle's reflections on
art (imitation of nature and life, mimesis) dominate ideas of limit, order, and
symmetry. Plotinus inquires in the Enneads whether the beauty of beings
consists in symmetry and measure, because such criteria are only suitable for
physical, plastic beauty, unduly mistook as intellectual and moral beauty. The
physical being itself, sensible, is only beautiful insofar as it is formed by
an idea that orders and combines the multiple parts of which the being is made.
Aristotle, unlike Plato,
believes that the beauty is inherent to man; after all, art is particularly a
human creation and, as such, cannot be in a world apart from what is sensitive
to man. The beauty of a work of art is thus attributed by criteria such as
proposition, symmetry, and ordering, all in their proper measure.
Aristotle's position regarding
the beauty and art is contrary to the one of Plato. The latter had elaborated a
critique to imitation, having as its background the question of truth in art.
He did, in fact, consider that art does not imply knowledge.
A beautiful, well-proportioned but small woman
belongs to the graceful field, not to the beauty field, as it lacks
39
greatness. This concern with
harmony and ordering from Aristotle is present in his conception of the
universe, since, for him, the world was chaos and went through an ordering,
although traces of the chaotic state are still present in the universe, as the
desired harmony was not fully implemented.
Aristotle in Metaphysics
states: "The principal forms of beauty are order and symmetry, and clear
definition," and another one for which beauty is determined by the
experience of pleasure aroused by beautiful things (according to Plato in
"The Banquet”).
This conflict between chaos
and harmony present in Aristotelian philosophy was transposed into the question
of the Beauty, and the concept of fair measure (in this case, balance between
the parts and the whole) is a necessity. But Aristotle admits that the ugly is
part of the Beauty, because when speaking about comedy, seen as "imitation
of inferior and vicious men," the Stagirite demonstrates that he accepts
this kind of manifestation as beautiful, extending the concept of Beauty.
According to Chauí in “Introdução à História da
Filosofia” (2003:346), in Metaphysics, Aristotle tries to define the fields of
knowledge separating them by their purpose. In this sense we can highlight, on
one hand, science (episteme) and, on the other hand, action (praxis and
poiesis). All these fields of knowledge
constitute philosophy because it deals with
everything that surrounds and is part of human life, as, according to
Aristotle, philosophy and science were one thing.
The artist does not imitate
the true being (the idea) of a thing, but its appearance. He does not know what
he produces and imitates; for example, the painter represents a bed and ignores
how the bed is made; the poet chants a song to the cure and ignores how the
patient is cured.
Art is therefore related to
the appearance of things, not to what is true. It is incapable of becoming
better. Aristotle affirmed the legitimacy of imitation and art. In Poetics, he
points out two natural tendencies of the human being: The tendency to imitate,
which is born with us and differentiates us from other animals; and the
tendency to have pleasure in imitations. At the origin of beauty and art these
two natural tendencies lie.
Art, instead of being inferior
to nature, as Plato wanted, has a natural origin. The statement in the book of
Physics: "Art imitates nature," does not mean that it reproduces
nature, but that it produces like nature. Aristotle quotes as characteristics
of the beauty: Order, the exact proportion and limitation, which are
demonstrated especially in mathematics.
In Poetics, he expresses a
reduced definition and indicates that the beauty, whether a living being or
40
something else constituted of
parts, resides in order and size. Something very small could not represent the
beauty as the vision gets confused when exercised in an almost imperceptible
time, nor something great because the unity and the totality of the thing would
escape the eye. Therefore, living beings and bodies must have a size that the
vision can easily cover. In the same way, in tragedy, stories must have an
extent that memory can easily withhold.
Vares writes that the poetic
arts are those that result from human action and have an end outside itself,
and are therefore inferior to the practical arts. In technical arts the
efficient cause is the technician or artificer, the material cause is that of
what the work is made, the formal cause is what gives shape to the work, and
the final cause is the reason of the work. Every artificer (efficient cause)
undertakes the action from a referential model (formal cause), trying to print
form to the matter (material cause).
The work is carried out when
the eidos (form) was inscribed in the
material, thanks to the mediation of the technician. For example, the physician
starting from the referential notion of health takes the form (health) to the
body (matter) with the healing purpose. Each art has its specific rules and
precepts, which are born from the combination of empeiria (experience), eidos
(model), and méthodos (method).
For Aristotle, "art
imitates life," since the artist follows the same principles as nature
(obeying the four causes). Art is a human technique or strategy, according to
Aristotle, to overcome obstacles that nature alone could not do it.
However, by reducing the
productive sciences in relation to the practices and theories, Vares comments
that Aristotle does not consider the artist (architect) a thinking being, but
only a performer. Aristotle shows that the ethical and political man acts with
prudence, while the technician acts with skill.
41
Aurelius Augustinus, the Saint
Augustine of Hippo, was an important Christian bishop and theologian. He was
born in North Africa in 354 and died in 430. He was the son of a mother who
followed Christianity, but his father was a pagan. Therefore, he had important
influence of Manichaeism (religious system that unites Christian and pagan
elements).
After his conversion,
Augustine devoted himself entirely to the study of the Sacred Scripture,
revealed theology, and to the writing of his works, among which the
philosophical ones stand out. The works of Augustine that present philosophical
interest are, above all, the philosophical dialogues: Against the Academics, On the
Blessed Life, Soliloquies, The Immortality of the Soul, The Magnitude of the Soul, On Master, and On Music. It is also interesting to philosophy the writings against
the Manichaeans: The Behavior, On Free
Choice of the Will, On Two Souls, and
On the Nature of Good.
The fundamental question that
St. Augustine asked was: "What is the beauty of the body? In the
convenience of the parts between themselves, followed by a certain sweetness of
colors" (St. Augustine, Epistle 3).
According to Costa and
Brandão, the foundation of the sensitive beauty in Augustine is the unity that
exists in every creature considered in its particularity, as considering the
cosmic totality, which is also a form of unity.
