Desire For the Beautiful One

We naturally desire what is beautiful. But early on Plato has Diotima teach Socrates (in the Symposium) that:

"Eros cannot find rest in the beloved, whose beauty is real but limited. Desire pushes us from one desirability to another, from superficial to deeper, from lower to higher forms of beauty. If the ascent succeeds, it leads to a sudden revelation: beauty itself is none of the desirable phenomena that meet us on our journey; it is the secret toward which the entire diversity of beautiful people, things, works, institutions, and stories point as their granting origin.

"Beauty -- or the Good -- itself cannot be the summit of the entire range of good and beautiful phenomena whose qualities and degrees of splendor can be compared. It is not the highest of all, but the incomparable 'giving' to which all of them owe their goodness and beauty. It is therefore 'beyond' and 'before' as well as 'in' and 'with' all splendid persons, things, and events.

"However, we would not even have an inkling of beauty itself if we were not touched and moved and delighted by the variety of finite wonders that surround us. There is no way of reaching the Good itself directly, no possibility of bypassing the empirically given diversity of limited goods. If the Good somehow exists, it can be contacted only through and in the desiderata of the many desires that rule our practical, theoretical, and emotional involvement in the empirical world where we live.

"All of them attract and tempt us; they elicit our activities and promise us some sort of rest, but none of them can completely pacify our yearning. And yet, this world and its attractions are all we have to experience and cultivate. To be possible at all, the experience of the Good itself must therefore be an 'aspect' or 'moment' or a hidden secret of our dealings with its finite manifestations."

Peperzak, Elements of Ethics, p. 89. And so, says Peperzak, we experience the Good and evoke it in a series of negatives. "Desire is not a hunger, not a kind of greed or thirst; the ultimate Desideratum is not beautiful or good, it cannot even be said to be as an entity (not even as the highest one); although absolutely overwhelming, it cannot fulfill; it neither stills nor ends our longing because it is beyond all these, beyond being, and thus most urgent and absolute.

"The discovery of this absolute difference does not dissuade us from any attempt at reaching out to it. On the contrary, it intensifies our longing. It does not silence the voices of the finite desiderabilia that populate our universe, but rather refers us to them and their call for an appropriate response. Conspiring with our desires, they must give us a taste for a well-ordered 'economy' of desirability (a 'system' of 'values'?), which might reveal to us what it means to be in touch with the Good itself. " It is through this "erotic economy" -- the interaction between our desire for beauty and goodness and the beauty and goodness we experience, that we can, perhaps, "glimpse" the Good in its "inescapable absoluteness." Ibid.

I can glimpse a trace of an infinite Beauty, hear a whisper of an infinite Goodness, as I truly experience the finite beauty with which I am blessed. My experience is true to the extent that it directs me skyward, elevates my appreciation for the goodness and beauty I am experiencing.

I think of the lovely "Song to the Moon" in Dvorak's opera Rusalka as a way of depicting the "negative" experience of Beauty and the Good that Diotima speaks of. The moon, elusive but all-seeing, is witness to the Good's kindling of all of the "lesser" loves by which we finite beings try to light our lives.

Listen to Rene Fleming's "Song to the Moon" in "Rusalka"

"Moon high up in the sky,
you light up vast distances,
you wander through the wide, wide wold
loking into the homes of men.
Stay awhile, moon,
tell me, oh tell me where my beloved is!

"Tell him, silvery moon,
that my arms embrace him,
so that at least in his dreams he may remember me.
Shine for him in far away places, shine for him,
tell him, oh tell him who is waiting here!

"If he dreams about me,
let that remembrance waken him!
Moon, don't go away, don't go away,
moon, don't go away!"

The attention paid to the immediate beauty in the song "You are So Beautiful," seems also to elevate the appreciation to Beauty itself, the ineffable, elusive "giving" that brings beauty and goodness into being.

Listen to Joe Cocker's "You Are So Beautiful"

Listen to Billy Preston's "You Are So Beautiful"

Listen to Doris Day's "You Are So Beautiful"