When Hippias Met Miss Rumphius
Personal Reflections towards The Beautiful apropos of Plato’s Hippias Major and Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius
by Lila Stiff
Editor’s Note: What is beauty? Is it found in the eye of the beholder, or is there a Beauty that transcends all beholders? And if there is, can our eyes be trusted to perceive it, or our hearts to respond rightly to it? What is beauty's proper place in the life of the mind, the body, the spirit, or in the home, church, society? Kicking off a series of reviews that will explore questions about beauty in new and recent books written across the disciplines, Vita Poetica's Reviews Editor Lila Stiff begins where one usually does: with Plato.
Trans. Paul Woodruff
95 pp., paperback, $10
Indianapolis, IN: Hackett
1983
978-0915145775
One of the perks of being in my mid-thirties is that I can finally enjoy the dialogues of Plato as pleasure reading, at last having attained a modicum of dispassion as to whether that makes me either insufferably pretentious or – the other danger – an absolute imposter, given my lack of any advanced degrees in philosophy or classics. I have recently been turning again to Plato because I am interested in knowing what beauty is, and Hippias Major, an early comic dialogue, is about this very thing.
Socrates is at his best here: wily, curious, disarmingly earnest, but relentless. On the streets of Athens, the loitering Socrates meets Hippias, a big-league Sophist, who is from the city of Elis in a diplomatic capacity. Hippias is a versatile orator and commands high speaking fees across a range of disciplines, spinelessly, if elaborately, telling each audience what they most want to hear. Sought-after, self-important, and with no doubts as to the value of his own time or opinions, he can hardly spare Socrates the wave of a hand as he attempts to hurry past. But Socrates is determined to detain him; does he already suspect the essential rottenness at Hippias’ core? After an inquisition of his enterprising career, soaring income, and the supposed kalon (beauty, fineness) of his teachings, the clearly frustrated Hippias retorts, “Well, why don’t you come and judge for yourself whether my speeches are beautiful or not!”
This is just the hook Socrates has been looking for, in order to rope him into an extended disquisition. Could Hippias perhaps help him judge? Help him find a definition of beauty that will satisfy an impossible interlocutor he’s been talking with, who is never, ever satisfied with his definitions? So easily flattered, the harried Hippias assumes that defining beauty is going to be pretty straightforward. It’s a beautiful girl. A beautiful horse. Even, sure, a beautiful pot. Maybe a gold pot? Everyone knows beauty when they see it. But Socrates will not let up. He’s asking about The Beautiful. That quality, found in anything we might call beautiful, that makes it beautiful, but that exists beyond those individual things: Beauty itself. Even more, Socrates is aware that people can be mistaken about beauty. They can focus on appearances rather than reality. So he wants an explanation of what beauty is that will also explain how this can happen, how something can seem beautiful yet not be so.
The ensuing dialogue borders on verbal slapstick: Socrates is trying to catch The Beautiful, which he already knows to be a slippery endeavor, and he has roped in the slipperiest of characters for this messy job. Pretty quickly, Hippias, unwitting and none too pleased, is in over his head, sullied. Prospective definitions of the beautiful are thrown up and shot down in rapid succession. Perhaps the beautiful is whatever is best in its class? Perhaps it is whatever is most appropriate to a thing’s nature, or the most useful, the most able, the most beneficial, or at any rate, the least harmful? Or could the beautiful be whatever is most pleasant to hearing and to sight, the most delightful or most gladdening? Hippias doesn’t see the point of such questioning, and he’s ready to be done with this, ready to let beauty be whatever men say that it is; but at every turn, Socrates, apologizing for the unrelenting rigor of the unnamed friend to whom a definition is due (this is, of course, himself), refutes every proposition Hippias half-heartedly offers as illogical, inadequate, incomplete. Beauty as an ideal, a transcendent quality, has some essence that has confounded them both, although only Socrates cares. “What’s beautiful is hard,” he concludes, and at last lets Hippias go on his way.
Despite some scholarly debate about whether Hippias Major was truly written by Plato (adequately resolved for my purposes), the dialogue is now considered an important step in the evolution of his theory of forms, those essential, absolute, and unchanging ideals that, by his contention, are realer than physical reality, realer than all our senses take to be real. One often hears those forms spoken of together as “the Platonic triad” of beauty, truth, and goodness (the latter, I understand, is probably better translated as justice, or measure – moral goodness). In medieval European philosophy, Beauty is also commonly referred to as one of “the transcendentals” – fundamental properties of being. In contemporary discourse, I’ve found the use of this triad to be rich; beauty, truth, and goodness regularly serve as a sort of trinitarian shorthand for the manner by which an individual can know and experience the most ultimate Good – God.
