The beautiful and the moral
Autor: A. R. | Publicado: 2016-09-22T11:31:00-07:00

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<![endif]-->The greeks had a very strong idea of beauty: it
was right. It may sound weird to us, foreign, even evil, since we are taught
not to judge a book by its cover and go beyond appearances. If we are able to
think outside the box for a little, and give the Greeks a fair hearing, we may
be able to find more than a nugget of wisdom in that idea.



The idea, simply put, is as follows: The
beautiful is aesthetically right, the same way that good is morally beautiful.
On the other hand, ugliness is aesthetically wrong, as evil is morally ugly.
Who can disagree with these statements? It seems that the moral and the
aesthetic, contrary to what Kierkegaard may have said, are not opposites, but
complementary concepts.



We can clearly recognize this concept in the
Illiad, and how the heroes are not only noble, but beautiful. On the other
hand, evil characters, not to mention monsters, are always ugly. This
distinction, in the modern world, has been heavily challenged, and we may blame
some sort of deconstructivism for that, though it started long before Derrida.
If we go back far enough, we may trace it to the Christian message, with all
its apparent paradoxes. Even further, we can trace it to Socrates.



It has been mentioned that Socrates’ friends
sometimes had to apologize for introducing the ancient philosopher to their acquaintances:
he was one of the ugliest men in Athens, a city that prized exterior beauty to
a fault. It has even been said that the emphasis that Socrates put on the value
of the soul was the strategy of a bitter ugly man to be better liked by his
more aesthetically pleasing peers. We will never know for sure, but it sure is
food for thought.



Even if we decide to disagree with the Greeks
(and there are good reasons for that, be they philosophical or theological), we
should try to understand their mindset, without ignoring the framework that
generated it. By doing that we may gain at least some knowledge; and if we
think hard enough, who knows, even wisdom?

The Spotted Lion