Why should the student of politics be apprised of the beautiful? This question is answered perhaps obliquely in the Nicomachean Ethics, where the Aristotle remarks that of the four fundamental questions of the study of politics, one is the enquiry into what is “noble [kalon] and just” (NE 1144a12). But this very word, kalon, is the root of much debate, sometimes with acerbic overtones in academic settings that seem otherwise to be bereft of sharp rivalries and accusations and allegations of utter and complete incomprehension of the object, or in this case, the word being examined. Today, I shall endeavour to write about the word ‘kalon’ despite my utter and total lack of Greek, ancient or modern; with this goes any apologies that must be rendered for coming off as a total tool. The question that we are faced with is simple: why is kalon rendered in translations the way it is: varyingly, as noble, just, or good, or nothing but beautiful? Can we truly remove from the scope of Aristotle’s ethical and political thought any concern with aesthetics, and, if this being the case, is such an artificial separation detrimental to how we conceive of politics in practice and thought?
Perhaps the strongest statement in favour of reconsidering the role of kalon as the beautiful comes from Joe Sachs, who holds no punches when he points out that “the word the translators are afraid of is to kalon, ‘the beautiful’.”[1] The argument Sachs makes for translating kalon in more aesthetic terms relies on a recreation of the original circumstances in which its contemporary aesthetic counterpart, the beautiful, is used, and how seeing it in such a light advances our understanding of Aristotle. Sachs uses the commonplace muttering “that was a beautiful thing you did” to allude to the different forms with which people have and continue to use the word, whether it be in “twentieth-century English” or “fourth-century-BC Greek.”[2] My main objection to this line of argument — an appeal to the commonplace — is that the same phrase can be uttered with replacing the term “beautiful” for “noble” or “fine,” words that Sachs objects to in his rephrasing. While Sachs, like Aristotle, refers to the commonplace as a starting point, unlike Aristotle he does not seem to scrutinise it with all that much effort and delicacy. However, there is a basic and foundational attempt to comprehend the importance of the word ‘beautiful’ and its relation to the thought of Aristotle, a question that demands attention if not at the dialectical reasoning that follows but at the finer point being raised implicitly: are we afraid of beauty nowadays?
For Sachs, the failure of translators to even consider whether, when used in context, kalon can refer to a term of aesthetic appreciation or goodness, carries with it the connotation that as a species we have become afraid of encountering beauty and prefer instead to settle for the mundane. Or, in other terms, because we have become so banal and effortless, we try to pull down from the towering edifices of moral virtue those qualities we ought to esteem: we try to make the special, the exalted, commonplace not by pulling ourselves up to its demands but rather by pulling down the edifice. We have sought to make virtue achievable by cheapening its demands. This insinuation is much more powerful, and it is a line of enquiry worth examining at length, for if its conclusions are found to have some grounding, the link between aesthetics and politics is not so much a question of fascism, as Walter Benjamin horrendously put it, but a question of whether we have sought to truly understand politics in recent years artificially by orphaning it from the demands of the morally good and the beautiful.
Thankfully, more convincing for us is the relation of justice and the beautiful. Sachs translates it as thus:
“if all people competed for the beautiful, and strained to do the most beautiful things, everything people need in common, and the greatest good for each in particular, would be achieved … for the persons of moral stature will forgo money, honour, and all the good things people fight over to achieve the beautiful for himself” (1169a8–11, 20–22).[3]
What does Aristotle mean to say here? W.D. Ross translates “beautiful” as noble. C.D.C. Reeve, on the other hand, explains his decision to dither by refusing to use the word “beautiful” but pointing out in the notes to his translation that Aristotle connects “what is ethically kalon to what is aesthetically noble, lending the former too an aesthetic tinge.”[4] When examined in context — as Reeve does, in the note — it seems as though we are confronted with a conundrum: kalon admittedly is a common term that is used with some looseness throughout Aristotle’s admittedly vast corpus; yet, when it comes to the ethical and political works it is more or less used with two connotations, the first being that of fulfilling itself or being a prime exemplar of, the second being a more conventional, aesthetically tinged term. Sachs recognises this distinction but goes elsewhere with his exegesis of the Ethics, a subject I wish to return to later in this essay.
