Mediation of Beauty

So what about beauty? Is beauty mediated?

First of all, what is beauty? I don't really know, so I think I'm going to go with (Pseudo-)Dionysius: "καλός καλεῖ" - "Beauty" (kalos) "calls" (kalei). Beauty is that which draws us. Or, more properly, something that moves us as rational/spiritual creatures, since animals aren't called by beauty. (and the draw of beauty is something deeper than the draw a hungry man feels for a steak.)

But I think the way that beauty calls to us is only through a form of some kind. Beauty is itself a mediation. You can't have access to a pure beauty apart from its form! (in a non-loaded way - whether you think like Plato that beauty comes from participation of the Form of Beauty or like Aristotle that it's in the mind of the perceiver, you will have to admit that beauty does not come without some sort of "body").

Consider art. Remember when I talked about media as being opaque or translucent? I think the project of art seems to be trying to use a medium in the most transparent way possible. Think about literature: we can use volumes of words to describe concepts in philosophy, but the words can seem to be partially a hindrance to the meaning being conveyed, even while they're revealing other things. In poetry, however, you are using words specifically through their individual veilings and unveilings, to optimize their concrete character as words, to create a harmonic structure from their inbuilt network of meanings and senses. (for more on this see the later part of this post from the old blog.

I think this applies to visual arts and music too; we can use sound (voice) to communicate, or pictorial symbols to indicate things, but in normal contexts we use them in an abstracted way, just getting away with the bare minimum, as if we're constricted by the medium. But again, through art, we really focus on that particular medium and really focusing on using it as matter according to all the things it hides and reveals.

Let's illustrate with the example of sound. The sound of a human voice is a pile of sine waves of sound bouncing through our vocal tracts that add to each other to give the unique but periodic squiggle-wave of the individual human voice (since waves don't exist on top of each other, they meld together to make one wave: the peaks and valleys adding and canceling each other out until the pattern eventually repeats again). And, as intelligent beings, we use this combination of sound waves to communicate intelligible words.

Now, in music, we do not just take these waves as they are, and how they've added up their random periodic squiggles; we optimize the resonances - we put extra focus on the resonances of the different waves together until that they add up together into periodic *sine wave* motion; the result being that instead of just a spoken word, it is a sung word, it has a unified pitch with a series of harmonics within it. (Until we optimize the resonance, all the individual component waves kind of cancel out each other's order).

If you were able to follow my analogy, I congratulate you (and I grossly simplified it because I am only pretending to remember phonetics). What I am trying to say is that we have "media" floating around in the world, whether that be sound or matter or anything. Then we as human beings endow it with intelligibility, make it into a word, or a stop sign, or something, where its being-a-word or being-a-stop-sign is largely secondary to the meaning it is pointing to. In art, however, we put extra focus on how we can communicate through the particularities of this word, through its being-this-word, with these particular connections or this particular pronunciation; we find a way to make our meaning optimally resonate through this particular medium, so to speak. Or, perhaps we can phrase this better: something is art to the extent that it focuses on how the medium as a medium can optimally communicate to us (because a philosophical work can be artistic - von Balthasar, Marion, and Nancy are all very poetic, and so their form is rather artistic, even while this form is more secondary to their projects than it would be for someone with the primary intention of writing poetry).

One more fundamental distinction with this analogy: "finding the optimal resonance" of the medium isn't an intellectual calculating process - just like we don't calculate when we sing, it's more an intuitive connection that when these waves add up right, we sense it. There is hard intellectual work to be done in art, certainly, but the artistic thinking is more to sense or intuit where these resonances are strongest, because it's not something we have the ability to calculate.

So this was a lot of rambling: what have we said so far?
Art is a mediation that optimizes the mediating, or that makes the medium as transparent as possible by taking full advantage of the particularities as a medium. Art is a way of conveying beauty, truth, and goodness that is not even conceivable without a form - mediation is most proper to it.

And where were we going?
Beauty is fundamentally through mediation.

Let's throw it our test case: angels? Do angels appreciate beauty? Do angels know form? I don't know how to answer. Only that form must be more than physical - I know for myself I often find ideas quite beautiful (even like pure math - things that have no physical form). Thus, presumably, angels can have an appreciation of the beauty of non-corporeal form. But I don't think they would have art - art is still related to incarnation, and the enfleshment of ideas in some kind of physical form. Art relates to beauty, but not all beauty is art. (abstract mathematics can be beautiful, but it is not, strictly speaking, art)

Don't go looking for logical proof of this here; I am just exploring and sharing what seems right to me. But it seems to me, once again, that access to pure beauty without mediation of some kind if nonsensical.

Next up: the Incarnation (if I feel bold enough to speculate on something I am wholly unqualified to talk about...).