New York Diary

Beauty, Goodness, Truth: What Socrates Got Wrong

Read: Death in Venice. (Also read, as a direct result of having read Mann: Plato's Phaedrus.)

Death in Venice is a complicated and excellent little book. I'm left a bit confused as to what's going on intellectually, however. On the one hand, Aschenbach moves from being a determined, cerebral, prominent and dignity-filled author to being a debased man ruled by his passions. The sense of duty and level-headedness that had guided his earlier working life disappears swiftly once he sees Tadzio, a youth of extraordinary beauty. Aschenbach abandons his writing, his steadfastness, and his well-considered plans to flee Venice. He leaves behind all dignity, as well: the writer sneaks around the city following Tadzio; he has his hair colored and makeup applied in order to look younger and more desirable to the boy; and he ultimately dies of an easily-avoidable bout of cholera because he could not bring himself to leave the diseased city where Tadzio is staying. In one way, then, this story is about the decline of an old man who, once having let his passions get the better of him even for an instant, is caught inexorably in a downward spiral.

But there are hints, too, that this is not precisely a bad thing (and it is this that leads to my confusion). Clearly, Aschenbach's obsession with Tadzio draws him from the cerebral to the passionate, from diligence to distraction and leisure. One of his best and most admired works comes out of his passion and preoccupation, however. Moreover, Aschenbach himself is filled with joy at even just the sight of Tadzio (to whom he never speaks). Perhaps most tellingly, though, are the constant references to Plato's Phaedrus, in which Socrates (ironically and seriously, in turns) extols love and lovers. "Beauty," the Phaedrus tells us, "is the only form of intellectuality which we perceive with, and can tolerate with, our senses. Otherwise, what would become of us if the godhead, if reason and Goodness and Truth were to make themselves directly known to our senses? Would we not perish and burn up from love...? Beauty is therefore the path taken by a man of feeling to achieve the intellectual." Tadzio's extreme beauty, which drives Aschenbach to destruction, is also represented as a kind of Platonic Ideal, then. Moreover, it seems like an appreciation of the boy's beauty ought to form the perfect bridge between the cerebral and the passionate within Aschenbach himself.

Yet somehow the boy's beauty ends up not as the apotheosis of some divine or near-divine thing (as it ought to in a story that parallels the Phaedrus, in which Socrates points out that Eros, too, is a god), but rather as something like a "gateway vice." Aschenbach's initial appreciation of Tadzio is intellectual, perhaps even spiritual (or so he tells himself, and it seems plausible to believe it): the great writer notices a perfection of form, and himself reflects upon Plato, Beauty, and the nature of divinity. In fact, we might say that Aschenbach allows himself to fall in love with Tadzio only because his beauty is so easily intellectualized. Having let down his guard and opened the door to passion and feeling even just a little, however, Aschenbach is overwhelmed, and ultimately doomed.

Yet perhaps this makes sense. After all, Aschenbach is not a "man of feeling" whom sensed beauty can move towards the more intellectual. He is an intellectual and reason-driven man already; and his indulgence of passion and worldly feelings, even in the dignified way of his early encounters with Tadzio, can only lead him astray. Aschenbach never perceives a physical, sensible instantiation of Goodness or Truth, but his appreciation of Beauty is sufficient to destroy him. Ironically and pathetically, then, Aschenbach ultimately does "perish and burn up from love."

posted by Skay @ 9:27 PM