ABSTRACT
The appeal of beauty to the physical senses makes it seem obvious that beauty and bodies are closely interrelated. Both the object and the subject of beauty are embodied; in other words, the beautiful thing is in some way material, whether as colour or shape or soundwave; and the one who perceives beauty does so by way of the physical senses. This being the case, it makes sense to suppose that we might understand both beauty and the body better by considering them together; and so I shall argue. It is, however, contrary to a view of beauty which has had a very long run
in western culture, beginning with Plato and extending far into Christendom. In Plato’s famous discussion of beauty in the Symposium, for example, Beauty Itself is non-physical; and although the body of the perceiver plays an essential role, ultimately it is left behind. Both subject and object are disembodied. According to the speech that Plato puts into the mouth of Diotima, the one
who is to be initiated into beauty ‘cannot begin too early to devote himself to the beauties of the body’. He (and in Plato’s discourse it will always be ‘he’) rejects sexual association with women and chooses instead ‘procreancy of the spirit’, falling in love first with ‘the beauty of one individual [boy’s] body’, from there to the loveliness of every lovely body. Next he will ‘grasp that the beauties of the body are as nothing to the beauties of the soul’, and will proceed via intellectual beauty to beauty itself, ‘the open sea of beauty’ perceived by the eyes of the mind, which confers immortality (Plato, Symposium 209a-212a). Plato is at pains to emphasize that the body plays no part in this vision of the beautiful itself, nor is ultimate universal beauty in any sense embodied.