The exemplar I have taken of work that detracts from my position is T. H. Irwin’s essay, ‘Beauty and Morality in Aristotle.’[5] Irwin recommends that we search through the Aristotelian corpus; in any case, I intend to take up a few of his examples to ensure that I can further examine the uses of kalon in context. The first comes from Aristotle’s Parts of Animals, a biological text that rushes to our unlikely aid:
“… we should venture on the study of every kind of animal without distaste; for each and all will reveal to us something natural and something kalon. Absence of haphazard and conduciveness of everything to an end are to be found in Nature’s works to the highest degree, and the resultant end of her generations and combinations is a form of the kalon.” (P.A. 1.5, 645a21–26)[6]
Irwin thinks this passage exemplifies the use of kalon not as the beautiful but to the “teleological order” that is integral to “both craft and nature [, which] present us with the kalon in their goal-directed constitution.”[7] However, this seems rather unlikely because we lack knowledge of what this end is. Preceding this passage is a short tale about Heraclitus, who forbade his guests from entering his kitchen because “even in that kitchen divinities were present” (P.A. 645a20). Take, for instance, your regular kitchen, with its selection of other-than-perfect livestock. It is extremely doubtful that all animals are perfect exemplars of their kind because of some natural teleology in the same way that everything a craftsman produces is a perfect articulation of his teleological thought: at the very least, for the latter, constraints and all sorts of other, extraneous and external factors, could hinder the completion of the aforementioned craft object which the craftsman had as his aim.
If this was a GRE question and I were being quizzed on the best possible option to replace a blank, I would posit that when I was to replace word kalon in the aforementioned passage, I would replace both with beautiful: there is no other option here. Look carefully at the wording of the translation above, assuming, as I have, that the translation bears a degree of fealty to the original in stylistic terms. The term kalon is placed in the first instance as something either complementary to ‘natural’ or at the very rate distinct but separate from it; in the second usage it is the larger, impersonal end which these species represent. If we are forced to consider the second usage, a replacement of kalon for a word denoting some teleological line of thought would create a sentence with an acute case of circularity, for it would thus read, in part: “the resultant end of her generations and combinations is a form of the end.” This would have the unintended effect of reducing this phrase from De Partibus Animalium, well, gibberish. In the first instance, too, if the word natural covers teleological — by now, it is clear that references to nature insinuate a teleological mode of action — then there can be no mistaking the distinctness of the usage of kalon. From context, thus, it can be deduced that kalon is better translated as something large, having some visual component to it, and with connotations of perfection. To translate it thus as ‘beautiful’ is not inappropriate. If it merely referred to the “general description of the kalon as what is pleasant through sight or hearing,”[8] as Irwin posits, then why would the divine be alluded to with kalon through analogy? Aristotle’s divine is thought thinking itself and not a capricious lord who engages in heavenly activities; if he were using Heraclitus as an example would it not be more prudent to assume that the sense in which the divine was being referred to was more Aristotelian than something else, especially considering the example had been enlisted to advance a point and not illustrate a differing opinion?
Irwin introduces another passage to support his argument from the Metaphysics: “The chief forms of kalon are order and symmetry and definiteness …” (Metaphysics XIII.3, 1078b1–2). The passage deals with mathematical kalon, although it is not immediately clear whether Aristotle makes and maintains an active distinction between the mathematically sublime and the conventionally beautiful, like Kant does in the Critique of Judgement. Even then, if both are considered forms of the beautiful or the kalon, would there not be an argument to be made that comprehension of the many senses of kalon would assist in a more wholesome view of it? Irwin seeks to reduce kalon to one definition or the other but does not enquire into the many disparate ways that the word ‘beautiful’ is used (more often than not with alarming looseness). If the mechanically and mathematically kalon share a commonality with the naturally kalon, do they not allude to some shared properties as objects that are worth considering if kalon is to be defined with any degree of accuracy and precision?
