Finding Beauty in a Body Image Obsessed World
Whenever it comes up in conversation that I write about beauty, people often give me a quizzical look. This is understandable. I am a forty-something-year-old man with nothing particular about me that telegraphs “beauty enthusiast.” The truth is that for most people thoughts of beauty go first to the human form, which makes sense. After all, it is the most intimate aspect of our nature, and many thinkers have held that by understanding our physical character we can better perceive the greater beauty all around us.
Renaissance artists like Michelangelo certainly thought so. As deeply religious people who embraced the humanist ethos, Michelangelo and his contemporaries viewed the human body as the closest earthly thing to God’s perfection that we have, and the human figures they rendered often express a distinctive, heavenly quality.
For such artists, however, this admiration of physical beauty came with limitations. Going back to at least the time of Plato, Western philosophers have considered beauty in proportion to the meaning that it enhances: be it truth, goodness, or even the divine. In his treatise The Symposium, Plato outlines a useful hierarchy:
…[one] should regard the beauty of minds as more valuable than that of the body, so that, if someone has goodness of mind even if he has little of the bloom of beauty, he will be content with him, and will love and care for him.”
However wise these words may be, they are, to be fair, the insight of an idealist. Unfortunately, real life is often marked by much shallower valuations. This acute human failing is the source of much grief in our society, and people end up doing great harm to their bodies and psyches in pursuit of impossible beauty standards. To find relief from this malady, it may help to consider a relevant philosophical notion: the mind-body problem.
THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM
Because the mind and body seem attuned to different forces, Western philosophers have for generations contemplated the degree to which they should be considered distinct. Traditionally, religion has played a part in helping to answer this question, but in modern times we are largely left to solve the riddle on our own. As W. B. Yeats describes in his poem “Sailing to Byzantium”, the question becomes especially acute in old age: “Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal”.
By my observation, there seem to be two common philosophical paths that people travel in an attempt to escape this conundrum. But unfortunately, both can lead in dubious directions regarding our relationship with beauty.
1. WE ARE BODIES ALONE (MONISM)
One attempt at resolving the question is to think of ourselves as bodies alone—that our consciousness is bound by the same natural laws which otherwise govern the physical world. Secularism and the incredible scope of modern scientific knowledge help foster this idea, and the common resulting outcome is the monist philosophy known as Materialism. The problem with such thinking is that it can devolve into a hedonistic moral view, placing emphasis on the gratification of our animalistic desires without addressing the complex needs of our emotional well-being.
When the body is held supreme in this way, the urge to glorify its beauty follows easily, as does the discounting of that inner beauty described by Plato. This human tendency is only exacerbated by the kitsch commercialism which typifies modern life, where products and entertainment relentlessly seek to titillate our baser instincts. Both in the advertisements aimed at us, as well as the way in which we advertise ourselves to others, surface-level beauty is usually deployed without deeper meaning. The overall effect is to leave one perpetually unsatisfied. Thus sometimes even the most attractive among us fall into patterns of self-harm: anorexia, bizarre plastic surgery, and self-loathing.
2. MIND OVER MATTER (DUALISM)
On the other end of the spectrum, people sometimes embrace a rigid, ontological-dualist view, rooted in what the philosopher René Descartes theorized as the opposing “substances” of spirit and body. Descartes’ idea updated earlier religious thinking and allowed for a new secular take on the primacy of mind. This is seen today, for example, in the discourse around transgenderism, where gender is now held to be a quality determined by the psyche, instead of solely derived from one’s biology.
Since bodies are often unfairly judged for things outside of a person’s control, modern dualists are motivated to expose body-related injustices. However, the desire to correct such wrongs sometimes leads to flawed, utopian thinking. Such a view is advocated by philosopher Kate Manne in her latest book Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia. In it she takes a rather extreme position in reaction to the difficulties presented by our body image obsessed culture, expressing hope for a future without aesthetic hierarchies of any kind:
…in which our current relentless beauty pageant has no more judges and not a single entrant. It is not that everybody wins or gets a participation trophy in the form of our collective studied neutrality. There should be nothing in its place…You can appreciate a leaf, a dog without ranking it against others or pronouncing it superior.
But as writer and Feminine Chaos podcast co-host Kat Rosenfield notes in her review of Manne’s book1, this is both flatly impossible and utterly undesirable. As Rosenfield observes, how can one appreciate anything (body, dog, or otherwise) without judging differences and forming preferences? Though surely we should all aim to look past superficialities, it doesn’t follow that beauty itself should be abandoned as a concept, even if that were somehow possible.
For starters, what’s to keep a beauty-free world from devolving into ugliness, sapping the human spirit? Even at a basic evolutionary level our sense of revulsion is notably hard-wired into us. There’s a reason why we react with disgust at the sight and smell of spoiled food, just as it makes sense that we gravitate towards beauty. For example, taking care of a newborn is incredibly stressful and challenging—good thing babies are so cute!
Furthermore, Manne fails to acknowledge beauty’s unifying aspect: that one could find meaning in those things collectively held to be superior precisely because they are collectively held. What joy would film, music, or art bring if we could not connect with others in appreciating them, or even debate the finer points of their value? Manne and other beauty doubters would have us forsake that pleasure as the price of addressing our corrupt body image culture. But imagine the atomized world that this would create, with shared judgments limited to cold evaluations of utility and empty congratulations to one another on being our “best selves.”
BEAUTY BEYOND THE BODY
There is, perhaps, a better way to address the mind-body problem, one that allows for beauty on all levels to coexist in their rightful place. In his book The Soul of the World, the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton explains his idea of cognitive dualism, in which people navigate the same observable reality in two different ways simultaneously. Scruton argues that while we remain conscious of the natural world which governs our bodies, we at the same time order our thoughts and relationships according to the peculiar realm of self consciousness, where we seek reasons instead of causes.
The body is therefore integral to our being because it provides the aesthetic experiences necessary for human nature to emerge from the physical environment. In this never ending process, even simple judgments—like which body, leaf, or dog is more beautiful—are necessary to forming meaningful connections with our surroundings. As we mature, our interests move to subjects of greater significance, and we set ourselves to discerning what’s most beautiful in music, painting, and architecture as a means of realizing deeper truths, as well as feeling at home in the world around us. Anyone who has ever visited the Taj Mahal or simply experienced a striking sunset knows that there is no obvious limit to the transcendence that beauty can bring.
Because beauty provides both a shared source of joy and a way of enhancing meaning, finding it beyond the confines of the body is one of life’s greatest calls to action. We can start by demonstrating our respect and care for one another through the cultivation of a beautiful manner—the ways in which we welcome and relate to each other through our actions.2 This is no trivial task. It often requires us to act against our own narrow self-interest and, above all else, to avoid objectification of the body, which tempts us to treat others as less than equal beings.
From this foundation, one can build towards the greatest forms of beauty, which are rooted in love and manifest themselves in our work, creative pursuits, and relationships. Though we are all bound to fall short of reaching such a high ideal, perhaps even just aiming for it can help us find greater meaning in our lives, despite what the beauty doubters may have us believe.
My thanks to Pheobe Maltz-Bovy for the shout-out on this episode.
To learn more about reemergent salon culture, check out Justine Kolata’s work at The Beautiful Soul.