11 On Beauty and Pleasure

In my readings of Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights (ca. 150AD) I stumbled upon a citation of the Greek master thinkers  Chrysippus of Soli (one of the founders of the Stoic School) with the title On Beauty and Pleasure. Beauty and Pleasure were two essential values in the ancient world and are (or have become) equally so today. For do beauty and pleasure not play an essential role in our everyday lives, especially when we don’t even notice?

Does not pleasure, in the form of consumption and consuming, occupy the first place in our hierarchy of values? And what about the consuming of human bodies? (that probably has to come into the picture now!) Consumption to the enjoyment of beauty? I don’t wish at all to inquire after the beauty of the body or of objects, of clothes or other articles that you desire, after your muscles (sorry), hairstyles, language, your intellect as well … but your are already at it, indulging in this kind of mental bodybuilding, so that this general atrophy of the mind doesn’t gain the upper hand (sorry) and smother us all. – But enough of that, I hear your rather disgruntled pleas. Indeed, that’s enough of that. A change of key!

What is pleasure, aside from consumption? The Latin root “sumere” means something like “expend,” “eat [something] up,” or “take upon [oneself];” while “con” means “together, with someone.” Thus, to “expend, eat, or take upon oneself” something together with someone. Consumption thus satisfies primarily (ideally not exclusively) sensual needs. And yet, what is expended or used up during sex? Until, at the end, nothing remains? What is no longer there? Possibly our lust- and pleasure-organs, not to speak – as in the manner of craftspeople – of “tools”?
There is probably also intellectual pleasure, perhaps inexhaustible and not so readily expended. Good art evidences itself to the extent that it does not age (or if it does, then only a little). Something new may always be found, discovered, deciphered.
For example: even right now, if you don’t just read these lines to find terms for understanding the world or reality as a whole, but rather also to amuse yourselves over stylistic nuances in the language, or subtle humor. And is not joy also a function of pleasure?
Can you also enjoy suffering, melancholia, thunder and rain, bodily pain and passion? Probably that as well. Pleasure thus includes both intellectual and bodily faculties. And it does not seek out joy exclusively.
Yet whether you can simply consume a text with linguistic dissonances, barbs, tripwires, and ensnarements, I’d venture to disbelieve. With consumption, the attribute “rapid” is usually attached, or concomitantly imagined. Consumption is fast. Yet thinking, that stagnant thinking, deliberation, rumination, rethinking and reflection, is slow.
Would not thinking thus be the antithesis of consumption? Hardly. For both are possible. There is thinking full of relish and consumption bereft of spirit. There is listless thinking and lustful consumption. Desire and Spirit, Thought and Consumption and Pleasure all together. Everything goes!

Michael Foucault, an important mentor of French philosophy, a man of intellect and physicality, brought his torture and bondage instruments all over the world on his lecture tours, so that he might – after stressful thinking and speaking engagements – enjoy himself in the manner and company of his peers. The affair was brought to light by a customs inspection in Japan. One of his disciples dedicated a book shortly before death (of both of them), “to the man who didn’t save my life” (probably because he had unprotected sex). And Kant, the great master thinker of the Enlightenment, Intellect, and Reason, is said to have masturbated daily.

Yet how should I now find the transition from masturbation, a rather unappetizing affair I think (or not), back to beauty? Very easy! Beauty is also connected to lust, and lust to pleasure. After Plato (Phædrus, I’ll be coming back to speak about this book again and again), beauty seeks to create beauty in the beautiful.1 But here I must disappoint you: I’m not going to speak concretely about beautiful women and masculine seduction from time to time, but rather hold myself to the admittedly broad realms of classical abstraction. With the idea of “beauty” for example, to beauty as an intellectual abstraction.

To create, and to be creative, requires that beauty which we desire. And desire can be intellectual as well as physical. And yet the Classical god of creating, Eros, was not originally a god of the intellect, and certainly not of reason. Rather, one of the body. For his mother was the goddess of love, Aphrodite, his father the god of war, Mars – Love and Creation, creative invention as well, are associated with tenderness and beauty as well as power, violence, and desire. And in the vicinity of the god of love were such unsavory figures as Pan, the Nymphs, and Satyrs. The great master Dionysus held it all under his sway, in order to attain his Mysteries and Ecstasies.
Now creating in general is always linked with desire, even in the creative act. And if you’re in love, regardless if it’s with notes, words, or people, you love the beautiful. Even if the beautiful seems ugly to other eyes.

I’ve already spoken about the confusing isosthenia of general terms, especially of ideas.
Yet what function does desire have in the dichotomy between beauty and pleasure? Is intellectual desire curiosity, the drive towards knowing, to truth, awareness, thence that longing for those ideas planted in us by the god Eros, to carry within ourselves?
Bodily desire acts in accordance with the preservation of self and species, of which the latter, according to some anthropologists, is in the foreground (even though we might not know it). Now the preservation of species no longer necessarily coupled to desire; just the opposite. Desire was distilled out from the system for preservation of the species, at the latest since the discovery of contraception, and now enjoys an autonomous life, does it not? and need not concern itself any further with pregnancy, or even just with sex.