Thus everything that exists,
despite its multiplicity, has unity to some degree. All symmetries, harmonies,
similarities, differences, contrasts, etc., of the sensible world are beautiful
because they are founded in the unity and always point towards unity.
Augustine further comments
that "when reason travels through heaven and earth, it is discovered that
nothing pleases it except beauty; and in the beauty, the figures; in the
figures, the dimensions; in the dimensions, the numbers." (St. Augustine, On
Order, II, XV, 42)
If material beauty comes from
proportional measures, that is, from numbers, the Greeks asked: Why are
proportions beautiful?
The first philosopher to deal
with the relations between beauty and numbers was Pythagoras, and his influence
extended through Plato and the Neoplatonic for many centuries. Saint Augustine
and Boethius were the transmitters of this numerical conception of beauty in
the early days of the Middle Ages.
And the same Saint Augustine,
On Music, asks: "Can we love anything else than beauty? But it is the
harmony that pleases in beauty; now, as we have already seen, harmony is the
result of equality in proportions. This equal proportion
43
is not only found in the
beauties that are the domain of the ear or result from the movement of the
bodies, but it still exists in these visible forms, to which we, more commonly,
give the name of beauty." (St. Augustine, On Music, VI , 13.38)
The tradition and teaching of
Boethius and Saint Augustine will be perpetuated, during the time of the
barbarian invasions, by St. Isidore of Seville (17th century), by the circles
of Irish scholars, and, cultivated by the Carolingian Renaissance between the
8th and 9th centuries, they reached the classical Middle Age.
Saint Augustine performs
sermons on beauty - Divine Creation:
Late
have I loved you,
Beauty
so old and so new,
Late
have I loved you!
And
see, you were within,
And
I was in the external world and sought you there!
And in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things
which you made.
You were with me, and I was
not with you!
The lovely things kept me far
from you,
Though if they did not have
their existence in you,
They had no existence at all.
You called and cried out loud
and shattered my deafness.
You were radiant and resplendent,
you put to flight my blindness.
You were fragrant,
And I drew in my breath and
now pant after you.
I tasted you,
You touched me,
And I am set on fire to attain
the peace which is yours.
44
Saint Thomas Aquinas was born in Italy in 1225
and died in 1274. For Aquinas, the beauty is what pleases vision. The visum
(vision), according to Aquinas, characterizes the beauty as something that is
seen or known, consequently, it is not possible to talk about the beauty without
vision. We may ask ourselves: How does this vision occur? Would the simply
sensitive, animal view be enough in this case? If so, the brutes would also
have the consciousness of the beauty, but this does not happen.
Matos Junior comments that, for Aquinas, the
vision results, then, that the affirmation of the beauty implies,
indispensably, reference to the intelligence. Man, by being a rational animal,
possesses the sense of the beauty.
The affirmation of the beauty presupposes,
albeit implicitly, a judgment of conscience. Now, judgment belongs only to intelligent
beings. It is certain, however, that beauty is accessible to the senses: The
ear is enchanted by beautiful music and the eyes delight by a beautiful form.
But the beauty accessibility to the senses is only possible because they are
penetrated by reason.
St. Thomas says that the senses that perceive
the beauty are those that are most connected with the cognitive power, as is
the case of vision and hearing; on the contrary, with respect to the other
senses, we do not use the concept of beauty to characterize its sensitive
because we do not say that flavors and odors are beautiful. By virtue of the
substantial unicity in man, spirit, and matter, the senses are permeated by the
spirit, and the enjoyment which man experiences through the senses cannot be
understood without reference to the intelligence.
The sense of the beauty always supposes
consciousness, which, in turn, is a category of the spirit. It is through the
spirit, mysterious reality, without which, however, we do not understand man as
we should, that homo sapiens
distinguishes himself from the irrational ones - they may even know, but surely
they do not know that they know, i.e., they are not conscious.
The vision, therefore, which constitutes
an essential element for the affirmation of the beauty, is, ultimately,
knowledge, and, refers to the intellectual power.
There is undoubtedly the knowledge that man
assumes by the senses (the sensible beauty) and the purely intellectual
knowledge (which occurs when the spirit delights in the contemplation of the
truth of a being, and then the more intelligible the truth is, that is, the
clearer it is, the bigger will be the delectation).
Because our spirit incarnate constitution, our
knowledge always begins by the sensible objects; knowledge that
47
awakens in us the first
principles of intelligence, from which we can, by the operation that St. Thomas
denominates separatio, reach the pure
intelligible. Let us conclude then that intuition (the act of seeing, always
related in one way or another to intelligence) is an indispensable condition
for speaking of beauty.
We must analyze now the second
constitutive element of our definition: The placet refers to the delight,
pleasure, or joy with the beauty as its source. Thus, the beauty considered something
that pleases is, in a way, the good for the knowledge. And the good is that for
which the appetite tends. It has already been established that the beauty refers
to intelligence; however, its formal reason is not confused with the one of
truth.
Truth is the proper object of
intelligence, since it is the conformity of intelligence with reality (adaequatio intellectus ad rem). If the
true and the beauty relate to intelligence, then what are the reasons for being
distinct concepts? In fact, the true and the beauty identify themselves by a
distinction of reason.
True results from the adequacy
of intelligence with the thing, while the beauty results from the delight
provided by that adequacy. In other words, to the notion of true corresponds
the conformity of the intellect with the thing, and to the notion of beauty
corresponds the pleasant rest resulting from the knowledge of the thing.
It is possible to see,
therefore, that knowledge is an indispensable condition of the delight that is part
of the beauty. Pleasure, delight, or joy - all parts of the beauty - can be
described as a certain pleasure experienced by the beholder, as an index of happiness
or satisfactory rest; in the case of man, by virtue of its substantial unity of
matter and spirit, this enjoyment is never purely intellectual, although the
beauty contemplated is overly sensible, but it is a pleasure that, referring
ultimately to the intellect, involves the whole man in its body, psychological,
and spiritual dimensions.
It is as if an overflow of
delight, striking man in all its dimensions.
