Aesthetics

Beauty and the Cosmos

By David E. Cooper

Aesthetic Perception And 'Cosmic Consciousness'

I
NCLUDED IN PlERRE H A D O T ' S CELEBRATED BOOK, PHILOSOPHY AS A WAY OF LiFE
(1995), is a short and suggestive essay called 'The Sage and the World.' In
this essay, Hadot proposes an association between aesthetic perception
and the 'cosmic consciousness' i n terms of which he understands the
ancients' ideal of the sage. The connection is made on the first page, through
citing a passage from the Meditations (Book 3, §2) of Marcus Aurelius in which
Hadot takes h i m to be developing an 'aesthetic theory.' Marcus here writes
of the person—the cosmically conscious sage—whose 'deeper insight into
the processes of the universe' means that there is 'hardly any phenomenon'
in which he does not take pleasure, including phenomena, like the 'gaping
jaws of w i l d beasts', which 'do not appeal to everyone' (Hadot 1995, p. 251).
Hadot does not specify the exact character of the connection between 'the
aesthetic mode of perception' and the sage's cosmic consciousness. Sometimes, he
speaks of a 'resemblance' between them (Hadot 1995, p. 257), or of the former—'a
disinterested aesthetic perception of the world'—'allow[ing] us to imagine
what cosmic consciousness might signify for modem man' (Hadot 1995, p. 255).
Sometimes, however, the connection is made to sound more intimate than one of
resemblance or analogy. At any rate, he quotes with approval authors for whom,
as he puts it, aesthetic perception is a 'model' for 'philosophical perception', or a
mode of perception necessary in order 'to maintain the cosmic dimension essential
to human existence' (Hadot 1995, p. 254). A n d it would be natural to understand
the point of citing Marcus as being to indicate that the aesthetic appreciation
of virtually all phenomena is an ingredient in, or aspect of, the sage's cosmic
consciousness.
I shall assume that Hadot is inviting us to see an intimate connection
between aesthetic and cosmic experience, and my purpose in this paper is to
reflect on this invitation. I shall do this by exploring the proposal that there
is intimacy to the point of identity between the two—that, in effect, the sage's
cosmic consciousness is aesthetic in character, or (to reverse the emphasis) that
to experience the world aesthetically is to dwell i n 'the cosmic dimension.' This

David E. Cooper is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy

at Durham University. A philosopher with a broad range of research interests, Cooper
has made several significant contributions to philosophy, ranging from aesthetics to
metaphysics and history of philosophy. Cooper's most recent works include the books
Meaning and A Philosophy of Gardens.

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proposal is a venerable one, and in the course of my discussion we will encounter

