Beauty has been rightly defined as the harmony of diversity, and a distinction has been made for good reason between beauty of form and beauty of expression as well as between the beauty of art and that of nature; similarly, it has very justly been said that the beautiful is distinguished from the useful by the fact that it has no purpose beyond itself or beyond the contemplation of which it is the object; from the agreeable by the fact that its effect surpasses mere pleasure; and finally from truth by the fact that it is grasped in immediate contemplation and not by means of discursive thought.1 But it should not be maintained unequivocally—as some have done—that beauty of expression is always more important than beauty of form, for this is to underestimate form or possibly to overestimate the importance of the moral factor on the aesthetic plane. It is true that expression has priority over form when an interior beauty coincides with an exterior beauty, but the case is quite different when interior beauty is superimposed on ugliness, for then it belongs to the sphere of morality rather than to that of pure aesthetics; there is also good reason for thinking that expression takes precedence over form when a loss of beauty in one sense gives rise to a new kind of beauty, as may be the case with the elderly when age has simply transposed a pre-existing beauty onto another plane or even created physical beauty; we also acknowledge the primacy of expression in the artistic representation of living beings, where beauty is portrayed by means of a stylization far removed from nature and where form is not obliged to copy the specific beauty of life.
Frithjof Schuon Archive