In the face of what we have
analyzed, we could not avoid mentioning the good, which, like the truth, is a
transcendental of the being. We have said that the beauty is a good of the
knowledge.
Aquinas also analyzes that the
good is that for which the appetite tends. But where is the difference between
the good and the beauty, since the latter, as we affirmed, is a good of the
knowledge? We must say that while belongs to the notion of good the relation
with appetite or will, belongs to the notion of the beauty, as we have seen,
the relation with the cognitive power. In the good, apprehension of appetite
finds rest; in the beauty, the rest of the
48
apprehension is given by
reference to cognitive power.
We thus have three distinct
concepts, but in reality they are inseparable: The true, the good, and the
beauty are transcendental of the being, and between them there is only distinction
of reason.
True, Aquinas says, is the
correspondence of intelligence with the being; the good is the being for which
appetite tends and in which he finds rest; the beauty, in turn, is like the
crowning of the true and the good, is the source of joy arising from the
knowledge of the correspondence of intelligence with its object (the true) and
the will’s rest in its object (the good).
For Aquinas, the formal reason
of the beauty refers to joy or enjoyment; it belongs to the beauty that
knowledge finds delectable rest in the act of knowledge, that the one who rests
on the wanted object is seen raptured by joy and full of love.
Between the truth and the good
there is a correspondence that can be delineated as follows: In fact,
intelligence finds its good, whereas in the good the will finds its truth. One
sees, then, how the primacy of logical priority rests to the intelligence,
since even the good, object of the will, would be an absurd if it were not the
truth of the will.
For Aquinas, in natural
beings, devoid of intelligence,
and therefore unconsciously
tending to their good, there is the intelligence priority, since this tendency
to good (appetite) occurs only in reference to a Higher Intelligence by whom
they are governed.
The primacy of the intelligence
priority could be summarized by the famous philosophical postulate: What is not
known cannot be loved. What is not firstly known by intelligence cannot be
desired by appetite.
Matos Junior writes about the thought of Aquinas
that truth is the good of intelligence, and the good is the truth of the will,
while the beauty is the delightful coronation of both, the truth and the good.
In this way, the three concepts are closely related - they are inseparable from
the being. Or better, they are aspects of the being; aspects, however, that the
word being by itself does not say.
The being is true for
intelligence, good for appetite, and, lastly, beautiful, because it provides to
the one who knows the enjoyment of knowledge and to the one who wants the joy
of possession.
Matos Junior comments that for
Aquinas the beauty is the being whose apprehension, whether by the sensitive
knowledge (intellectual senses, such as vision and hearing), or by purely
intellectual knowledge, always and necessarily follows enjoyment. The more pure
and sublime the knowledge, the more intense the
49
joy that results from it. But
we must make an observation: One might be led to confuse perfect apprehension
with the ultimate character of knowledge as such.
Whenever we get to know a
being who offers our intelligence an object whose apprehension leaves nothing
to be desired, then we have a perfect apprehension. This means that certain
truths appear to us in such a pure form that brings to the knowledge the rare
joy of a pure and perfect apprehension of the truth. Such is the case, for
example, of the sensitive beauty and the conclusions we come from safe data,
undisputed logic, and full apprehension.
Concluding the ultimate
character of knowledge, it concerns only to the absolute truth, a term for
which the activity of our intelligence spontaneously follows, according to
Aquinas.
However, Matos Junior writes (2013, p.7):
Absolute truth, the ultimate goal of our knowledge, is not evident to
us, although it may be self-evident in itself and we may be aware of it. The
fact, however, that we grasp only imperfectly the absolute truth, does not mean
that we cannot love it perfectly or enjoy it. By being beyond
our understanding capacity, it is still good and beautiful for us. On
the contrary, the contemplation of absolute truth is the cause of the most
intense joy that man can expect in life. This explains: Love and joy are not
measured by the perfect knowledge we can have about an object, although
knowledge is a necessary condition for love or joy.
If we cannot perfectly grasp
the absolute truth due to the deficiency of our intellect, we can,
nevertheless, know it by what it is not and love it. Such knowledge, although negative,
is still a knowledge that points to the sublimity of the contemplated object
and awakens, in the appetitive power, the love.
It is from the knowledge of
the sublimity of ultimate truth, though we cannot fully embrace it by our
limited intelligence, that we experience sublime love, which is able to guide
us in the dark toward union with the excellence of the object, resulting from
it all sublime joy.
For this reason, mystics dare
to affirm that, although we can only know the Absolute in this life imperfectly
and by analogy, we can, however, love it perfectly.
50
The Thomistic
doctrine, of a realistic gnosiological basis, as it is, indicates three
conditions of the beauty, which is nothing other than the very conditions of
the being; they are:
a) integrity: Nothing that is
appropriate to the being should be missing; The being must possess everything
that is due to him;
b) proportion or unity: The being
is necessarily proportional to itself; Every being is not contradictory, it is united;
c) clarity or brilliance of
intelligibility: The being is insofar as it is intelligible; The more
intelligible, the more clarity and brilliance.
The beauty
has, therefore, an ontological foundation and, then, is not given to subjective
manipulation.
Our
intelligence itself is as if it was invaded by the sense of integrity,
proportion, and clarity of the being. We could call this phenomenon a gestalt
sense, which is connatural. We always tend to the order, to the affirmation of
the Cosmos about chaos.
From the
exposed reflection it follows that all things are beautiful in the same way as
they are (exist). There is no
absolute ugliness or ugliness
in itself, just as there is no absolute nothingness.
What we call ugliness is
nothing else than beautiful lacking the beauty that it deserves. In order to
speak about ugly, it is necessary that, before, there is the being, which is
necessarily beautiful as a support for which the perfection misses something.
With great wisdom, St.
Augustine says: "Because every being, at any degree, is something good,
since the highest Good is the highest Being;" And: "Beauty (that)
reigns in everything that exists, from the highest to the lowest." The
being is always good and beautiful. The being, in its lowest degree, is
superior to nothingness.