not only the Stoic perspective that is Hadot's main concern, but those of some
Christian and Buddhist thinkers too.
Hadot's own line of argument does not support such a strong proposal.
According to this argument, what primarily 'hides from us the world qua world,'
and thereby obstructs a cosmic perspective, is 'the utilitarian perception we
have of the world' (Hadot 1995, p. 254)—one that, in Bergson's words, presents
things to us only in forms suited to 'our action upon things', and that renders the
world as a mere 'ensemble of "things" useful for life' (Hadot 1995, p. 258). N o w
aesthetic perception which, as Hadot puts it, is 'detached' and 'disinterested' is not
similarly utilitarian. Nor, of course, is cosmic perception. But nothing Hadot says
entails that aesthetic and cosmic perceptions are identical—that there is just one
way, rather than two ways, of suspending or transcending the utilitarian stance.
Indeed, Hadot himself refers to ancient 'exercises,' designed to induce a cosmic
consciousness, that, on the surface, do not look aesthetic in character: for example,
the effort to think of each moment of one's life as if it were the last, as a means of
inspiring a sense of 'gratitude' towards existence per se (Hadot 1995, pp. 259-60).
Moreover, when we look at the components of what Hadot has in mind
by 'cosmic consciousness,' there seem to emerge tensions between this form of
consciousness and the aesthetic mode of perception, at least as Hadot characterizes
it. He emphasizes four components of cosmic consciousness. First, it is a 'holistic'
experience of the world, of 'the world qua world,' not as 'an ensemble of things.'
The sage's 'sensation of existence is, inseparably, the sensation of being in the
whole and the sensation of the existence of the whole' (Hadot 1995, p. 259).
Second, it is not a dry, theoretical awareness of the world, but a 'lived relationship'
with the earth' (Hadot 1995, p. 255). A Stoic sage, like Seneca, Hadot tells us,
was not only 'conscious of being a part of the world, [but] plunged himself into
the totality of the cosmos' (Hadot 1995, p. 252). Third, and relatedly, cosmic
experience is one of a deep unity between perception and the world. The sage's
contemplation is a 'unitive' one, for he recognizes that 'in order to perceive the
world, we m u s t . . . perceive our unity with the world' (Hadot 1995, p. 261), and
that, in Paul Claudel's phrase, 'we are born along with the world' (Hadot 1995,
p. 260). Finally, the sage's philosophical perception of the world requires, not
merely a suspension of the utilitarian mode of perception, but a 'radical rupture'
with everyday consciousness, a 'conversion' or 'complete transformation of our
relationship to the world' (Hadot 1995, p. 254).
H o w do these components of cosmic consciousness relate to aesthetic
experience as Hadot characterizes it? While he has a fair amount to say about the
experience, indeed the cosmic consciousness, of two artists, Paul Klee and Paul
Cezanne, both of whom invoke a cosmic rhetoric of being integrated or 'lost'
in nature (Hadot 1995, pp. 255-6), it is not clear that Hadot wants to label this
dimension of the artists' experience as 'aesthetic' What he explicitly says about the
aesthetic is, in fact, pretty conventional, expressing a familiar notion of aesthetic
perception that has been dominant in academic aesthetics at least since the time
of Kant. Aesthetic perception, we are told, is 'detached' and 'disinterested,' and
is focused on what a thing 'displays to the eye' rather than on its pragmatic or
scientifically accessible properties, thereby involving a 'displacement of attention'

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away from both a utilitarian and a cognitive mode of attention.

Described like this, aesthetic perception looks to be at odds with all four
components of Hadot's cosmic consciousness. To begin with, it is unclear that
aesthetic perception on this picture requires a 'holistic' awareness of 'the world
qua world.' Indeed, critics of the Kantian picture often complain that it takes as
paradigmatic the contemplation of discrete or 'framed' individual objects, to the
exclusion of attention to their relationships to the wider world (see, for example,
Berleant 1991). Second, the picture seems to incorporate a rather 'cool' image of
detached aesthetic contemplation that is hard to combine with the rhetoric of a
'lived relationship to the earth' and of being 'plunged' into the world. Enthusiasts
for this picture, like Clive Bell, have emphasized how, according to it, 'we are lifted
above the stream of life' through aesthetic enjoyment.' 'To appreciate a work of
art,' Bell adds, 'we need bring with us nothing from life' (Bell 1981, Chapter 2).
It is unclear, next, that the picture happily combines with talk of consciousness
of the unity of perception and perceivers with the world. For Kant, famously,
aesthetic enjoyment of the sublime is due precisely to a sense of the independence
of our minds from nature. Finally, references to the 'conversion' or 'complete
transformation' from everyday experience that cosmic consciousness requires
sound exaggerated when applied to aesthetic perception on the familiar picture—
overdramatic terms for capturing a temporary 'displacement of attention.' (For
Schopenhauer, aesthetic experience could not finally 'overcome' the Will, precisely
because of its staccato character. The aesthete is not 'completely transformed,'
but simply someone who occasionally takes time out, from the hurly-burly of
life, to contemplate forms.)
The prospect promised by Hadot's essay, of an intimate connection
between aesthetic perception and cosmic awareness, seems to have dimmed.
Not only does he provide no explicit argument for it, but the components of
cosmic consciousness he emphasises make this sound distant from, and at some
odds with, aesthetic awareness on the familiar conception of the latter that his
brief remarks indicate. If we are to discern intimacy—to the point, perhaps,
of identity—between aesthetic and cosmic awareness, it seems that we need a
different conception of the aesthetic from the familiar one so far in play.