I love beauty, and am ready to accept the unfashionable notion of it as an absolute.
I love beauty, and am ready to accept the unfashionable notion of it as an absolute, but my stabs at defining it aren’t much better than Hippias’. I’m interested in defining it so as to better evaluate whether my own pursuit of it is actually justifiable. And so of late, I have been trying to peel back the layers of what I think I know about it. Nothing of a metaphysician myself, I’ve long sought assurance from beauty’s sturdy, sound grounding as part of the Platonic triad, or one of the transcendentals.
But as Socrates has already shown, it’s always more complicated than one thinks. It turns out that the much-touted triad doesn’t actually hold the unassailable classical pedigree I’ve long been fond of. In fact, there is no classical precedence for the special use of beauty, truth, and goodness together, and no explicit triad structures for the forms in any place in Plato’s writings. As to the transcendentals, most medieval philosophers labeled them goodness, truth, and unity, not beauty. Aquinas counted five transcendentals, including beauty as something of a bonus sixth, subsidiary to the Good – hardly transcendent among the transcendentals! In a recent “genealogy” of the Platonic triad as an intellectual construct, sociologist Jean Levi Martin traces its current form back to Diderot, via German romanticism, via intentional mistranslations of the enormously influential seventeenth century Earl of Shaftesbury, all of whom were trying to put their own anxieties about taste on more solid footing. Oh well. Looks like I won’t be getting any farther than Hippias anytime soon.
Orthodox Christianity has lived a richly integrated aesthetic experience of God. In music, architecture, painting, the visual and decorative arts, no expenditure of energy and expense is enough for Beauty, and these efforts have a very precise theology to them.
Why am I so eager to see beauty granted high metaphysical status? Because I see the tremendous ambiguities inherent in setting forth beauty as a transcendent ideal, and I live them, too. An Eastern Orthodox Christian, I note the ambivalence present in my tradition’s approach. There is a cherished founding narrative to Christianity in Slavic lands in which the then-pagan tenth century Prince Vladimir of Kiev sent emissaries west into Europe and east along the civilizations of the Silk Roads to assess the merits of various religions. The emissaries he sent to Byzantium returned to him reporting that when they stepped into a liturgy at Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia cathedral, “We did not know whether we were in heaven or on earth; such beauty, we know not how to tell of it." By the primary chronicle’s telling, it is that report of the beauty of Christianity that brings Vladimir – and with him, early Rus’ – to baptism.
By that time, and in the centuries since, Orthodox Christianity has lived a richly integrated aesthetic experience of God. In music, architecture, painting, the visual and decorative arts, no expenditure of energy and expense is enough for Beauty, and these efforts have a very precise theology to them. But this is everywhere tempered by an equally rich ascetic tradition that runs parallel, warning of the more illusory aspects of beauty in its lowercase presence in individual lives. The “eye of the beholder” can hardly be trusted. Wary of decadence, vanity, acquisitiveness, self-aggrandizement, excessive concern for comfort, or mere self-involvement, asceticism is a reminder that beauty as a guide may throw one off the path to the Absolute entirely, rather than lead straight to it.
My formative years were Protestant ones, where my spiritual sensibilities were shaped by an instinctive wariness of bad art in spiritual things, and by an ambitious church-building campaign ill-timed to my teenage cynicism. In my Holden Caulfield stage, I noted how well appointed the affluent homes of our parish were, while the House of God was kept sparse, if not outright tacky. Aesthetic and ascetic – both aspects of the Christian tradition do seem to find their fullest expression when they are counterbalanced by one another, in a real but healthy tension, striving ever upward.
Accordingly, my own relationship to the everyday pursuit of beauty is rather tortured. I am not an artist; if I were, perhaps I’d be comfortable claiming citizenship in the realms of the beautiful. Instead, to my own horror, I am probably best described as an aesthete. The best I have is a naturalistic bent, a deep appreciation for art and literature, a passing competency in a handful of media, aesthetic opinions that tend toward High-Snobbery, and the kind of “eye” that is good for composing a photo, picking out paint colors, and turning down the neon and cartoon-character-emblazoned hand-me-down clothes. I’m a gardener with interests in design, ecology, and historic preservation, so my mind turns constantly on proportion, harmony, integrity, order. Left to my own devices and an unlimited budget, I would turn in on myself, my imagination composing and recomposing everything in my sight in an ever-tightening noose of refined taste and acquisitiveness. My life would probably be very pretty, but utterly devoid of truth and goodness or concern for others, an absolute failure of the eternal ideal of Beauty.
