Beautiful Forms and Protean Minds

"... so does the stream of beauty, passing through the eyes which are the windows of the soul, come back to the beautiful one ..."

~ Plato, Phaedrus

"Apart from self-knowledge, one of the most notable examples of intuition is the knowledge people believe themselves to possess of those with whom they are in love: the wall between different personalities seems to become transparent, and people think they see into another soul as into their own. Yet deception in such cases is constantly practised with success; and even where there is no intentional deception, experience gradually proves, as a rule, that the supposed insight was illusory, and that the slower more groping methods of the intellect are in the long run more reliable."

~ Bertrand Russell, "Mysticism and Logic"

Those blessed few that still read quality works of literature are surely aware of Plato's reflections on love in the Symposium, where he has Socrates explain the ascent form purely physical passion to the highest love, which we may call the erotism of the Intellect [I borrow the term "erotism" from Georges Bataille, who used it to refer to any passion productive of ecstasy, more or less]. Since the trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty was for Plato the highest level of contemplation (theōria) to which one may attain -- and since this trinity is fixed, stable, and eternal -- it goes without saying that operations of the Intellect cease at the moment this rapturous event occurs: union with that triune source of All. The thinking self need fear no disappointment, for there is nothing illusory about a purely noetic form, or Idea (according to Plato).

But then there are those non-Platonic folks (most of us, nowadays, I daresay) inclined to agree with Wallace Stevens, when he writes that "Beauty is momentary in the mind — / The fitful tracing of a portal; / But in the flesh it is immortal. / The body dies; the body’s beauty lives ("Peter Quince at the Clavier" IV.51-54). Indeed, the physical beauty of the beloved lives because it has passed through the eyes of the lover ("fitful portal") to be rendered back as a reality for both. (Is this not the theme of Shakespeare's Sonnets?) There is a type of mysticism in both the Platonic and the Stevensian notions of beauty and the love it inspires ... It is a mysticism of the momentary: the moment that is so sublime, it produces in the one experiencing it a sort of painful awareness of the ephemerality of all things, even (and especially) the most precious. Therefore, the desire to preserve that moment takes precedence over all rational thought, analysis goes out the window, and self-awareness takes a backseat to the instant fulfillment provided by that intuitive response which, as Russell pointed out, is so powerful precisely because it is so immediately convincing. The truth of beauty resides in the fact that we don't need ever to decide what is beautiful: the eyes are fixed, the heart pounds, the loins spring to life ... Who wants to engage in rational analysis at such a moment? Presereve it as something sacred! Worship it and sacrifice the self and its desires on the altar of the Other ... This happens to everyone, from concupiscent high school students to gently smoldering septuagenarians. We never learn. But would we have it any other way?

Back to Plato. "Know thyself" was inscribed on the lintel of his famous Academy. It is rather paradoxical that the highest achievement of his philosophical system (and he did have a system; cf. my Plato (Humanities Insights), 2010) was a merging of the self or person (hupostasis) with the transcendent source of All. To know thyself as such is to know oneself as a momentary spark of life, close to an illusion. To borrow a line from the late Lou Reed, "something flickered for a minute, then it vanished and was gone." He was referring to an orgasm, of course ... and Plato might as well have likened the human person to a spurt of cosmic seed -- albeit on infertile (illusory!) ground. Demeaning the self to such an extent, just to preserve the sacred fixity of our desire's object, is a rather large price to pay for "spiritual" comfort, or, more accurately, lack of disappointment with this coterie of desperate organisms we call human life.

Cold and calculating (inhuman!) is the one who analyzes every emotion, and beats him/herself up if that emotion doesn't pass the test of reason and logic. Such a one is doomed to an endless cycle of self-doubt, lukewarm friendships, and mechanical sex. Of course, such a one (assuming any such creature exists) will rarely, if ever, be disappointed; but the price is loss of those experiences that engender the tumultuous and conflicted and ever-generating work of art we call the human person.

The pain of having been deceived by one we love can be assuaged in several ways, the most common being the stock phrase "I never knew you!" (or "You are not the person I thought you were!"). When we say such a thing, we are practicing self-deception. The beloved was the "apple of our eye," the "cat's pajamas," the "bee's knees," etc. ... But then something happened, something changed -- and change, for a Platonist, is the worst lapse of all, for it is a lapse into non-being, or illusion -- and the person we love(d) is no longer t/here. Reason kicks into high gear, and allows us to explain this change as not really a change at all, but a coming-to-light (aufklärung) in the clearing of which our own self-deception (due to our failure to rationally analyze the emotion as it arose) is seen to be the cause of our disappointment. It is not the beloved who is at fault (even though s/he might be a charred imp of the pit) but our own fallible self. We promise ourselves, going forward, to be more rational in our dealings with beautiful forms and protean minds.

In the present age, filled as it is with willful superficiality, one is left to ask how reason might continue to speak. Intuition, even, is being dulled by the aimless flux of digital media and knick-knack "information." Heraclitus' river, at least, flowed steadily in a single direction. Certain catch-phrases now current, such as "It is what it is," or "Life on life's terms," indicate to me a separation of the self from the concrete reality in which it dwells. Many among us have become observers, though not with loving eyes -- nor even with bitter, resentful eyes -- but rather with indifferent eyes ... and that is far worse. An excessive emotional affectibility is preferable to the insensibility of the average non-poetic clone of our time. The best one can do is allow reason to make excuses for the volatility of one's nature, and to continue to yearn for and love beauty, in the flesh, and live a life of the mind that provides excuses, conceals sorrow, and shows forth only the best.