'Aesthetics' And Discourses Of Beauty

B U T W H A T W O U L D M A K E S U C H A C O N C E P T I O N O N E O F T H E AESTHETIC? T H E P R O B L E M I S

not that 'aesthetics' is an eighteenth-century neologism, but that—even i n the

decades before it was coined—the kind of enquiry it labelled was powerfully
shaped by eighteenth-century predilections. This was an enquiry into taste, into
discriminating judgement—an enquiry made pressing by the perceived problem
of how subjective sensory experience could yield anything in the way of objective,
or 'universally valid,' judgements. It was an enquiry constrained, moreover, by a
number of contrasts important to, indeed partly definitive of, the Enlightenment
consciousness—ones between, for example, art and nature, beauty and the
sublime, taste and understanding (whether moral, scientific, or philosophical).
Despite the term 'aesthetic' having first been put to work i n this
eighteenth-century context, it surely makes sense, however, to speak of
Renaissance and Medieval aesthetics, or of Indian and Japanese aesthetics—and

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without any assumption that eighteenth-century predilections were shared by

these cultures. The reason it makes sense is that, for all its specific context, the kind
of enquiry first labelled 'aesthetics' was deemed to be continuous with a much
older tradition of discourses of beauty. For Alexander Baumgarten, who coined
the term, 'aesthetics' may be 'the science of sensitive cognition,' but its focus is
the 'general beauty of sensory cognitions,' and 'the art of beautiful thinking'
(Baumgarten 1961, §1 and §13). A n d in Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgement,
the First Book of the 'Analytic of Aesthetic Judgement' is titled 'Analytic of the
Beautiful.'
Someone might worry that reference to traditional discourses of beauty
does not secure the historical continuity of aesthetics, since maybe those discourses
were too diverse to count as discourses on the same topic. Maybe 'beauty' does
not name a single theme, however broad. But while one should concede, indeed
stress, that these discourses were diverse, it is not arbitrary to translate certain
terms in Ancient Greek and Latin, or Sanskrit, Chinese and Hebrew, by the word
'beauty.' This is because, in these languages, there are terms for that of which
'the apprehension in itself pleases,' to cite Aquinas's gloss on the term 'beautiful.'
Mary Mothersill (1984, p. 262) is right to think that Plato was right to think that
'beauty is (i) a kind of good, (ii) which can be possessed by items of any kind and
(iii) which is linked with pleasure and inspires love.' If so, languages that employ
this concept allow for a discourse of beauty, however much these discourses differ
over which items please and for what reasons.
So the search for an alternative conception of the aesthetic that might
align, even identify, aesthetic experience with Hadot's cosmic consciousness is
really a search for an appropriate conception of the experience of beauty. The
question has become, is there a viable conception of what it is to experience beauty
which entails that to experience beauty is to experience the world (and ourselves)
in 'the cosmic dimension'? If there is such a viable conception, then it must be free
from those eighteenth-century predilections that shaped the 'familiar' notion of
the aesthetic which Hadot himself was invoking. The experience of beauty, if it is
to be aligned with a cosmic sense, cannot be that of the person who is exercising
'taste,' and passing discriminating judgements on objects. Nor can it be confined
to just one portion of the cosmos, the 'sensory': to experience beauty cannot be a
matter, simply, of enjoying certain 'sensations.' Nor can it be a kind of experience
essentially structured by those contrasts endemic to the Enlightenment scheme.
The appropriate experience of beauty cannot be one for which the distinction
between art and nature is crucial, or one that is disjoined from an allegedly quite
different experience of the sublime, or one deemed to carry with it nothing by
way of an understanding of the world and of our place within it.
Freedom from these predilections is apparent, in fact, in Book 3 §2 of
Marcus's Meditations that Hadot quotes from (Hadot 1995, pp. 189-90). Here
Marcus explains that the beauty of natural processes is not confined to certain
items in nature, of the sort that 'a man of taste' would appreciate, and that beauty—
for example, 'the rich maturity of old men and women'—need not be sensory
beauty, for it may be beauty of character or soul. He is unwilling, moreover,
sharply to distinguish the pleasure such processes afford from that provided by
'the imitations of them' created by painters and sculptors. Nor is there any hint

