On Beauty, Part 3

Art by Elliot Skow

[Earlier: part 1; part 2.]

An eagle’s sleek wings are beautiful, because they’re good at what they’re for, namely enabling flight; or anyway so says the Functional Theory of Beauty That theory, while old, has never been dominant. Another old theory was so dominant for so long that the philosopher Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz dubbed it simply “The Great Theory.” He charted its fortunes in a 1972 paper, The Great Theory of Beauty and Its Decline. The theory, first written down during the classical age of Greek philosophy, did not begin its decline until the late 18th century and the rise of Romanticism. That’s a good run. In Tatarkiewicz’s presentation, it asserts that

beauty consists in the proportions of the parts [of the beautiful thing], more precisely in the proportions and arrangement of the parts, or, still more precisely, in the size, equality, and number of the parts and their interrelationships.

That “still more precisely” is funny to me. I wanted a “yet still more precisely” that indicated which proportions and arrangements make for beauty. After all, even the parts of ugly things are arranged in some, uh, arrangement. Tatarkiewicz reports that some thinkers have

maintained that the relationship of parts which produced beauty could be numerically expressed,

but he does not tell us what those numbers are, except in one place: he quotes Vitruvius (cf. Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian man”), who observes that “nature”