Beauty

3. Beauty as an intrinsic property

The simplest form of realism about beauty takes it to be an intrinsic or nonrelational property with strong de facto and de jure ties to love. For Plato and Plotinus it is a supersensible abstract Form, better exemplified by abstractions than by concrete particulars, and supremely exemplified by itself. Acquaintance with beauty begins in commerce with particulars, but only pure thought, on the model of mathematical and moral intuition and demonstration, can elevate the opinions gained through acquaintance to the level of knowledge. Though their theoretical framework does not by itself entail particular normative principles, Platonically-minded thinkers usually favour Apollonian values of order, clarity, harmony and balance as opposed to Dionysian values of profusion, sensuality and vehemence.

A basic question left unanswered by theories of this type concerns the nature of the property of beauty. Neither Plato nor Plotinus offer to identify the property of beauty, and in their writings it tends to acquire a mystical air, due to the obscure nature of its purer exemplars (the Forms) and the extreme breadth of its range. The latter makes it difficult to imagine how any nonrelational property could account for all the indicated sorts of beauty, and the difficulty is compounded by suggestions of a single, universal rank-ordering. Answers to such questions are hampered by the vagueness of theorists’ accounts of the relation between properties and their instances, which is especially acute if one takes literally Plato’s claim that the property of beauty is supremely self-exemplifying. Platonic ontology aside, citations of primary values such as the medieval triad of clarity, splendour and proportionality invariably omit to supply a working criterion of any of the three, or a summation rule to decide between things which differ in more than one of them.