Is beauty only the provender of the elite, those who have endless time to take it on as a hobby, and extravagant resources with which to acquire it? Is love of beauty just materialism masquerading in a lofty mantle? Even if not, is it really possible for our own quotidian pursuits of beauty, meager as they may be, to deal in the sublime? And is there any other currency to be had? My bourgeois guilt wants to know.
Against the overripe Victorian decadence that the term “aesthete” evokes for me, modern-day aestheticism is more low-key, “looking for beauty in the everyday,” in the manner of Instagram posts: small, sentimental, self-involved – not sublime. I worry about the pursuit of beauty being disengaged, uncaring, and seemingly oblivious to more fundamental needs along Maslow’s hierarchy. Is beauty only the provender of the elite, those who have endless time to take it on as a hobby, and extravagant resources with which to acquire it? Is love of beauty just materialism masquerading in a lofty mantle? Even if not, is it really possible for our own quotidian pursuits of beauty, meager as they may be, to deal in the sublime? And is there any other currency to be had? My bourgeois guilt wants to know.
Against such hand-wringing, I find clarity in the quiet surety of a favorite picture book from my childhood: Miss Rumphius. Where Socrates gives us a vision of contemplation against Hippias’ remonstrances, Barbara Cooney’s exquisite Miss Rumphius schools my own agony over how to instantiate beauty in one’s life. Unique among picture books, Barbara Cooney’s oeuvre memorializes quiet, responsible, often sad lives, with beauty and grace lived out over the longue duree, reaching its apex in the fictional Alice Rumphius. In the mold of her grandfather before her – a sailor and artist-craftsman – Alice has a life plan: She will travel to see the world, and then she will come home and live by the sea. “That is all very well, my little Alice,” the grandfather tells her, “but there is a third thing you must do: You must do something to make the world more beautiful.” “‘Alright,’ said little Alice. But she did not know yet what that could be.”
picture book
32 pp., hardcover, $17.99
Puffin Press
November 5, 1985
ISBN 978-0140505399
As an old woman, back by the sea but bedridden from an injury in faraway lands, Miss Rumphius sets to her third task. Over a hard, dark winter, she alights upon lupines, the resilient, erect blooms in every shade of purple and blue, and upon her convalescence, takes to scattering seed, by the pound, everywhere she can reach, never without effort. Across Maine, lupines crop up everywhere she has stepped, a legacy both fleeting and perennial. The simplicity of Cooney’s lesson ably eludes sentimentality. Her illustrations evolve from the dark overwrought Victorian interiors of Miss Rumphius’ childhood to the colors of exotic lands and to the spare rocky palette of the Maine Coast. Beauty in Miss Rumphius’ life has found an escape hatch from both excess and smallness; it has become ascetic and aesthetic alike, in its action. Confounding more in the manner of parable rather than Socratic dialogue, Miss Rumphius reminds me that, for all the questions one might ask about beauty, if it is as potent and essential, transcendent and divine, as I long for it to be, then it requires something of us. I just do not know yet what that will be; I will have to continue pursuing the beautiful, and continue to be confounded.
In Vita Poetica Journal issues to come, I hope to present reviews of books, new and recent, on beauty. I hope to lean into more specific questions that can situate our community’s conversations about arts and faith within beauty’s complex categories, as something made manifest in local instantiations, yet pursued ever onward toward an absolute ideal. Triad or no, there are many fresh approaches to it coming from the most unexpected places: ecology, mathematics, ethics, physics, education, astrophysics, as well as from realms in which beauty is more of a mainstay: philosophical aesthetics, literature, art, architecture, design. An expert in none of these fields, rather an irremediable generalist, I aim to hunt the beautiful from every possible approach, making each book’s quarry accessible to the general reader. My hope is, on the one hand, to recover a classically tenable, rigorous scaffolding for beauty as a category – to be game for this where Hippias was not – but, on the other hand, like Miss Rumphius, to stay grounded, to be accountable for a more active, embedded, personal response to whatever I find.
Lila Stiff is a sixth-generation Washingtonian. A home educator, mother of four, and erstwhile indie bookseller, she reads widely.