There is, of course, a
hierarchy of beauty degrees. The more something has to be, the more beauty it
has. This is to say that the more righteous, united, and clear is the being,
the more beautiful it will be. If we can then affirm the existence of an absolute
being (Ipsum Esse Subsistens), even
though we cannot fully embrace it with our limited intelligence, we will affirm,
consequently, the existence of absolute beauty.
51
Leonardo da Vinci, an Italian
Renaissance artist, was born in 1452. It is still uncertain the city of his
birth: For some historians, his birthplace was in Anchiano, while for others it
was in a town situated on the right bank of the river Arno, near the mountains
Albanos, between the Italian cities of Florence and Pisa.
Da Vinci said
that the sensitivity to the beauty causes a state of ecstasy that leads to
reflection about the wonders of the world.
Da Vinci also commented that
pleasure and pain are represented as twin traits, forming a unit, because one
never comes without the other; and if one is put with its back to the other, it
is because they oppose each other.
He was one of the most
important painters of the Cultural Renaissance. He is considered a genius as he
was an excellent anatomist, engineer, mathematician, musician, naturalist,
architect, inventor, and sculptor. His scientific works and projects were
almost always hidden in notebooks (many written in codes), and it was as an
artist he achieved the recognition and prestige of the people of his time.
Leonardo da Vinci apprenticed
as a garzone (studio boy) to Andrea
Del Verrochio’s studio (an important artist of the time) in the city of
Florence. He lived for a while in Milan, where he worked for the court of
Ludovico Sforza. Until 1506, he worked mainly in Florence and everything
indicates that during that time he painted his most famous work: The beautiful
and enigmatic La Gioconda. He worked for King Francis I of France, where he made
beautiful works.
Main characteristics of Da
Vinci paintings: Use of the artistic technique of perspective, use of colors
close to reality, perfect human figures, religious themes, use of mathematics
in artistic calculations, centralized main images, background landscapes, human
figures with feeling expressions, and artistic detail.
Da Vinci states that
everything that is beautiful dies in man, but not in art. Man will never invent
anything simpler or more beautiful than a manifestation of nature. Given the
cause, nature produces the effect as soon as it can be produced.
Vitruvian Man - is a famous
drawing that accompanied the notes that Leonardo da Vinci made around the year
of 1490 in one of his diaries. It describes a naked male figure separately and
simultaneously in two overlapping positions, with the arms inscribed in a
circle and in a square. The head is calculated to be one-eighth of
the total
53
height. Sometimes the drawing
and the text are called the Canon of Proportions.
The drawing is currently part
of the collection of the Gallerie dell'Accademia (Academy Gallery) in Venice,
Italy.
By examining the drawing, it is
possible to note that the combination of the arms and legs positions form four
different postures. The positions forming a cross are inscribed together in the
square. On the other hand, the upper position of arms and legs is inscribed in
the circle. This illustrates the principle that when changing between the two
positions, the apparent center of the figure seems to move, but in fact the
navel of the figure, which is the true center of gravity, remains still.
Da Vinci, before returning to
Florence, makes his last work for Sforza, the classic "The Last
Supper". In 1500, after returning to the Florentine city, he enters his
most productive stage in the sphere of painting, composing in this period his
most celebrated and mysterious creation, the portrait of Lisa del Giocondo,
spouse of Francesco del Giocondo - the famous Mona Lisa.
At about the same time he
began to produce the mural painting called "Battle of Anghiari."
In 1516, with the death of his
patron and protector Giuliano de Medici, Da Vinci began to work with the
sovereign Francis I of France. The artist dies in French territory in 1519 in
the town of Cloux. His body was buried in the Church of St. Florentine in
Ambroise, later destroyed due to the insurrections that occurred during the French
Revolution.
The
noblest human passion is the
one
who loves the image of beauty
instead
of material reality. The
greatest
pleasure is in contemplation.
Leonardo
da Vinci (1490)
54
Hegel was born in Germany in
1770 and died in 1831. According to Hegel, there is a fundamental
differentiation between the artistic beauty and the natural beauty. The beauty
in art is directly related to the purity of the spirit, whereas the natural beauty
is directly submissive to the reality of nature.
Stigar writes that in this perspective the
"artistic beauty excludes the natural beauty" since for the spirit it
is necessary to develop its potentialities, whereas nature already has all
conditions determined and its laws are tough.
Thus, Hegel contradicts the current
opinion that "the beauty created by art would be inferior to the one of
nature," therefore also being contrary to the proximity of artistic beauty
to the nature; mimicking is not the greatest virtue of artistic beauty.
In this way, "we think we
can affirm that the artistic beauty is superior to the natural beauty because
it is a product of the spirit that by being superior to nature communicates
this superiority to its products, and therefore to the art;" the artistic
beauty being superior to the natural beauty.
Stigar affirms that in this
way the most beautiful creation emanates from the spirit because it is in it
that things are pure objects, perfect realities, and potentially organized
without previous conditioning or limitation of beauty.
In antiquity, the beauty is
treated by Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. Hippias Major is the dialogue that
more closely deals with the definition of the beauty in itself (auto to kalon), a trait that is common
to all supposedly beautiful objects. In the Symposium and Phaedrus, the problem
of the beautiful competes with the problem of love. The Symposium is largely
the search for a solution to the question: "Is Eros the love of the
beauty?"
Love is always a delusion
(mania) that leads us to the vision of the sensitive beauty ("Only Beauty
has the good fortune to be more perceptible and captivating!” Phaedrus, 250d).
In this dialogue, Socrates asks Agatha: "Don’t you think beauty is
simultaneously good?”
The dialogue is not
conclusive. Aristotle in Metaphysics already draws attention to the difference
between beauty and good: The good always implies action and beauty can be found
in motionless things. Aristotle then considers three higher forms of the
beauty: Order, symmetry, and limit; forms that mathematics demonstrates
especially.