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that the attraction of nature's more fearsome aspects—those ' w i l d beasts' with
their 'gaping jaws/ for instance—belongs to a different category from beauty, to
'the sublime.' Nor, of course, could Marcus have any sympathy for allocating the
appreciation of beauty to a different faculty from that of the understanding. O n
the contrary, the appreciation of which he writes is only available to the person,
the sage, who has 'truly familiarized himself with nature and its workings.'
If we are to identify a viable conception of the experience of beauty that
aligns this with cosmic consciousness, it seems natural to ask if it is not already
there in Marcus's Meditations. Certainly he needs such a conception if his talk of
the sage experiencing the beauty of seemingly unattractive phenomena, like the
gaping jaws of w i l d beasts or the foaming mouths of pigs, is to be warranted.
Without it, we are entitled to wonder why Marcus does not speak, in non-aesthetic
terms, of the sage simply finding such phenomena interesting or striking. Some
distinctive conception of beauty must inform Marcus's appreciation of a pig's
saliva if this appreciation is to count as aesthetic. In the next section, I consider
Marcus's conception of beauty, as articulated by Hadot, together with some
related ones advanced by later writers.

Marcus Aurelius, Simone Weil, And Theological Aesthetics'

H A D O T W R I T E S T H A T M A R C U S S U B S T I T U T E S F O R A N ' I D E A L I S T I C A E S T H E T I C S , ' F O C U S E D

on 'ideal form,' a 'realistic aesthetics which finds beauty in things just the way
they are, i n everything that lives and exists'—and he does so on the basis of the
Stoic insistence that we should not discriminate among so-called 'indifferents,'
'things which depend not upon us, but upon universal nature' (Hadot 1995, p.
190). If we are to experience 'indifferent' things as they are, rather than as they
figure in relation to our desires, we should adopt 'an attitude of indifference' to
them. But why should this 'indifference' culminate, as Hadot puts it, i n a 'joyful,
loving satisfaction,' let alone in a perception of beauty in 'everything that lives
and exists'? After all, these sound like psychological states incompatible with
indifference. Hadot proceeds to answer this question on Marcus's behalf through
specifying the relevant sense of 'indifference.'
The sage who has cultivated 'familiarity' with nature 'perceive[s] the links
between all phenomena which seem strange or repugnant to us, and between
these phenomena and universal reason, the source from which they flow.' From
the sage's perspective, 'every event w i l l seem . . . beautiful and worthy of . . .
affectionate assent.' For 'to be indifferent to indifferent things means to make no
difference between them; in other words to love them equally, just as nature does'
(Hadot 1995, p. 197). For both Marcus and Hadot, those last four words make the
crucial point. It is because, as Marcus puts it, 'the Universe . . . loves to produce
all that must be produced' (Book 10 §21) that we in our turn, according to Hadot,
'are to "love" to see' all that is produced (Hadot 1995, p. 198). The appropriate
response of the sage to the sight of the gaping jaws or the foaming snout is neither
repugnance nor indifference in the ordinary sense of this term. But nor is the
response simply that of a detached scientific observer intrigued by the mechanisms
of the natural world. Once the phenomena are appreciated as the products of
'universal reason's' love and pleasure, the response will itself be imbued with
love and pleasure—hence an aesthetic response, hence an experience of beauty.

