Categories of the beautiful and the sublime, and their representation in fictional characters or tropes will be analyzed in this lecture.
According to Socrates, the world is logical and harmonious, and everything in it is aimed at some goal—which is what makes it beautiful. The truth, kindness, and beauty are intertwined and together form goodness. Understanding of beauty as divine, or the absolute idea’s embodiment in everyday things and phenomena remained until late in history and was questioned only in the eighteenth century for the first time. Does beauty reveal itself in the objective characteristics of nature, or is it determined by human consciousness, by the specificity of our rational understanding and sensuous perception? And if beauty is an immanent quality of nature, is it possible to literally grasp beauty per se, as a mineral in its purest condition? Patrick Süskind uses this physical metaphor of beauty. The protagonist of his novel is trying to catch and grab this natural substance, meaning its most excellent and desirable creation—the female body, a substance that is the quintessence of perfection. Its unique flavor will cause powerful sensations in people, who will tremble in delight, and scream and wail blissfully.
“Her sweat smelled as fresh as the sea breeze, the tallow of her hair as sweet as nut oil, her genitals were as fragrant as the bouquet of water lilies, her skin as apricot blossoms… and the harmony of all these components yielded a perfume so rich, so balanced, so magical, that every perfume that Grenouille had smelled until now, every edifice of odors that he had so playfully created within himself, seemed at once to be utterly meaningless. A hundred thousand odors seemed worthless in the presence of this scent. This one scent was the higher principle, the pattern by which the others must be ordered. It was pure beauty.”
(Patrick Süskind, Perfume; The Story of a Murderer, 1985. Translated by John E. Woods)