Since symmetry is fundamentally related to the
plastic arts, Aristotle does not mention it in Rhetoric, where he returns to
the subject. Order lies in the formal structure of tragedy; the limitation
concerns the extent of the tragedy. These philosophical principles are applied to
literature in the Poetics: "The beauty
consists in greatness and order, and
57
therefore a tiny living
organism could not be beautiful; and also it would not be beautiful, overgreat."
One does not find in Aristotle, however, a systematic speculation about the
beauty.
In the Enneads, Plotinus also
briefly discusses the subject, questioning the idea that the beauty can be
measured by greatness and order. Plotinus still follows Plato and concludes
that such criteria only serve physical beauty ignoring moral beauty.
The beauty concept enters into the critique of
the work of art in partnership with the notions of taste, of balance, of
harmony, of perfection - effects produced in the subject of appreciation. It
seems to be a necessary condition to the emergence of the beauty feeling the
pleasure and/or sympathy feeling. The two main classical conceptions of the beauty
are present as "the one that pleases the vision and the ear" (Plato,
Hippias Major, and St. Thomas Aquinas).
The sublime is not only the
beauty raised to its highest level. In the same way, by analogy, the beauty is
not simply the beauty reduced to its most common expression. The sublime
demands the unlimited condition: It is sublime what escapes us in the immediate
judgment of the beauty. The sublime is what the imagination cannot stop; the
beauty is detrimental to imagination and is found in a finite object. The
beauty (and all the minority variants of the beauty such as the
gracious, the gorgeous, the
charming) is the beauty without greatness of limited kind.
The evaluation of an object in
terms of sublime, beauty, or beautiful is the most subjective of man's judicial
activities. Having brought such evaluation to the literature, it is not
accepted today that such attributes can be determined objectively for the
critical reading of the literary text. The Impressionist criticism that
dominated the 19th century may claim the contrary, but all the criticism
currents of the 20th century tend not to consider the merely
subjective judgments as acceptable in the appreciation of literary works of
art. 
The beauty only makes sense for the man, so it
has to be a category that is present in the Being of the man. But the beauty is
not determinant of the Being of all things for which it is directed. From what
we say that is beautiful, a judgment of value is drawn that affects the actual
existence of the object under examination. As Kant argues, in the Critique of
the Power of Judgment (I, 2), something is beautiful in function of a simple
subjective observation, not considering the existence that the thing has in itself.
Kant distinguishes the beauty from the good (which pleases through reason) and
the pleasant (which requires the acceptance of the senses).
The beauty results from a subjective reflection
about an object, without knowing what the object should be (unless we want to
determine if it is good), that is, a beautiful thing does not ask for a concept
about the thing itself.
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From this definition, Kant
deals with an important distinction: "There are two kinds of beauty: Free
beauty (pulchritudo vaga) and simply
adherent beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens).
The first presupposes no concept of what the object should be; the second
presupposes such a concept and the perfection of the object according to
itself. Flowers are free natural beauties. However, the beauty of a human being
presupposes a concept of the end that determines what the thing must be,
therefore a concept of its perfection, and is simply adherent beauty." (I,
16)
The later commentators of the beauty
seem to agree about the existence of two species of beauty. Hegel begins his
Aesthetic by soon distinguishing the artistic beauty from the natural beauty.
This second type of beauty (which is equivalent to Kant's "free beauty")
is left out of the aesthetic that should concern only the beauty created by
art.
It is the only way to bring
the concept of the beauty to the literary theory: The beauty of the literary
text is invariably an artistic one, although literature is a work of art. No
literary text can have a beauty such as the one of the Sun, which is absolute
and is not a product of genius.
Hegel defends the artistic
beauty as the only one with aesthetic interest. The artistic beauty is a
product of the spirit, so we can only find it in humans and in the works they
produce. According to Hegel, the Idea of good,
truth, and beauty complete
each other, because, in short, there is only one Idea. Everything that exists
contains the Idea. Aesthetics occupies itself first of all with the idea of
artistic beauty as ideal.
Hegelian aesthetics were
neglected in the 19th century overcome by the dominant psychologism. In Italy,
Francesco de Sanctis preserved Hegel's lesson and his successor, Benedetto
Croce, with Aesthetics as scienza
dell'espressione e linguistica generale (1902), rediscovers the idealist
vision of the beauty. Proposing the abolition of the frontiers between all the
arts and between all the literary genres, Croce defends the whole artistic act
like expression, origin of "lyricism." Although, while works of art
are forms of lyricism, they will always be art with aesthetic value.
In Marxism, Hegel's aesthetics
also encountered supporters. If the founders of Marxism only dedicated to the
problem of the beauty, contemporary authors like Lukács and Brecht have engaged
in the definition of artistic beauty as an expression of the social, working,
and creative man.
Aiming at the unity of the
true, the good and the beauty, the Marxist-Leninist aesthetic goes beyond the
work of art in search of the meaning of the beauty.
Every work of art is a
reflection of social consciousness. The beauty is not an absolute and untouchable
reality for the human: The beauty is
the result of human work accomplished in community.
59
Nietzsche was born in Germany
in 1844 and died in 1900. According to Martins, Nietzsche's aesthetic owes a
lot to the concept of voluntarism that Schopenhauer attributes. Art stands for Nietzsche
in essence and his creations form life. Hence the aesthetic phenomenon is
closely related to the existence of man and nature (and its relation to it).
"Man is no longer an artist; he has become a work of art: What is revealed
here in the shudder of drunkenness is, in front of the supreme voluptuousness
and appeasement of the original Unity, the artist power of the whole
nature." The artist in Nietzsche is an imitator. It imitates nature, but
expresses it according to the particular "artistic drives."
Martins also says that art
takes liberty, because it is not only an activity of the spirit, as Hegel saw
it. Nature will also be considered an artist, because it is creation, it is
life and death. "It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and
the world are eternally justified" (p. 61, The Birth of Tragedy)
The beauty for Nietzsche is what approves the world, what expresses the
most intimate of existence.