Yet why is there beauty? Only for the preservation of species? An attractive Person is only thus attractive because he or she wishes to reproduce beauty, that reproduction must preserve the species? Good: the many pretty young people in the flower of their youth, if you look at it that way … They have only one thing on their minds, fun and enjoyment and pleasure … Does this beauty always want to be “enjoyed”? That is, must it always be taken in with the senses?

Is there also an intellectual; that is, also a “non-sensual” beauty? According to Plato, certainly. Even the love for a beautiful person should lead to pure intellectual love as idea, thus as something godlike-noncorporeal, and not to the body. Love of the body is primitive, animal-like. Like every other kind of feelingness certainly human, but not always beneficial. This idea is taken up from Christianity and heralds the struggle against the general aggressiveness of mankind. In Plato’s model of the State there was a small niche for selected persons, who were only responsible for the preservation of the species. Hitler is generally known to have attempted to imitate this model with his breeding and Lebensborn experiments.2

The ideas of Truth, Beauty, and Uprightness are godly attributes according to Plato, representing the idea of the good, and they remain supratemporally valid and abiding. What then, if language dies out, if Plato’s thoughts, and those of many of his followers, are no longer read, can no longer be understood? Are we not already there?
In the philosophy of science one reads of a felicitous (“beautiful”?) “theoretical architecture;” in mathematics of consummated sums and beautiful structures together with their visualizations. There still exists thus, at least in this area of the natural and hard sciences, the idea of the beautiful.

Yet this beauty always brings with it the bodily sensation of joy, and joy is a sensation, a feeling. And feelings derive from pleasure, and intellectual feelings cannot exist: they would be inherently self-contradictory.
The social functions of Truth and Uprightness are understandable. But beauty, if no longer used for continuation of the species: what is it good for? Plato would answer: to lead us to the highest ideal, the idea of the Good. In the beautiful we encounter the godly purely intellectually. Merely wishing to enjoy this godliness would be sacrilege. (The brief sexual encounter, the “one night stand,” remains for some a sacrilege to some contemporaries for this reason). The materialists and Marxists say: beauty is good to keep the cash registers ringing and to consent freely to that servitude to which the money-makers of this world have enjoined us. In the best case without our noticing. All should be as self-evident. Ruled by unknown powers, who are themselves unequipped to philosophize over the meaning or purpose of beauty, because they no longer can or will understand its language.

The daily lipstick, the wet shave, hair gel, holes in your punk-jeans, or muscle training let us abandon ourselves to compulsion and obey it: compulsions directed from outside of us, making us happy because pleasure is in force, bodily pleasure.
We stand before the mirror of the almighty omnipotence of which we have convinced ourselves, and attempt to scrub it from ourselves, as is the manner. Why, and for whom? Indeed, only for ourselves. For Narcissus only loved himself. As it was no longer a question of finding a partner, or continuing the species (more on that later), but rather only of being loved, admired, desired, we subjugate ourselves to any compulsion, so long as at is public and publicized, and can be filmed. For this defines our new ideal of beauty: one based on the screens of our mass media, on being recognized, photocopied, and posted who-knows-where, and who knows by whom, or by what means, or why.

Just as now. My thoughts are sent out to persons and parts unknown. You don’t know me and I don’t know you. (sigh). Oh, even I’m going around in circles that I’ve chosen for myself. On top of that, I belong to that very circle, which I would challenge. Thus we find ourselves in a labyrinth in which the Minotaur we mean to battle has not once been glimpsed. He cleverly keeps hidden. And Ariadne’s thread, which should lead us back out to freedom, is lost.
But that’s enough for today: thanks again for reading and thinking along!

PS- I’ll attach the bibliography from Chrysippus (282–209BC), so that you have some insight into how one occupied oneself intellectually in earlier times, and where we stand today. Only a few of the questions therein are comprehensible to us today, let alone the answers. The books of this Greek philosopher are lost to us.
Only the bibliography remains in Diogenes Laërtius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, written in the 3rd century AD.
PPS- Unfortunately it’s not yet possible with the current equipment.
1 A word of caution: the term “beauty” is usually used for the ancient Greek kalon, which carries numerous meanings in Plato’s writing that do not directly overlap with those of the modern-day “beauty.” While occasionally being used to refer to attractiveness or pleasantness – as, for example, when Socrates refers (Phædrus 230b) to a welcoming tree – it is used more frequently to refer to noble attributes of courage or comportment, and thus carries an ethical meaning clearly distinct from the æsthetic. Purely physical beauty of an erotic type is furthermore usually described with the related word kallos, which Plato uses much more sparingly. Distilling what Plato might have thought about the modern term “beauty” is thus a fraught undertaking. See below, and also the relevant article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
2 The Nazi “Lebensborn” (literally, “fount of life”) organization was a subsection of the SS that sought to increase the “Aryan” birth via extramarital relations of persons classified as “racially pure and healthy” based on Nazi racial hygiene and health ideology. Lebensborn encouraged anonymous births by unmarried women, and mediated adoption of these children by likewise “racially pure and healthy” parents, particularly SS members and their families. From the relevant Wikipedia article.

translated by N.Andrew Walsh