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Marcus, like other Stoics, occasionally uses the word ' G o d ' for that
active, rational material principle, pneuma, which is responsible for the natural
order of the cosmos. When he does this, close connections with a later Christian
aesthetic become unmistakeable, especially with one articulated by a Christian
philosopher who greatly admired Marcus and Stoicism more generally—Simone
Weil. Especially in her essay, Torms of Implicit Love of God,' she articulates
an experience of beauty integral to which are all the aspects of Stoic cosmic
consciousness emphasised by Hadot.
To begin with, it is an experience that carries with it a sense of the
world as a whole. Indeed, Weil writes, it is 'nothing short of the universe as a
whole [that] can with complete accuracy be called beautiful' (Weil 1977, p. 474).
Anything less is only beautiful by sharing 'indirectly' in the world's beauty.
Second, the experience of the world's beauty requires a lived relationship with the
world: it is not the experience of someone who has disengaged from the world,
for we approach to the beauty of the world when, 'the soul set in the direction
of love,' we press the world to 'our very flesh,' and the 'afflicted' person who
is incapable of experiencing beauty is one whose 'roots' in the world have been
torn up (Weil 1977, p. 483, p. 486). Third, the experience testifies to a deep unity
between perception and reality: it is not simply that beauty is a 'relationship of
the world to our sensibility,' for in order authentically to enjoy this experience we
'must make ourselves like to the beauty of the world' (Weil 1977, p. 474, p. 483).
Finally, to experience the world as a whole as beautiful requires a transformation,
a permanent and radical rupture with ordinary consciousness. For Weil, we must
'awaken to what is real and eternal' through 'the renunciation of our w i l l ' and
become, in effect, 'images' of God (Weil 1977, p. 470, p. 484).
But what, precisely, is the conception of beauty that inspires Weil's claims
about its cosmic dimensions? 'The beauty of the world,' she writes, 'is the order of
the world as loved,' and it is loved because it is experienced as 'proceeding' from
God, or rather as the 'real presence of God' (Weil 1977, p. 478, p. 482). Elsewhere,
as she puts it, 'in everything which gives us the pure authentic feeling of beauty
there is really the presence of God . . . an incarnation of God in the world . . .
indicated by beauty,' which is the 'experimental proof of God (Weil 1977, p. 379).
God's incarnation in Christ is the paradigmatically beautiful phenomenon in the
world, but anything truly beautiful is an 'opening to universal beauty' (Weil 1977,
p. 475). The love we feel for such things is not an egoistic one: when we desire
something beautiful, our desire is not to 'eat it,' but simply 'that it should be'
(Weil 1977, p. 379). To experience beauty, for Weil, is lovingly to experience the
necessary order of the world that is sensed as the manifestation of God.
Simone Weil's essay was a modern venture in 'theological aesthetics,'
as it has been called since the appearance of the first volume of Hans Urs von
Balthasar's The Glory of God. Although they rarely acknowledge Weil's work,
Balthasar and his followers echo much of her thinking, but for our purposes it is
better to remain with her account than to turn to these later ones. For one thing, her
discussion is less burdened with theological problems stemming from what one
admirer of Balthasar calls 'the most elementary statement of theological aesthetics,'
that God is not simply 'the essence and archetype of beauty,' but Himself beautiful
(Hart 2004, p. 177). Second, and relatedly, her focus is more directly on the beauty

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of the world. For Balthasar, the primary concern of theological aesthetics is 'the
perception of the divine self-manifestation' (Balthasar 1982, Foreword) —a concern
which, on the surface, is not an obviously aesthetic one at all. So anxious is he to
prevent theological aesthetics from collapsing into 'this-worldly' aesthetics—to
retain a distinction between 'theological beauty' and 'the beauty of the world'
(Balthasar 1982, p. 79ff)—that the suspicion remains that the kind of 'perception'
which is the object of his study is not aesthetic perception, not an experience of
beauty, at all.
More importantly, perhaps, Weil's discussion is more continuous with
Marcus's than are those of later theological aestheticians whose inspiration
comes not from Stoic philosophy, but from the Christian mysticism of figures like
Dionysius the Areopagite and Gregory of Nyssa. Thus, for Weil, as for Marcus, the
experience of beauty in the world owes to recognition of its order, of the necessary
character of its processes. Contrast this with David Bentley Hart's remark that 'the
cardinal axiom of any Christian theological aesthetics [is] that creation is without
necessity' (Hart 2004, p. 256)—by which he means not simply that G o d d i d not
create out of necessity, but that his creation displays an 'unmasterable excess' (Hart
2004, p. 21), a rich play of 'difference' that infinitely exceeds whatever elements
and order a world would have to possess to be a viable world at all. Weil is also
closer to Marcus in tone than are writers like Hart. The Stoic tone is quieter, more
sober, less ecstatic. In Hart's book, the talk—recognized by the author himself as
'buoyantly rhapsodic' (Hart 2004, p. 256)—is of an 'erotic' experience of beauty,
a delighted encounter with overwhelming splendour and the radiant forms of
the 'pure surface' of the world. Maybe this is a rhapsodic description of some
sort of cosmic consciousness, but it is surely not the sort aspired to, if Hadot is
right, by the ancient sage.
So let us remain with the conception of the experience of beauty indicated
in Marcus's reflections, and amplified in Weil's essay. Here is a conception
which, if viable, establishes intimacy between aesthetic perception and a cosmic
consciousness. But is it viable?