In the work of Nietzsche, Macedo writes (2008, p. 59):
Since human knowledge will finally find its religious expression in an
active knowledge of which the free and united humanity will be the only holder,
the set of these richly developed arts will find in the dramatic form, in the
splendorous humanity of the tragic, a point of unification full of meaning. The
tragedies will be the feasts of humanity. In them the strong, free and
beautiful man, free from all conventions, will celebrate the joys and sorrows
of his total surrender, and may then be worthy and sublime to fulfill with
death the great sacrifice dictated by love. (Wagner, Op. Cit., p.95)
Here we express all the
optimism of the young Wagner, as political activist, in the name of a new form
of art, an art that would affirm the aesthetic foundation of life, an art that
had its ultimate goal in the aesthetic beauty of existence, i.e., in the name
of a future work of art.
Nietzsche's aesthetic is a
continuation of the idea of Schopenhauer's "Will", and in "Birth
of tragedy" it is continually quoted. In this first moment, Nietzsche, under
determinant influences of Schopenhauer and Wagner, romantic
61
pessimist, values in the suffering of the human
existence the great artistic beauty.
For Antunes, the Apollonian principle is linked
to the concept of the beauty, of fair measure. Apollo is the god who imprints
limits and measures to things in time and space (MACEDO, Nietzsche, Wagner e a
Época trágica dos gregos, p.133). He would manifest himself especially in the
plastic arts, where the concern for the beauty and the fair measure impress on the
world the notion of beautiful appearance, as Nietzsche explains in "The
Birth of Tragedy":
Apollo, as god of the configurator powers, is the divinatory god at the same
time. He, according to the root of the name, the 'resplendent', the divinity of
the light, reigns over the beautiful appearance of the inner world of fantasy...
His eye must be 'solar', in accordance to its origin; even when he looks angry
and ill-tempered, the consecration of the beautiful appearance hangs above him.
(Nietzsche, BT, p.26)
Following this same observation, Nietzsche ends
up speaking of intuition early in the "Birth of Tragedy". It would be
a feature of aesthetics, something beyond the simple verification of what is
logical. This intuition would be something of the most subjective, born of the
essence of the individual.
The concept of intuition is closely related to
the question
of Schopenhauer's principium individuationis [the principle of individuality].
Therefore, in this case, the beauty is in the subjectivity, the so-called
aesthetic of subjectivity (Heidegger's observation). For Nietzsche it is more
important the intimate relation of the artist than the final product object.
Apollo and Dionysius are the two Greek gods that
Nietzsche invokes to determine the artistic creation and contemplation. The
product of this duality is the art and its origin is the will (supreme and
universal, as in Schopenhauer).
Apollo and Dionysius represent the two artistic
drives, and their relations have psychological foundations. With this,
Nietzsche manages to unite the aesthetic question with the ethics. Apollo is
the god of appearance; it is what gives to the unified form. This god refers to
the security of the equal and identifiable, at the same time that it prevents
the dive in the very being and in the self-knowledge of the passions and chaos.
Dionysius is the god of excess, the god of
renegade, it is nature manifesting in the wildest form, in its whole primordial
originality. As Macedo says: "Dionysus [...] still is the expression of
the will in its most immediate unity, it is the musical element of the world
that speaks of the being that has not been yet alienated in the forms of time,
space, and causality. It is the stripped nature of the veil of individuation,
reconciled with itself, with its deeper truth." (MACEDO, Nietzsche, Wagner, e a Época trágica
dos gregos, p.133)
62
The drive represents the
possibility of the relation of man in the world, because it is the order and
the measure, and it works as "shield" between the deepest and the
"perverse" of the human being, and culture. Apollo would be the god
of the plastic arts, and in half of the poetry, according to Nietzsche, because
it is represented by identifiable forms, i.e., it is submitted to some order.
Dionysus would be the god who
represents the most this romantic pessimism. He is represented by music, as
this form of art is not expressed through identifiable forms, it is a free art
purely manifested by the sensitive. Music is not attached to an aesthetic ideal
of form, of immediate significance; the beauty is totally related to the
sensitive.
In this drive, which corresponds
to a state of intoxication, imagination is free, free from the forms and
singularities guaranteed by the Apollonian drive. That is why the Dionysian is the
drive of destruction and of the new, which I say is the revolutionary drive,
because it understands exactly how man is in his time, without holding onto
beliefs or anything similar.
Nietzsche ends up attributing
to art a freedom only seen before with Kant. The beauty of art lies in its
materialization of human
existence. This happens because the force of "Will" (supreme and
universal) is at the origin of art. This will, which is plural, which does not
submit itself to standards, thereby guarantees an authentic representation of
human existence; this is what will make the Apollonian and Dionysian drives
work.
Analyzing art
after Nietzsche.
Recognizing an artistic freedom, affirmed through the recognition of the beauty
in the most intimate conditions of an individual, is a thought directly
connected with the current manifestations of art.
One might recall an artistic
movement which seems to seek precisely this revolutionary potential through the
Dionysian experience: The Dadaists, who possessed some object common to us, and
destroyed it in search of a new conception that was subjective and in which its
truth would depend on the free imagination of the artist and the spectator.
Nietzsche breaks
simultaneously with his earlier conception of Dionysism as an "aesthetics
of the sublime" and assumes a perspective of Dionysus as the god of an
aesthetic of the beauty and the affirmation of the sensible life. And in
"The Gay Science" of 1882, in the aphorism 276, it would appear the
fundamental principles of his new aesthetic, founded by the idea of amor fati, love to the destiny, love to
the beauty of the world simply as it is:
63
I want to learn more and more how to see what is necessary in things as
what is beautiful in them - thus I will be one of those who make things
beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love from now on! I do not want to wage
war against ugliness. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse the
accusers. And, all in all and on the whole: some day I want only to be a
Yes-sayer! (Nietzsche, GS, §276)
According to Antunes, in this
new phase of Nietzsche’s philosophical life, after the break with the
metaphysics, with the metaphysical conception of art, that is, after the break
with both Wagner and Schopenhauer, it is possible to perceive a more mature and
independent Nietzsche. Nietzsche would now have realized that to think about
the rebirth of tragic art in modernity would have been one of his major
theoretical mistakes of his youth, intoxicated by the metaphysics of
Schopenhaurian and Wagnerian artist. Hence, he assumes the perspective of love
to the reality as it simply is: Without hating or judging, a simple amor fati, love to the life as it really
is, and having art as the aesthetic expression of this beautiful and
affirmative life.
