[Andrew Frisardi]

I want to add a postscript to my last post, which is with Ed’s last couple of posts in mind but which actually applies to this whole section of the thread.

Ed, your response to my earlier Sufi quote on beauty (post #248) seems to suggest that I believe that everyone who ascribes to that mystical or esoteric view writes or ought to write like Rumi. Or even like Rumi’s grandmother. That’s not what I meant. The “radiation on a particular level of reality of the Beauty of the Face of the Beloved” isn’t only beauty that evokes the numinous. It doesn’t have to be that grandiose. Even a small poem with beauty in it carries that quality, even if (much) less radiantly. This is about beauty as such, however it appears, not a contest judged by Donald Trump.

Here's my postscript: An idea of beauty is a raison d’être of the activity of making. It rarely, if ever, means that the work that’s done actually reaches the level of the ideal. This isn’t a question of having an ideal and then living up to it—that would be hopeless. Michelangelo purposely defaced some of his work in marble when it didn’t live up to the internal picture he had. As you no doubt know, he thought of the figures that he shaped from marble as existing already in the material; his job as sculptor was simply to free them from the stone. Beauty as it exists in the work of art comes from the extent to which the artist does or does not do this. There are degrees of it.

For me, a metaphysically rooted idea of beauty gives a reason for being to the arts, since it connects the arts to a larger whole—the same whole “life” belongs to. A basic question in philosophy is: Why is there something rather than nothing? A basic question in the arts is: What’s the point?

Any theory of beauty that isn’t merely “academic” (as the misnomer went) is going to address that.