Pankalia And Metaphysical Commitment

As A L R E A D Y H I N T E D , T H E D O C T R I N E T H A T A L L P H E N O M E N A M A Y A N D S H O U L D B E

appreciated as beautiful—the doctrine of 'pankalia,' it might be dubbed—is

intuitively implausible. Indeed, one is tempted to invoke a very quick argument
to demonstrate its falsity: the term 'beautiful' has its sense through contrast with
ones likes 'ugly,' a contrast and a sense that would be lost if 'beautiful' is applied
to everything.
The pankalic idea remains intuitively implausible even when the critic
makes certain concessions. It might be conceded, first, that the quick argument just
rehearsed is suspicious. That a term owes its sense to a contrast with another term
does not entail that both terms must have actual application. (Think of 'natural'
and 'supernatural.') It could be conceded, too, that the concept of beauty need
not be understood essentially as a tool for making discriminatory judgements of
taste, for passing verdicts on things—activities that would exclude the possibility
of the concept's applying universally. A n d the critic could concede, finally, that
even self-proclaimed pankalists like Marcus would not deny that some things

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are beautiful—specifically those that manifest moral evil. Marcus would surely
deny that a face through which the evil of its owner showed was beautiful, since
such a face fails to belong, in the relevant sense, to 'nature.'
Even after these concessions, however, there are countless phenomena,
like the pig's saliva, that we are invited by the pankalist to regard as beautiful,
albeit in a non-judgemental manner, but which, to put it mildly, it is difficult so
to regard. It is at this point, of course, that there emerges the strategic importance
for the pankalist of invoking Marcus's 'universal reason' or Weil's God that loves,
desires, takes pleasure in what it has created and expects in return that we should
delight in the whole of this creation, saliva and all. If, the thought goes, I have a
sense of everything as the product of this creation, T shall experience as beautiful
what would otherwise repel me or leave me cold.
Strategically useful as such metaphysical invocations are for the
pankalist, they are problematic. M y concern, in the present context, is not
to challenge the thought that someone with the relevant Stoic or Christian
metaphysical commitment will experience nearly all phenomena as beautiful,
nor to question the truth of this commitment. What does concern me is brought
out by considering a consequence of construing the experience of the world's
beauty as an appreciation of the world's being the product of 'universal reason' or
God—namely, that this experience becomes the privilege of people who share this
metaphysical commitment. This, surely, is an unwelcome consequence. Stoicism
and Christianity are not the only traditions in which pankalic claims are made,
and we should at least try, therefore, to hold open the possibility of someone from
a different tradition experiencing the beauty of the world as a whole.
There is a further reason why the Stoic or the Christian should retain a
space between their experience of the world's beauty and a particular sense of
the metaphysical provenance of the world. When Hadot indicates that aesthetic
perception might be a 'model' of the sage's cosmic consciousness, he intends it
to come as a discovery that aesthetic perception is intimate or even identical with
metaphysical understanding. But this will not be a discovery if the conception
of the aesthetic—of the experience of beauty—has already been invested with,
already been defined by reference to, a particular metaphysics. For what should
have been reached through philosophical reflection will have been guaranteed,
at the outset, through stipulation. If experiencing the world as beautiful already
has built into it the recognition that the world is the product of 'universal reason'
or God, then what promised to be a substantive claim about the relation between
the aesthetic and the cosmic has become a merely analytic one. This cannot be
a result that Hadot, Marcus and Weil could welcome—not if they intend, as
surely they do, that reflection on aesthetic perception is to illuminate a cosmic or
philosophical understanding of reality.
A predicament has emerged. Essential to any conception of aesthetic
experience that could be intimate with that of cosmic consciousness is the
pankalic idea that all natural phenomena may be experienced as beautiful.
Clearly this conception must be 'revisionary,' 'unconventional'—at any rate, it
must be free from those eighteenth-century predilections which have shaped
subsequent understanding of aesthetic experience. But the lesson to be drawn
from the preceding discussion is that revision cannot take the form of investing

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the conception of beauty, at the outset, with metaphysical commitments like those
of Marcus and Weil. Not only would this confine experience of the beauty of the
world to those who share these commitments, but it is liable to render trivial the
claim that aesthetic experience is one with cosmic consciousness.
So the question becomes: can there be a revisionary conception of the
experience of beauty which accommodates the idea of pankalia, and which,
without itself being metaphysically invested, is hospitable to the thought of an
intimacy or identity between this experience and cosmic consciousness? In the
next and final section, I suggest that such a conception is to be found within
Buddhist discourses of beauty.