As was the surrealist movement
and its methods based on the science of psychoanalysis - the so-called free
association practices. This practice aimed at the liberation of form and
patterns in search of the truth of the individual in his most intimate state.
Martins analyzes that
esthetics is currently concerned with the issue of technology. The virtual
world is creating new possibilities, and technological art is taking care of
it. How to relate Nietzsche's aesthetics and the art that manifests itself in
this new time and space?
In fact there is a great
relaxation of the "form" and "appearance" of a subject when
it manifests itself in the virtual world; it does not assert itself to anyone,
it is anonymous, it feels free because it is impossible to be judged.
Technological art through the
virtual plays with this imagination. This "disinterested" of the
contemporary art refers to its aesthetic dimension that is little concerned
with content and form, but is concerned with maintaining the imaginary potential
of the viewer, so that it can freely contemplate. At this moment, what matters
is the process, this time of experimentation of the world, of contemplation.
64
Franz Brentano was a German
philosopher. He was born in 1838 and died in 1917. Franz Brentano was adept at
intentionality, which underlies one of the basic principles of his
act-psychology: The inseparability between idea and action to explain the
specificity of human conduct.
For this reason, he is
considered one of the founders of modern psychology emancipated from
philosophy. This assumption underpins the doctrine of psychoanalysis, the
psychology of Gestalt, and the cognitive-phenomenological psychology.
Like Aristotelian thought,
Brentano believes that the psyche belongs to the realm of Nature and, as such,
is part of the natural sciences. Further, his study is fundamental to attain
the complete truth of all animate or living beings: plants, animals, and humans.
At the very beginning of his
treatise, he states: "For these two reasons [the beauty and to attain the truth]
it is reasonable to consider the investigation or study of the psyche as first
order. Moreover, its study does indeed provide an important contribution to the
whole of truth and, in particular, to the study of Nature." (Aristotle,
1991, p. 105, 402a)
In the Aristotelian view, the psyche is defined as the principle of all
the functions or actions of all modalities of living beings. Here is how he
explains it: "At this point it is enough to remember that the psyche is
the principle (próte enérgeia) of all the functions just mentioned and is
defined by them, that is, by the faculties of nutrition, sensation, intellect,
and of the movement.” (Aristotle, 1991, p. 144, 413b)
Finally, in Aristotle's terms,
the psyche is defined as the principle of "individuation" or
realization of all the possibilities that each living being brings to the core
of its uniqueness: The entelechy [individuation] naturally occurs in what is possibly
a thing, that is, in the matter [condition] that is proper to it. In view of
the above, it is evident that the psyche is a certain entelechy and a form of
all the possibilities that dictates the singular nature of each being.
(Aristotle, 1991, p. 146-147, 414a)
67
Auguste Comte was born in
Montpellier in 1798 and died in Paris in 1857. In the period of 1817-1824 he
became a secretary to Count Saint-Simon, later renouncing this function for
disagreeing with the practical nature of the doctrine proclaimed by his chief.
In 1832 he was designated as a
mathematic and mechanics analysis repeater at the Polytechnic School of Paris,
where he was admitted as a student in 1814. In this school, Comte was
influenced by renowned intellectuals such as the physicist Sadi Carnot
(1796-1823), mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736-1813), and the
astronomer Pierre Simon de Laplace (1749-1827.
With the closing of the
Polytechnic School in 1816, Comte devoted himself to sociological, economic,
philosophical, and political studies in Paris: He read the works of Destutt,
Tracy (1754-1836), Pierre Cabanis (1757-1808), Count Of Volney (1757-1820),
Adam Smith (1723-1790), Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832), David Hume (1711-1776),
and William Robertson (1721-1793). But the author who most influenced him was
Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet (1743-1794), with his book
entitled “Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind.”
The moral
good will be elected with the advent of a perfect society. This is what Auguste
Comte says in his speech; for him man is a social being because the individual
does not exist.
It can only fulfill its
destiny and be happy by subordinating itself to the advent of perfect society,
which is the true end of human evolution and the ultimate term of progress.
None of the finite goods, taken one by one, can constitute the highest good.
Taken together, they could be enough to satisfy man's deep desires. But it is a
fact that no man owns or can possess at the same time the totality of these
goods.
Being intrinsically
unsatisfactory, one loses the hope of correcting their insufficiency for a
quantitative increase: They all share the fragility and relativity of the
particular goods they totalize.
Moreover, they are passengers and perishables.
Their possession and happiness
are accompanied by the anguish of having to abandon them one day. Nothing of
that can be the highest good, because no materialism is able to indicate to the
man an authentic highest good.
69
John Dewey was an American
philosopher and educator. He was born in 1859 and died in 1952. John Dewey
joined the university in 1875, graduated in 1879, and worked three years as a
secondary school teacher. In 1884 he obtained a PhD in Philosophy from Johns
Hopkins University in Baltimore and is hired as a professor at the University
of Michigan, becoming director of the Department of Philosophy.
He is liked by the students,
showing courtesy in class, and avoiding to impose his own points of view. John
Dewey became a philosopher, but his educational ideas were related to
pragmatism; as a philosopher one cannot dispense philosophical and educational
reflections, and on the pedagogical side, the valorization of the philosophical
aspect. In this meeting of knowledge it has to take into account the political
commitment, because for Dewey philosophy and education cannot be seen apart
from each other.
Philosophy provides tools for
the interpretation of social conflicts, and education proves the hypotheses
raised by it. For Dewey, man is born devoid of knowledge and as he gains
experience, he learns to be a man. Through the accumulation of this experience
and the development of his intellect, education promotes the understanding and
meanings of the elements around him, creating a relationship of reciprocity
between the individuals that surround him.
