The Semantics of Beauty

Abstract

Aquinas holds that beauty is claritas. This is the Truth in its splendor, purity, and glory. Beauty is not a fictional artifact superimposed upon the features of the ordinary world. Beauty lets the essence of things appear as well as their mutual belonging and, sometimes, their cosmic togetherness. Beauty itself is not performable. It is performable, however, as a mise en scène of even the most ordinary objects. They can make beauty appear only through a perfect textuality that issues from rigorous syntax and semantics. An education in reading beauty is an education in catching reality.The present epoch is characterized by the invasion of the "beautiful"-a beauty that is, strictly speaking, functional. It can be admired by virtue of the capacity of "beautiful things" communicated through the flow of mass media, which is, above all, commercial but also political, religious, and cultural. These media strike the senses in unexpected ways; they stupefy and stir the psyche.This beauty is almost exclusively psychological, an efficient means of communication-communication being the principal instrument of address and governance of the masses.Also, this beauty does not generate the surprise of discovery, but rather the tremor of the unexpected. It triumphs in the scene of public ceremonies, in the tools of the theatre of the social baroque as the project of propagation, today as yesterday, of a prodigious faith, against the insidiousness of austerity and the severity of the reforms of customs that are announced from time to time.A dominant figure of the baroque, beauty was then "strangely" not codified. It lets things appear differently than they are according to nature and culture, "culture" being understood as the organized attempt to discover and represent the true with the personal appropriation of the true. 33