Formless Beauty

14 January 2023

Formless Beauty

“. . . [T]he nature of the best and the nature of the most lovable is in the altogether formless.  Therefore, whatever you bring into form and show to the soul, it seeks something else over it which gave it shape.  Our reasoning insists that what has shape, and shape, and form, all this is measured and limited, that is, it is not all or self-sufficient or beautiful of itself, but this too is mixed.  These beautiful things, then, must be measured and limited, but not the really beautiful or rather the super-beautiful; but if this is so, it must not be shaped or be a form.  The primarily beautiful, then, and the first is without form, and beauty is that, the nature of the Good.  The experience of lovers bears witness to this, that, as long as it is in that which has the impression perceived by the senses, the lover is not yet in love; but when from that he himself generates in himself an impression not perceptible by the senses in his partless soul, then love springs up.  But he seeks to see the beloved that he may water him when he is withering.  But if he should come to understand that one must change to that which is more formless, he would desire that; for his experience from the beginning was love of a great light from a dim glimmer.  For the trace of the shapeless is shape; it is this which generates shape, not shape this, and it generates it when matter comes to it.  But matter is necessarily furthest from it, because it does not have of itself any one even of the last and lowest shapes.  If then what is lovable is not the matter, but what is formed by the form, and the form upon the matter comes from soul, and soul is more form and more lovable, and intellect is more form than soul and still more lovable, one must assume that the first nature of beauty is formless.”

(Plotinus, Ennead VI.7.33, Plotinus Ennead VI.6-9, translated by A. H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988, pages 189 – 191, ISBN: 9780674995154)

 

“. . . This at last is the Authentic term because the Nature best and most to be loved may be found there only where there is no least touch of Form.  Bring something under Form and present it so before the mind; immediately we ask what Beyond imposed that shape; reason answers that while there exists the giver having shape to give – a giver that is shape, idea, an entirely measured things – yet this is not alone, is not adequate in itself, is not beautiful in its own right but is a mingled thing.  Shape and idea and measure will always be beautiful, but the Authentic Beauty and the Beauty Beyond cannot be under measure and therefore cannot have admitted shape or be Idea: the primal existent, The First, must be without Form, the beauty in it must be, simply, the Nature of the Intellectual Good.

“Take an example from love: so long as the attention is on the visible form, love has not entered: when from that outward form the lover elaborates within himself, in his own partless soul, an immaterial image, then it is that love is born, then the lover longs for the sight of the beloved to make the fading image live again.  If he could but learn to look elsewhere, to the more nearly formless, his longing would be for that: his first experience was loving a great luminary by way of some thin gleam from it.

“Shape is an impress from the unshaped; it is the unshaped that produces shape, not shape the unshaped; and Matter is needed for the producing; Matter, in the nature of things, is the furthest away, since of itself it has not even the lowest degree of shape.  This loveableness does not belong to Matter but to that which draws upon form: the Form upon Matter comes by way of soul; soul is more nearly Form and therefore more lovable; Intellectual-Principle [nous], nearer still, is even more to be loved; by these steps we are lead to know that the First Principle, principle of Beauty, must be formless.”

(Plotinus, The Enneads, translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page, various editions 1917 to 1930, quoted from the online edition at sacred-texts.com)

 

1.  This is Plotinus’s elaboration of the relationship between sensory beauty and transcendental beauty.  It is a repeated theme in The Enneads that beauty is a sign of the existence of the transcendental, but if we experience beauty as sensory we miss what beauty really is.

2.  In some Enneads Plotinus seems to say that Beauty as such is another name for the transcendental, like The Good and The One. In other Enneads Plotinus seems to place beauty below The Good and the One, in the realm of nous.  I don’t think there is any actual confusion; it is simply that there is a noetic beauty that is received in the noetic realm from the transcendental, The One and The Good; and this noetic beauty is further transmitted to the realm of soul, and ultimately impressed upon the material realm. 

This quotation details how, by following beauty back to its source, ascending to the noetic (Intellectual-Principle/Intellect/Spirit), and then releasing the beauty found there in the noetic, one enters the realm of The Good, where one finds Authentic Beauty, the Beauty Beyond, the Source of all that is beautiful in the material realm.

3.  Plotinus weaves into this discussion the topic of love.  Like beauty, love is a sign of the presence of the transcendent, but as the Armstrong translation says, as long as the lover bases love on the mistaken idea that love grows from the senses, ‘the lover is not yet in love.’  This is a view that is found many times in Platonism such as the dialogues Alcibiades I, Rival Lovers, and The Symposium.  The insight is that sensation-based love is not actually love; but the experience of love can lead one past the material experience and allow one to make the same kind of ascent that beauty offers.

4.  There is an optimism in this kind of analysis; I mean that, in a sense, the cosmos is constantly offering us opportunities to recognize the existence of the transcendental - through the experiences of beauty and love.  This, again, I don’t mind saying, is a kind of Platonic grace. 

Most people do not take advantage of these opportunities; but they are, nevertheless, there. 

5.  This quote also re-enforces the centrality of the Ascetic Ideal for the practice of Platonism.  In both the experience of beauty and the experience of love, the way the practitioner uses these experiences to ascend to The One is by turning away from the sensory experience and tracing back the experience of beauty or love to its source.  It is this turning away from material sensation that is the Ascetic Ideal.