On 3 June 2026, we engaged in a nearly 2-hour conversation concerning beauty. A few highlights, conclusions, and elaborations:
1. Beauty is necessarily encountered first through the senses. It is also, in our experience as human, always connected somehow to a sensory experience, even if the object greatly exceeds what sense alone can provide. Mathematics, for instance, provides an object primarily removed from sensation but which finds or demands completion in some one or another symbolic representation.
2. The experiencing of beauty proceeds through a drawing-out-towards completeness. There is a twofold kind of “drawing” which occurs in the beautiful. First, this is of the person experiencing it into the object of beauty. Literally, this is a seduction, a se (itself) ducere (leading into). Second, this is of the relation accomplished between observer and object. We see this drawing out of the person in the attraction to the object, the captivation or fascination by it. We see the relation accomplished inasmuch as the person comes to know the object, and to see in it more than the object itself possesses. This is why the beautiful work of art or nature has an inexhaustibility to it: it affects the opportunity for truths to be realized which in some sense remain only virtual; opportunities beyond the intention even of the artist in creating it.
3. Intellectual understanding is often necessary to appreciate beauty. As an example, moves or plays in games or sports—precisely as actions within those games or sports—require an understanding of the rules to be fully appreciated. That is, we might admire the physical competence without knowledge of the sport, but to appreciate a performance, we must know something of the rules by which it was constrained and within which bounds it was accomplished. So too, paintings may be beautiful simply by their color and composition, but an ability to “read” the painting will, generally speaking, greatly enhance one’s ability to perceive the beauty therein.
3. The object experienced as beautiful is always beheld, never possessed. This can be seen in the way we use the predicative adjective, “beautiful” of sensed objects: they are seen, heard, perhaps at times smelled, but never touched or tasted. To be seduced, the object must be at some distance from us. Objects of taste and touch may be enjoyed, and they may elicit imagined desires for future sensory experiences that could be called beautiful as imagined; but “beauty” seems always to be at a distance from the one experiencing it.
4. Beauty moves powerfully—and thus can be dangerous. To be beautiful necessitates a certain goodness, but the seductive draw of the beautiful can be away from the good. What has a proportion and a fittingness in itself may elicit a desire that is disproportioned and unfitting in another. For instance, my neighbor’s wife may be beautiful—well proportioned in bodily frame and face—but for admiration of beauty, in this case, to turn into desire for intimacy is most certainly not good. Desiring to possess the beautiful is to conflate it with the good; but the good, properly and rightly discerned, is always perfective of us. Beauty is not.
5. Ugly things may be beautiful, if seen rightly—but this is not “subjective”. If we look at some paintings—say, by Picasso, Salvador Dali, Hieronymus Bosch—we may see things unpleasing to the eye; distorted music may grate against the ear. And yet, rightly-arrayed ugliness tends to draw our attention in much the same way as the beautiful. The disproportioning may signify to us something beyond the surface of the work. It thus belongs to a greater whole within which it may yet serve a proportionate role. We can see this in fiction and cinema perhaps particularly well.
There is much more to be said about beauty. Two hours proves a surprisingly short time. Perhaps we will revisit the topic again in the future, with a more focused point of discussion.
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