ANIMAL BEAUTY
Excerpt Hillman - A Blue Fire
Kosmos is an aesthetic term which can best be translated as “fitting order.” Therefore it is equally a moral term, used for instance by Aeschylus for “good order,” “good behavior,” “decency,” and by Homer, in the negative kata kosmon for “bad order,” “shamefully.” Liddell and Scott give such translations as “becomingly,” “duly,” “decently”; other connotations are “discipline,” “form,” “fashion.” A second group of meanings refers especially to the world of women, where kosmos is used for ornament, decoration, embellishment, dress and is descriptive of sweet songs and ways of speech. The verb kosmos means “to arrange, adorn, furnish.” Our word cosmetics is closer to the original atmosphere of kosmos than is the Latinate universe.
From the perspective of the Greek word the physical world is an orderly arrangement, a display of palpable things; and so it may be conceived as a whole universe only because of its aesthetic and moral fittingness. Without these sensate echoes, without the aesthetic and moral connotations contained in kosmosy the word today refers only to a vast gasbag, outer, empty, spacey and cold, while the logos of the cosmic is without sweet song. By this I mean that the mode of adequate response to the world as universe is to seek sufficient explanation, to the world as cosmos to seek sufficient appreciation.
Abandoning idealizations, lifting repression, allowing desire admit the profound attachment of our minds to things, of things to each other and their desire to enter and be held in the mind, to be perceived, named, known and loved, the joy in the animals at Adam's recognition, their ennoblement by being spoken of. Each thing needs other things—once called “the sympathy of all things.” Attachment is embedded in the soul of things, like an animal magnetism (Mesmer), a cosmic longing or cosmogonie eros of the Greeks and Freud. The soul's longing does not call for deliverance, rather it reports cosmic dependence, declaring frankly that clutching and clinging are ecological passions of the soul, keeping things in the embrace of each other and maintaining the intercourse of their self-revealing conversations.
When cosmos is understood as the arrangement and expression of things, as the patterning order each event presents, embellishing each event with its own kind of time and fitting space, cosmos becomes the interiority things bring with them rather than the empty universal envelope into which they must be brought….
Cosmos would be the shine in display, the beauty attesting to the presence of soul, the face that claims (Levinas), the form that shapes, the tension that holds, the pathology that limits, and the immediacy afforded by phenomena to one another, their intelligible truth. Here, truth too shifts from noetic and universal coherence to the inherence of behavior: remaining true to itself, true to form, true to its nature, in law abiding—truth and law indistinguishable from beauty.
Here I turn to the work of the late Adolf Portmann, the eminent Basel zoologist and philosopher of nature. He demonstrated that selbstdarstellung or display of interiority is as essential to organic life as are the useful behaviors of survival. Animal life is biologically aesthetic: each species presents itself in designs, coats, tails, feathers, furs, curls, claws, tusks, horns, hues, sheens, shells, scales, wings, songs, dances. And this display of secondary qualities is primordial. The aesthetic is rooted in biology. Nothing precedes it genetically. The coat of an animal is phylogenetically prior to the optical structures necessary for seeing the coat. To show is primarily to show— secondarily to be seen. There are creatures in ocean deeps where no light falls which nonetheless have brilliant colors that can never be perceived; and there are symmetrical markings on primitive oceanic organisms that bear no useful purpose, neither for camouflage against enemies, attractions for breeding, signaling, staking territory, lures for prey. Sheer appearance for its own sake, or what Portmann also calls “unaddressed phenomena.” Sheer appearance as purpose of its own, recalls Kant's notion of the aesthetic as “purposiveness without purpose.” And more: sheer appearance as its own purpose recalls the original aesthetic meanings of kosmos—”ornament, decoration, embellishment, dress.” An animalized cosmology restores the aesthetic to primary place. To restore this aesthetic sense of cosmos therefore requires giving first place to animals.
(“Cosmos,” 287, 298–299, 294)