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Voltaire |
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Beauty |
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Ask
a toad what beauty is, the to kalon? He will answer you that it is
his toad wife with two great round eyes issuing from her little head, a
wide, flat mouth, a yellow belly, a brown back. Interrogate a Guinea negro, for him
beauty is a black oily skin, deep-set eyes, a flat nose. Interrogate the
devil; he will tell you that beauty is a pair of horns, four claws and a
tail. Consult, lastly, the philosophers, they will answer you with
gibberish: they have to have something conforming to the arch-type of
beauty in essence, to the to kalon.
One day I was at a tragedy near by a philosopher. "How beautiful
that is!" he said.
"What do you find beautiful there?" I asked.
"It is beautiful," he answered, "because the author has
reached his goal."
The following day he took some medicine which did him good. "The
medicine has reached its goal," I said to him. "What a beautiful
medicine! " He grasped that one cannot say a medicine is beautiful,
and that to give the name of "beauty" to something, the thing
must cause you to admire it and give you pleasure. He agreed that the
tragedy had inspired these sentiments in him, and that there was the to
kalon, beauty.
We journeyed to England: the same piece, perfectly translated, was played
there; it made everybody in the audience yawn. "Ho, ho!" he said,
"the to kalon is not the same for the English and the French."
After much reflection he came to the conclusion that beauty
is often very relative, just as what is decent in Japan is indecent in
Rome, and what is fashionable in Paris, is not fashionable in Pekin; and
he saved himself the trouble of composing a long treatise on beauty. Voltaire,The
Philosophical Dictionary. Selected and translated by H.I. Woolf. New York: Knopf,
1924. From http://history.hanover.edu/texts/voltaire/volbeaut.htm
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.racism |
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