Take, for instance, Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattre Fontane and Ruskin’s favoured Lake District, both of which have very little in common. The former is a baroque building that is dramatic and is squeezed into a corner of a busy intersection in Rome; the other is the quintessential, bucolic English countryside dominated by — you guessed correctly — lakes and rolling hills (indulge me, please, and imagine it undeveloped). One is a beautiful work that is made by man. The other is a beautiful exemplar of nature. This, however, does not change the fact that they share something in common, however elusive it might be, and that commonality between the two is best encompassed by the aesthetic epithet of “beauty.” It is what might seem to be a seemingly loose term — but it is the apt term for this situation in the very same way that a proof might be elegant and beautiful, as might a highway. This confusion is behind Irwin’s conclusion: he argue that “Aristotle has different properties in mind when he speaks of the kalon in physical appearance and in moral virtue.”[9] Where Irwin seeks to whittle down the meaning of an expansive term he renders most attributes of it moot: the beautiful is only visually appealing — or that is the implicit line of argument Irwin advances. Either Irwin ought to come clean about the reduced, narrow and unconventional definition of ‘beauty’ that he proffers, or he find alternative grounds to base his characterisation of ethics distinct from an aesthetic corollary.
Before I enter into the interesting analysis provided by Richard Kraut, there is the other question that we are faced with if we seek to sheer ethics from aesthetics: for Aristotle, the virtuous man is the magnanimous man, quite literally the “big soul”-ed man. Magnanimity is linked to all sorts of dispositions, but perhaps the most remarkable statement is here:
“Why then should we not say that he is happy who is active in accordance with complete virtue and is sufficiently equipped with external goods, not for some chance period but throughout a complete life?” (NE 1.10, 1101a14–16)
The considerations provided by the passage in context are but simple: that it is common to think that material goods assist and complement in the pursuit of virtue. However, zooming out a bit, we understand the bigger picture, namely that while it is easier to be big-souled if one has the ability to be, monetarily, it is not impossible. The statement shows the common view that Aristotle takes down.[10] But if material goods are a non-requisite for magnanimity, there can be only the state of mind it corresponds to, namely, a noble disposition. However, we are faced at this juncture with two opposing views: the ‘inclusivists’ and the ‘monists’. The former argue that on the whole, the “happy life … is both actively virtuous and sufficiently equipped with external goods.”[11] The monists, on the other hand, argue that external goods are not a necessary prerequisite for virtue, but goods of the soul are. Beauty belongs to the latter. Thus, we arrive at Kraut’s formulation:
“The best answer will make use of what Aristotle tells us: it is because ethically virtuous activity is kalon that it is good – so good that the accrual of what is kalon to the agent compensates for his loss of other benefits. If we take kalon to mean ‘fine’ or ‘noble’, our question merely renews itself. Not so, if we take it to mean ‘beautiful’.”[12]
Kraut’s translation — the one preferred by Sachs as well — is, in my opinion, the only possible translation that has the intended effect of rescuing this dialectic from turning into a vicious self-referential circularity. If there is no aesthetic component to goodness — and if the trifecta of the good, the just, and the beautiful is let go of — we find ourselves in a quandary. The question that we are faced with is rather simple: is there an aesthetic component to an ethical life? If our trifecta holds, it must imply even a correlation, if not a causal effect. There is no better approach I have come across so far that can best Kraut, but it is time to turn my attention into a line of argument that Kraut and Sachs both presuppose: why are we scared of the beautiful?
[1] Joe Sachs, ‘Three Little Words’, The St. John’s Review XLIV, no. 1 (1997): 1–22, at 15.
[2] Ibid, 16.
[3] Ibid, 19–20.
[4] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 2014), 1169an, 204.
[5] T. H. Irwin, ‘Beauty and Morality in Aristotle’, in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Jon Miller, Cambridge Critical Guides (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 239–253.
[6] Translated by William Ogle, from the Modern Library edition ed. Richard McKeon.
[7] Irwin, ‘Beauty and Morality in Aristotle’, 242.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid, 244.
[10] See Matthew Cashen, ‘The Ugly, The Lonely, And The Lowly: Aristotle On Happiness And The External Goods’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 29, no. 1 (2012): 1–19, esp. 2–3.
[11] Ibid, 2.
[12] Richard Kraut, ‘An Aesthetic Reading of Aristotle’s Ethics’, in Politeia in Greek and Roman Philosophy, ed. Verity Harte and Melissa Lane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 231–250, at 250.