The Deliverance of The Beautiful'

I R E M A R K E D T H A T S T O I C I S M A N D C H R I S T I A N I T Y A R E N O T T H E O N L Y T R A D I T I O N S I N

which the idea of pankalia has been advanced. Another such tradition is that
of Buddhism. In a canonical sutta {Samyutta Nikdya, 46.54), the Buddha remarks
that one who 'dwells in the deliverance of the beautiful' does not experience
things in terms of their 'repulsiveness' or 'unrepulsiveness,' and in a later sutta
he is credited with refusing to be the Buddha of a land where 'there remains the
distinction between the beautiful and the ugly' (Quoted in Yanagi 1989, p.l30).
As one twentieth-century Buddhist aesthetician, Soetsu Yanagi, emphasises, the
Zen conception of beauty 'makes no room f o r . . . the kind of relative beauty that
is comprehensible only as an antithesis of the ugly' (Yanagi 1989, p. 137).
But we are entitled to ask, as we did of Marcus, what this conception
which transcends the merely 'relative' one might be. One thing is surely clear from
Buddhist texts, ancient and modern. The experience of non-relative beauty—of
everything as beautiful—is an experience variously described as 'ungrasping,'
'non-precoccupied,' 'liberated,' 'free from impediment,' and (to a degree at least)
'enlightened.' There are anticipations here of the Kantian notion of aesthetic
experience as 'disinterested.' But the Buddhist conception is a more radical
one. Pankalic experience is removed from the whole matrix of concepts, goals,
desires, affects, prejudices, and 'mental formations' that shape our everyday,
unenlightened intercourse with the world—experience from which, for example,
any sense of the self as standing apart from the flux and impermanence of the
world is absent. In effect, it is experience that only a person who is 'transformed'
or 'converted' is capable of.
The question remains, however, of what could qualify this 'non-
preoccupied' consciousness as an experience of beauty. To do so, it must, to recall
Aquinas's gloss on beauty, be an 'apprehension' of things that ' i n itself pleases.'
That it is such an apprehension is attested to in Buddhist texts. Terms translated
as 'joy,' 'bliss,' 'rapture,' 'delight' and 'happiness' are frequently employed to
describe the affective dimension of 'liberated' experience of the world as beautiful.
(An especially important term is piti, the name for one of the 'Seven Factors of
Enlightenment,' which has been variously rendered as 'delight,' 'rapture,' and
'joyful interest' in objects of experience (Nyanatiloka 1977, p. 168).)
For some commentators, it is left as a 'brute fact' that when we perceive
things in the 'ungrasping' mode, we experience them with pleasure or delight.
Joel Kupperman, for instance, writes that ' i n the abstract, it would seem equally

