3 Beauty and form
Beauty, absorption, and pleasure
It has long been recognized that human beings find various visual and
auditory appearances to be deeply absorbing. Certain sunsets, flowers, bird-
songs, and beautiful bodies, among natural things, and certain pots, carvings,
vocalizations, and marked surfaces, among humanly made things, seem to
engage eye or ear together with attentive mind. In experiencing such things,
we feel we want the experience to continue for“its own sake,”at least for
some further time. Greek uses the phraseto kalon–the fine, the good, or the
beautiful–to describe many sorts of things that are attractive to mind and
eye or ear, without sharply distinguishing natural beauty from artistic merit
(or moral goodness). In theSymposium, Socrates reports that the priestess
Diotima once instructed him in how“a lover who goes about this matter
correctly must begin in his youth to devote himself to beautiful bodies,”^1 first
loving one body, then many (as he comes to understand that they are alike in
beauty), next beautiful minds, beautiful laws and customs, beautiful ideas
and theories, until finally he will come to love“the Beautiful itself, absolute,
pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colors or any other great
nonsense of mortality.”^2
It is natural to think of the affording of such experiences as a central aim
of art. Many artists seem to seek to engage and entrance eye or ear and mind.
They monitor and revise their products–rearranging colors, shapes, notes,
words, or postures–with a view to deepening the product’s affordance of
(^1) Plato,Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis, IN: Hack-
ett, 1989), 210A, p. 57.
(^2) Ibid., 211E, p. 59.
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