In his
continuous growth and development and his natural relation with human
experiences is where the democratic educational practices are oriented, in which,
according to Beltrán (2003:49):
Dewey did not understand democracy - and in this lies its original
contribution - as a government regime, but as a way of life and a permanent
process of liberation of intelligence. (2003:49)
This reaffirms that human
action must be based on the principle of reason, collective thought; our
intelligence is constituted in order to continuously develop, concretizing
through social interactions in the environment in which we are inserted.
The man is a
political being as man is always educating himself, therefore education is a
political action, so for Dewey: "Democracy is the name of this permanent
process of liberation of intelligence. The construction of
71
democracy can only be achieved
through education, and, therefore, it is necessary that the educational systems
are also democratic.” (2003:51)
Life and education, education
and life, is the only joint action that must always submit itself to a
reflexive control, without it, it will be mere reproduction of the existing
systems of the dominant social classes. However, the functional and intentional
education, as previously exposed, where responsibility should be assigned to
school institutions ensuring democratic principles enabling the integration of
communities into a continuous process of social reconstruction.
The School should provide a
particular environment to carry out social life experiences confronting
individuality with specific school contents, being the teachers trained for
intellectual initiative, discussion, and decision-making, thus breaking
pre-established concepts. For Dewey:
The
school is not a preparation for
life,
but it is life itself, purified; in
school
the student has to learn to
live. (Luzuriaga, 1971:249)
Thus, the school must teach
the concept of freedom, that the student learns to live in a continuous process
of valuing oneself and the other, that is, valuing human life.
The planet we live in is of
inexplicable origin and beauty, but debatable, the existing diversity, among
them the human presence, is presented by biology that demonstrates the
privilege of living beings that inhabits it, classifying animals as rational
and irrational. The responsibility of promoting knowledge and improving
conditions of survival lies with the human being through the use of reason. In
order to better understand the environment in which we live in, the
contribution of Eduardo Prado de Mendonça should be used as a base (1984,
p.14):
Man
is a rational animal, he cannot
act
without using his reason, and
when
he does not do it consciously
and
philosophically, he does it
thoughtlessly
and as a dilettante.
Man, as a thinking being, must
always be in search of the truth, indicating the revealed truth or in the
philosophy that induces us to the knowledge that comes closest to the truth. Therefore,
intellectual development goes through a process of education from
72
the most primitive of men to
the present day.
Education is an irreversible
process in the human community in providing a condition of relationship and
understanding among peoples, according to Luzuriaga (1971:1). He comments that:
The intentional and systematic
influence the youthful being with
the purpose of forming and
developing it. But it also means the
broad, generic action of a society
over the younger generations in order
to preserve and transmit collective
existence.
In this sense, without losing
its cultural heritage, the human being develops and integrates with the new
cultural and social behaviors that society presents to him.
The most distinguished
disciple of Dewey in Brazil is the educator Anísio Spínola Teixeira, one of the
most important idealizers of the new school, not of a pragmaticism, but of a
reflexive pragmatism that contributes to the Brazilian educational process, conceptualizing
"education as a reconstruction of experience," stating that all human
beings bring with
them experiences that will
help in their development, therefore: The universe is an infinite set of
elements that relate in the most diverse way possible. The multiplicity and
variety of these relations make it essentially precarious, unstable, and
compels it to perpetual transformation. (Teixeira in Dewey: 13)
With this brief report, we
understand the precariousness of man in the world, and in this same world in
constant and necessary evolution, the importance of a dynamic effort of man
himself to face the phenomena of the modern, democratic, and scientific world
is the element configured in the thought of John Dewey.
73
The general goal of this work is to contribute to the understanding of
the concept of the beauty and its evolution. The act of thinking constitutes
the inner essence of the spirit, and values the interpretation of art, because
this is born from the spirit and is guided by it.
We can say that the concept of
the beautiful has evolved over time. Beauty is in man, said the Renaissance.
Essentially in the process of construction from which human creativity is
appropriated. For the most part, the fruit of this creative process results in
what we call Art.
In the Greek world, the
dualism between the higher world, or world of the gods, and the lower world,
the one of temporal life, propelled the construction of the famous Greek
temples, which in their original aesthetics were an attempt to bring to the
human world the reflection of the world of the gods.
For several
centuries, art and the beauty were pure representations of nature, falsely
synthesized, according to Plato, by artists incapable of revealing a slight
resemblance to the world of ideas.
For many philosophers, the word is the first
step in the search of knowledge. The name ''philosopher'' was created by the
mathematician Pythagoras. He also conceived philosophical thought about the
order of things in the world explaining that the universe is composed of varied
forms and the search for the understanding of these forms coexists in both the
fields of philosophy and mathematics.
To conclude,
we can use the concept of the beauty for Hegel, in which he comments that, in
general, is the sensible representation of the Idea, which, in turn, is the
immediate unity of the concept in its different moments.
Hegel also comments that the beauty
is the first moment of self-consciousness of the absolute spirit. It is when,
for the first time, as we have seen, there is the elimination of the opposition
between subject and object, which allows the progression of overcoming the
alienation of the spirit that opposes itself.
The cultural is now stronger
than the beauty of the past based on the appreciation of the senses of the
natural. With this, the new abstractions materialize from the feeling and
reflecting, rather than only seeing.
As a visagist I constantly seek the
understanding of the beauty for the present moment, since consumerism does not
lead to happiness, but the adequate consumption of products that match with
each person is what makes it beautiful, attractive, and satisfied with its own
image.
Finally, we can confirm that the beauty, says
Kant, "is what pleases universally, unrelated to any concept."
Satisfaction is only aesthetic, however, when gratuitous and disconnected from
any subjective (interest) or objective (concept) end. The beauty exists as an
end in itself: It pleases the form, but it does not depend on the sensitive
attraction nor the concept of utility or perfection. In the aesthetic judgment
there is agreement, harmony, or synthesis between sensitivity and intelligence,
the particular and the general.
75
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I am sure that in a few years these drawings
will be the true references in images of these philosophers.
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