Beauty

Is it true that all people are beautiful? Or is that just a white lie we tell to make non-beautiful people feel better?

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Of course it isn't true! Just walk down the street with your eyes open ... Most of us just don't make it in the beauty stakes. Most of us are just very ordinary -- not even quirkily striking. Tough, but that's life.

Thankfully, beauty isn't everything, and with luck we get by. We non-beautiful people even manage to hook up with other non-beautiful people (or at least, that's how it usually goes, though as the poet Robert Graves remarked, beautiful girls can have strange tastes in men ...), and the world rattles on and gets populated all the same.

It would quite be as daft to seriously pretend that we are all beautiful as to pretend that we are all very athletic, all very smart, or indeed all very nice. We're not. And just as telling someone dumb that they are smart does them no favours, telling someone particularly plain and pasty that they are beautiful won't make them feel better (they can see what is in the mirror and now have a deluded or lying friend too).

Is there any kind of philosophical point to be made hereabouts? Well, a term like "beautiful" is there in the language to draw distinctions, precisely to mark off some things (whether sunsets, flowers, or people) from other things (other sunsets, other flowers, other people). But there is a question whether we should care about the distinction, or whether we should rest much on which side of the distinction someone falls. We might well think that, in the wider scheme of things, we shouldn't rest much on it, and certainly not as much as our looks-obsessed culture does. And if we think that, then we might -- as a rhetorical device -- say "we are all beautiful" as a kind of protest against allowing importance to the distinction between superficial appearances (for if we are all beautiful, the distinction can indeed do no discriminatory work). But the protest is striking and gives us pause for thought as a slogan precisely because it is literally false.

I could not agree more with Peter's point about the down side of being preoccupied with who looks beautiful or more beautiful than others. But I might add that I think the topic of beauty or even the reality of beauty is important. Though a neglected topic for much of the 20th century, the topic made a re-bound in the latter part of that century (Iris Murdoch, Guy Sircello, Mary Mothersill) and today (see On Beauty by Elaine Scary). And it is becoming more appreciated as an important factor in ethics, especially environmental ethics. See the anthology From Beauty to Duty which includes attention to the ethical implications of our aesthetic appreciation of nature (e.g. if we find a wilderness area beautiful, chances are we will see its destruction for short term economic gains as ugly and morally objectionable).

So, are all people beautiful? I agree (quite reluctantly) with Peter. But consider a different question: Would the flourishing and well being of all people be beautiful? Of course we would need to clarify notions of "flourishing" and "well being," but, off hand, I think this would be something beautiful, a state worthy of our deep aesthetic delight, and also a worthy state to hope and work for (and maybe even pray for). Consider yet another question: Can any person become beautiful? Perhaps not, given our cultural standards of what counts as beautiful, but there is a tradition from Plato to Max Scheler to Roderick Chisholm that to love the good is itself something beautiful. On this view, if any person can love what is good, there is (at least to that extent) a sense in which any of us can be beautiful.

Check out the book On Beauty. It is a beautiful book.

Just to be contrarian, let me perhaps disagree with what my colleagues have said.

It seems likely that the term "beautiful" is what philosophers call "context-sensitive". That is, what it means varies from case to case. The simplest examples of such words are "I", "you", "here", and the like, but most of us have come to the conclusion in recent years that most expressions of natural language exhibit some degree of context-sensitivity. For example, quantifier words, like "all", seem to do so. The sentence "Everyone is on the bus" certainly need not mean that absolutely everyone is on the one and only bus in the universe. What it means clearly varies from case to case.

The same seems to go with "beautiful", and in two respects. One is that "beautiful" is a scalar adjective, like "tall", in that it accepts modifiers like "very". And, like "tall", how beautiful something has to be to count as beautiful tout court will vary from case to case. That might make it possible truly to say "Everyone is beautiful", but that would be because the standard of beauty had been set low enough in that context that everyone met it. That need not be absurd, but isn't likely to be what the questioner had in mind.

A second way in which "beautiful" is context-sensitive is that the respect in which a thing is supposed to be beautiful can vary from case to case. If I say that something is beautiful, I do not in any way have to mean that it is physically beautiful. Music can be beautiful, for example. Surely people can be beautiful in other than physical ways, too. That is, to borrow from Charles, there can be things about people that are "worthy of our deep aesthetic delight" that have nothing to do with their exterior appearance. So, if I say, "Mahatma Ghandi was a beautiful human being", then that can very well be true. Note, moreover, that, if I say, "All of these things are beautiful", they need not all be beautiful in the same respect. Some of them could be visually beautiful, some audibly beautiful, some morally beautiful, etc.

