Having noted the existence of those who no longer hear the voice of beauty, let’s abandon them. Let’s think about something else, about the power of the experience of beauty itself, which can be profoundly moving or even somewhat paralyzing when we realize that our inclinations are so different from what stands before our eyes. We thus possess a unique sense of detecting our own inner imperfection and a certain alienation: we become alien to ourselves in the experience of beauty, sometimes in a sublime way, when we become aware of the ideal, but sometimes too painfully. Plato presented a vision of how to remove this alienation in his dialogue The Symposium. In this vision, Eros draws the entire being of an individual towards an ever-fuller union with what is beautiful, and this happens through the discovery within oneself of the same idea that makes people and things beautiful.
In a memorable scene from one of the masterpieces of American cinema, An Affair to Remember, from 1957, Terry McKay and Nickie Ferrante meet on the deck of a ship in the evening, after a fateful day that revealed their feelings for each other. Terry has tears in her eyes. To Nickie’s concerned protest, she replies, ‘Beauty does that to me’. Beauty is deeply moving, but what does this actually mean? In the excellent commentary on the dialogue contained in chapter IX of book III of Werner Jaeger’s Paideia, we read about Plato’s greatest discovery in this matter: his demonstration of the duality of the force – here called Eros – that causes some to acquire qualities that make them desirable, loved and sought after by others, while others acquire the capacity and power to love. In his dialogue, Agathon describes this first side of Eros:
In Agathon’s view, Eros is the happiest, most beautiful and best of all the gods. He is young, charming and delicate, residing only in places where everything blooms and smells fragrant. […] he possesses all the virtues: justice, moderation, courage and wisdom.
[Trans. MP]
Socrates, however, who sides with the lover of beauty, lucidly notes that anyone who has loved beauty and feels attracted to it clearly does not possess it but desires it. And it is precisely this understanding of Eros that is the decisive force for Plato: it transforms the individual, instilling in them the pursuit of a certain ideal, not through the acquisition of beauty, for this is impossible, since Plato’s starting point is the beauty of the body, the physical movement of the voice or gesture, but through the contemplation of the idea of beauty. In it, one sees the realization of beauty first in sensual forms, in beautiful beings whom one admires, and then, climbing that famous Platonic ladder, one sees oneself in an increasingly general form, encompassing the beholder themself. This contemplation is a paradoxical appropriation of what lies outside, admired but unpossessed, as if otherworldly. In this way, everyone can and should share in Beauty; indeed, only then is it worthy of attention. Otherwise, it would be merely a random configuration of qualities acting on others as a cause, a stimulus, an urge rather than a force shaping their own being. Pascal’s famous remark resonates here: ‘If Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been different’. Indeed, Cleopatra’s beauty was a key factor in three pivotal turning points in the history of Rome and Egypt at that time, but this was not the effect of beauty that Plato had in mind, nor is it the beauty that underlies the intuition that beauty is linked with the good in the world of ideas.