The beauty mystique: Ethics and aesthetics in the bond genre

Abstract

Physical beauty is widely identified in the Graeco-Roman Western tradition as a symbol of moral beauty and goodness. Ever since Plato, the good and the beautiful have been a unified conception. The phrase "She's a beautiful person" merges ethics and aesthetics to neatly identify both the moral and physical dimensions of beauty. Similarly such descriptions as "divinely beautiful," looking "angelic," and especially "looking good" all equate beauty and goodness. Beauty and goodness (or virtue) are therefore semiotically reciprocal. The signifier and the signified are one, albeit in different cognitive dimensions. This semiotic reciprocity thus reflects and reinforces both the physicality of moral beauty and the morality of physical beauty. Conversely, physical ugliness and moral evil are also reciprocal. The ugly and deformed are feared, and are often depicted in mythology, the media, literature, fairy-tales, and especially in the imagination as evil and vicious. The evil--villains, devils, monsters, bogeymen--are believed to be ugly "inside and out." These connections are clear in such phrases as "looks like hell," "ugly as sin," and "evil-looking."l These associations all suggest a pervasive ideology ofbeautyism which exalts and institutionalizes the primacy of the beautiful over the ugly. Physical beauty in our culture is inseparable from the face. Similarly, "beautyism" is inseparable from "facism," or the belief that the face, as the pre-eminent symbol of the self, is the mirror not only of the personality but also of the soul, as it often is of the 1However naive and even silly these equations and polarizations may seem to our modern and scientifically "enlightened" ears, we must recognize that the "beauty mystique" is very much part of our culture and is as old as our civilization itself. It goes back at least as far as Homer and Plato. Indeed, Plato argued in the Symposium (211-2) that the love of the physical beauty of a particular boy is the first step on the "heavenly ladder" to knowledge and love of Beauty to the divine beauty which is God (1963: 562-3). This idea was further developed and sanctified by Augustine and Aquinas, secularized during the Renaissance, lauded by the Romantics, and is only now being researched by social scientists (cf. Synnott, 1989, 1990).