It follows, it seems to me, that there is no linguistic or conceptual obstacle to our uttering "Everyone is beautiful" and speaking truly. Suppose one thinks that there is something about every person that is beautiful. For example, one might think that every person carries a spark of the divine (i.e., in an older language, "is made in the image of God"), and it is hard to imagine what might be more beautiful than that. Then one could say, "Everyone is beautiful", and speak what one took to be the literal truth. And even if one did not think that, perhaps one might think that, for each person, there is something about them that is beautiful. Then I am not sure about this, but I think one could say, "Everyone is beautiful", and mean precisely that.

None of that tells us whether everyone is beautiful, of course, and it does not mean, either, that there are clear senses in which everyone is not beautiful.

The term "beauty" has another feature that is probably also relevanthere, namely, that it seems to have a clear "perspectival" use, like"delicious". If Bob says, "Okra is delicious", and I say, "Okra tasteslike dirt", then there seems to be some sense in which we are not(really?) disagreeing. Philosophers of language have been much interested in such expressions recently, but my point here is that "beauty", at least in some of its uses, seems to be similar.So if someone says to his lover, "You are beautiful", perhaps that canbe true even if most people would not consider the lover beautiful. But that's a very large topic in itself.

My colleagues raise a number of points, some rather puzzling, which deserve more that there is space for here. But some quick reflections:

1. Love of the good, to take Charles's example, may be a fine and noble thing. But something surely can be fine and noble without being beautiful. In fact, by my reckoning, both Charles and Richard seem to be prepared to stretch "beauty" and "beautiful" in ways I don't find at all natural or helpful (I'm wickedly reminded of the old hippie all-purpose "beautiful, man!" when Richard talks of Ghandi). They both seem to think being "worthy of our deep aesthetic delight" is ipso facto sufficient for being beautiful.

Well, in so far as I understand the phrase, I would have thought that the Grosse Fuge, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Titian's The Flaying of Marsyas, and King Lear are, if anything is, worthy of our deepest aesthetic delight. But it would seem a quite inept response to describe any of those as beautiful. The list could be greatly extended. Much that is worthy of great aesthetic delight is not particularly beautiful. Beauty is one (albeit it major) aesthetic virtue among many.

So even if there are indeed qualities of people other than perceptible ones (like looks, gracefulness, voice) that can be "worthy of aesthetic delight" it doesn't follow that they are qualities that make for beauty properly so called.

I suppose Charles and Richard could say that e.g. a great performance of King Lear which drains the audience doesn't engender 'delight', and want to anchor the notion of delight in ideas of aesthetic enjoyment. And making that link might indeed help them in tying the notion of the beautiful back to what is worthy of aesthetic 'delight'. But at the same time, this wouldn't seem to chime at all with their talk of e.g. finding moral character beautiful -- as contemplating someone's morals doesn't seem to give rise to aesthetic delighted enjoyment. At least, not in me.

2. Richard is right that "beautiful" is context-sensitive. But that is consistent with there being a default context in play when (like the original questioner) we ask, straight out, without special indications, whether someone is beautiful. There is a difference between asking, in a default context, whether everyone is beautiful, and asking whether for everyone there is some respect/some context in which they count as beautiful. I don't believe the latter is true either, but even if it were, it wouldn't affect one's response to the former.

3. I'm a bit baffled by Richard's "one might think that every person carries a spark of the divine … and it is hard to imagine what might be more beautiful than that". For I find it difficult to understand what it could mean to say that having such a spark makes a person beautiful. For in so far as I can understand "carries a spark of the divine" it is a claim about potentialities, about what (given the fortune of circumstance, at any rate) we are capable of becoming. But can a potentiality be beautiful? What is beautiful, or otherwise, is surely what is actual. Having a potentiality to be beautiful in God's image is not itself a way of being beautiful, any more than having a potentiality to be wise is itself a way of being wise. (Even if you want to say -- not that I would -- that the fact that a person has a divine spark is beautiful, man, that wouldn't make the person beautiful.)

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