What Do You Want From Beauty

　　What do people want from beauty? Obviously one of the most essential questions that has occupied Western thought at least since the age of Greek philosophy. The question obviously raises the issue of the relations between its two main terms, want (which I will henceforth refer to under the term desire) and beauty. What is the relation then between desire and beauty, or, why do we desire beauty. I want to briefly talk about this question in relation to two fundamental understandings of beauty, at first the ancient, classical Greek one, and the modern one, the first under its famous Platonic formulation, the second in relation to one of its most famous modern formulation, that of Rilke.
      It was Plato who first established the relation between desire and beauty, mainly in his dialogue The Symposium. Indeed what we desire, for Plato, is fundamentally beauty, or the beautiful. why is it that we desire the beautiful? this has to do with the Platonic understanding of these two terms. To desire means for Plato (and for Greek thought in general) to live in a certain deficiency, to lack something. We desire because we lack something, or are not fully complete. The beautiful, on the other hand, is the name for what is perfect and complete, lacking nothing.

     We desire beauty then, because beauty is the name for the most perfect achievement of completion. the beautiful person, object or idea, for Plato, are thus complete, lacking nothing, this completion is what we understand by beauty and what we ourselves, as desiring beings, want to become. Perhaps the most famous modern formulation of the question of beauty is the one given by Rilke, saying Beauty is the beginning of horror, that is, beauty is something which stands on the limit of what is horrifying. the question about the relations between beauty and desire - and here I have to move very quickly, skipping over all the transformation of classical thought that this formulation implies - changes completely its significance. to want beauty will now have to take account of the essential relations between beauty and horror. I think that there are two main ways to think within this constellation about the relation between want and beauty, the first we can call the defensive one. If beauty is on the limit of horror we might say that we want beauty in order to protect ourselves from the horror that is, so to speak, one step away. beauty is in a way the last defense against being consumed by the horrifying, and art, the realm which devotes itself to beauty and to the making of beauty, will be the realm whose task is to serve as the last defense against the horrifying. To want or desire beauty is now to want or desire a protection from horror.

    A second possible understanding of the consequences of the relations between horror and beauty is to understand the desire for beauty not so much as the need for defense as implying a transformative creative event where beauty is the successful creation of something out of horror, horror being understood as the experience of annihilation. If horror signifies the destruction of a world, beauty can be understood as the transformation of this destructive moment, creating something new out of it, opening the possibility of a new world. If this is what beauty is about then we will also understand the function of desire differently. desire will no longer be the desire for completion, the expression of a fundamental lack in existence, but will be the activation of the creative possibility of man to bring about a new world out of a moment of destruction. beauty is not the object that we want, in this conception, not a full perfection towards which our wanting is directed, but an activity of the transformation of horror, or of the nothing. art, the activity dedicated to beauty, will therefore be the activation of this capacity to transform horror, or the nothing, into something new, the possibility of a new world.