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possible that an emptied-out mind would have... negative... experiences': it's just
that, as it happens, Buddhist 'testimonials' show the experiences to be 'positive'
(Kupperman 2006, p. 61). But, the texts do, in fact, provide an explanation of why
the experiences are 'positive.' It is because they are experiences of things as they
are, or in their thusness, and because, as Michael McGhee puts it, we 'delight in
the thusness of things,' in the appearance of things to us when 'ignorance and
delusion retreat' (McGhee 2000, p. 217). He may have in mind texts like sutta 137
of the Majjhima Nikdya, which speaks of the 'kind of joy' experienced when one
'sees [something] as it actually is.' A n d the texts also testify to a further ground
for the pleasure we experience. For, there arises the 'meta-pleasure,' as it were,
of recognizing that one is sufficiently liberated to perceive things as they are.
'Delight' in things, after all, is a 'factor of enlightenment,' and only available,
therefore, to the person who is at least partly enlightened—a state which is itself
cause for further delight.
What has emerged, T suggest, is a Buddhist conception of beauty that
is cogent and sufficiently revisionary to accommodate the idea of pankalia.
It is revisionary in that it requires of the experience of beauty that this be a
self-conscious experience of things as they are. This contrasts with the familiar
view, deriving from Kant and other eighteenth-century authors, that aesthetic
perception is directed towards 'appearances' that may well not manifest things
as they really are.
Unlike the revisionary conceptions of Marcus Aurelius and Simone
Weil, however, the Buddhist conception is metaphysically modest. Nothing
corresponding to creation by a loving God or production by 'universal reason'
is built into the Buddhist notion of what it is to experience a thing as beautiful.
Admittedly there is reference to experience of a thing's 'thusness,' of things 'as
they are.' But this is to be understood as the experience enjoyed by people who
are liberated, converted or enlightened, not as an experience of the world under
some contentious metaphysical description of it. Nor is aesthetic experience, for
the Buddhist, invested from the outset with the guarantee that this will be a cosmic
consciousness in Hadot's sense. If it is intimate with or inseparable from cosmic
consciousness, this is something that will only emerge on further reflection. The
thesis of intimacy will therefore be a substantive thesis.
While that thesis is not built into the Buddhist conception of beauty, this
conception is nevertheless 'hospitable' to the thesis. It allows, at the very least,
for the possibility that aesthetic perception will be cosmic, for it is left open that
it is only for a cosmic conscioiisness that things will figure as they are, in their
'thusness.' But one can go further: the Buddhist conception actually encourages
such a conclusion. Reflection on what led to the conception will, that is, encourage
the further thought that to experience beauty is to experience the world cosmically.
Yanagi writes that 'the sense of beauty is born when the opposition
between subject and object has been dissolved . . . and [both] have vanished into
the realm of Non-dual Entirety' (1989, p. 152). I take this remark to condense
the following reflections. What fundamentally characterises the 'preoccupied,'
'grasping' mode of everyday experience from which someone is 'liberated'
when perceiving all things as beautiful is its complicity with—its being 'tainted'
with—a sense of the self or subject as disjoined from the environmental flux

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116 David E. Cooper
which is experienced. In the case of the liberated or enlightened person, who is
now capable of experiencing beauty, this disjunction or opposition is 'dissolved.'
Already, then, we have in place two of the four components of Hadot's
cosmic consciousness. It is a 'transformed' consciousness, since it is liberated
and enlightened, and it incorporates a vivid sense of 'our unity with the world.'
Further reflection, moreover, suggests that the Buddhist experience of beauty
contains a third component, for it is a 'holistic' experience of the world, and not
one of the world as 'an ensemble of things.' This is because the recognition, by
the liberated person, that the self is not an entity set against other entities is part
of a wider appreciation that nothing—no thing—is a discrete, independent entity
with 'own-being.' For the enlightened perceiver—to invoke the famous image
of 'Indra's net'—each thing perceived 'reflects' all other things, and thereby
evokes the world as a whole. The fourth component i n Hadot's account of cosmic
consciousness—that it is not a merely theoretical awareness of the world, but a
'lived relationship' to it—is attested to in countless Buddhist texts that contrast
mere propositional knowledge with an understanding that is 'deeply cultivated.'
The latter, unlike the former, necessarily brings with it a changed stance towards
the world, a new register of affective states. 'What, bikkhus, is full understanding?,'
asks the Buddha, and answers his own question by referring to 'the extinction of
greed, aversion and delusion' that such understanding necessarily incorporates
{Samyutta Nikdya, 22.23).
Pierre Hadot is right to raise the prospect of an intimate association
between aesthetic awareness and cosmic consciousness. If I am right, however, it
is not i n the writings on which he concentrates, notably the Meditations of Marcus
Aurelius, that this association is most cogently made. In the attempt to secure
the pankalic possibility of everything being perceived as beautiful, Marcus, like
Simone Weil after him, invests the notion of beauty with a metaphysical content
from which it needs to be kept free. It is in a different tradition, that of Buddhism, I
have argued, that there is articulated a conception of beauty which, although itself
metaphysically modest, welcomes both the idea of pankalia and the intimacy to
the point of identity between the experience of beauty and a cosmic consciousness
in Hadot's sense. More succinctly: the world as it figures for the Buddhist sage
is an aesthetic phenomenon, cp

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