Both beautiful AND ugly? ...

The Philosopher

The Aristotelian-Scholastic (hereafter A-S) philosophy of beauty was my gateway into Aristotelian metaphysics. And here was a very welcome spelling-out of what was hitherto unspellable. Yet not everybody feels the same way. (Meiosis.) And that's what I want to talk about.

But first a high-speed run-through. Ex hypothesi, beauty is a transcendental, standing alongside truth and goodness—that is to say, it is something over and above the genera, supra-categorical. (Whence the fact that beauty finds its way into all ontological categories: concretes and abstracts, subjects and objects.) And being modes of being (or Being), the transcendentals are interconvertible. But how can such very different things—truth, goodness, and beauty—interconvert? The answer (ex hypo.) is that they are not as different as they seem. Consider an analogous case from the philosophy of logic. Necessity, analyticity, and apriority are separate notions. But they all look at the same thing from different viewpoints: those of metaphysics, semantics, and epistemology. To use the Fregean jargon, they differ in sense but not in reference. And so it is with the (similarly coextensive) transcendentals.

Ye be warned: the terms are used extendedly. For example, truth is not here to be understood propositionally, not as a "truth-value," but rather as realness or genuineness. (Truth with an uppercase "T".) For classical thinkers, both Platonists and Aristotelians, something is true insofar as it is an exemplar. The triangle drawn with a straightedge is truer to triangularity than that drawn freehand. A tree with a strong root-system is truer to treeness than a root-fallen tree. Etc. Further, the well-drawn triangle is good, whereas the poorly-drawn triangle is bad.  A strong-rooted tree is good, whereas a weak-rooted tree is bad. Turning to mankind, trueness and goodness finally comprehend morality. The virtuous man is more true and more good than the vicious man. So if you want to be a real man, a manly man, then be virtuous. (Why do the classical philosophers use the terms so oddly? They don't—we do.)

Anyway, it follows from all the above that if something is beautiful, it must thereby be true and good. But most find this troubling. Roger Scruton, in his wise—if overmuch Kantian—book on beauty, writes the following (about Aquinas specifically):

If that [A-S transcendentalism] is so ... how can there be dangerous beauties, corrupting beauties, and immoral beauties? ... I don't say that Aquinas has no answer to those questions. But they illustrate the difficulties encountered by any philosophy that places beauty on the same metaphysical plane as truth, so as to plant it in the heart of being as such.

Here Scruton puts forward the most common objection to the A-S philosophy of beauty. And it seems to me rather weak, even point-missing. After all, what the traditional thinkers are saying, using the terms in the traditional ways, is that just insofar as a thing is beautiful, it is true and good. Take, say, a beautiful sophism—more correctly, a beautifully-phrased sophism. Objectors will say, 'Look, here's something beautiful that's also false and bad. So there!' Well, yes, but really we are talking about two things. For just what is it that's beautiful? Answer: the phraseology. And insofar as it is beautiful, it is true and good. What is it that's false and bad? Answer: the sophism. And insofar as it is false and bad, it is ugly. Put it this way. The beautifully-phrased sophism is both beautiful, re its form, and ugly, re its matter. (And there is always some such multiplicity in these cases.) Ergo there is no contradiction.

Socks

Let's keep going. Take the puckish Socrates, a short, fat, fubsy, snubnosed, popeyed, potbellied baldhead. His friends likened him unto a flatfish (Plato's Meno). (Oh, but as a contrario, see ch. 5 of Xenophon's Symposium, in which Socrates enters a beauty-pageant.) Unshod and unwashed, it didn't help that his fellow citizens beat him and pulled at his beard (Diogenes Laërtius' Lives, Book II). Socrates was the ugliest man in Greece, let's say. Must we then add that he was the falsest and the baddest man in Greece? No, that would be a fallacious athroposcopy (à la the physiognomon Zopyrus). For it was Socrates' body that was ugly, whereas his soul was true and good. Yes, his soul was exemplary. Crito was so struck by it that he took him from his father's sculpturing workshop and saw to his education gratis (see Diogenes L. again). 

Note: nothing here calls for a substance dualism or treblism. It is enough that the analysanda be separable in some way, not necessarily ontologically.

If it turned out that something good was eo ipso ugly, or that something bad was eo ipso beautiful, then goodbye transcendentalism. But I can't see how such a thing would be at all possible. Can you?