Jonathan Costro

Prof. Dickinson

SPC1608

Beauty Beyond Sight

Concerning beauty, it is generally understood either as subjective or objective. 18th

century philosopher David Hume argued the subjective that “Beauty is no quality in things in of

itself: it exist merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different

beauty” (qtd in “Sartwell, Crispin”). One need only ask a random stranger about beauty to see that

Hume’s understanding of beauty is the modern one for the person most likely will say that beauty

is in the eye of the beholder. However over a thousand years before Hume, Plotinus (a

Neoplatonist) decreed, “We hold that all loveliness in this world comes by communion with the

Ideal-form” (qtd. in “Sartwell, Crispin”). Plotinus names beauty as the ideal-form that an object

has to be connected to in order for it to be lovely. By his thinking, beauty lived beyond the mind

and existed as an essential aspect that made up the fabric of reality. Despite their differences, both

understood that any aspect of reality possessed worth because it was beautiful. For the whole

purpose of seeing beauty in the eye of the beholder is that people are enticed to different people,

places, and object. Furthermore, what people hold as lovely, they pursue desperately whether it be

money, their job, or the love of their life. Yet, humans universally pursue certain ideals such as

love, truth, justice, peace, order, or goodness. Because all humans chase after these ideals, beauty

must go beyond human sight to bear an object presence in and itself, and must affect the human

mind in some way. If beauty goes beyond the sight and mind of humans, then it is obviously

objective.
 To clarify, beauty matters because humans pursue what they consider beautiful and the

universal search for these ideals ties them together with beauty. Beauty has always forces

humans to pursue the aspects of beauty, as George Baudelaire states, “even in the centuries

which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has

always found satisfaction.” However, these ideals are vague as no one know what a person

means stating they fight for justice, so humans use their experiences to associate them with other

beliefs. For instance, a family at cracker barrel who gets furious at the injustice of waiting an

hour for their meal does so because they associate justice with being nourished before hunger,

and justice remains alive in beauty. Beauty dictates how humans view the world, and in return,

how humans interpret the world dictates what they associate as beautiful. Merely looking at two

of the greatest propaganda machines of the modern age can demonstrate how this understanding

works. Indeed, the German people being convinced by Nazi Film Propaganda that the Jews

transgressed against German purity proves this theory, when looked upon in a new light.

Disturbingly, the Nazis used the aspect of beauty known as goodness to convince the

German people of how the very existence of the Jews transgressed against the Germans. For ages

people have associated greatness with goodness. Alexis de Tocqueville famously remarked,

“America is great, because she is good. If she ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.”

Left in a slump after World War I, the German people hit the extreme opposite of greatness in

the depression of the 1930s. Writing an intriguing essay, Dietrich Orlow portrays the German

Republic and economy of the time as being destroyed by Chancellor Bruning. He examines

another author’s account on the matter, “Bruning’s fanatic (and fatal) belief that through

monetary policies alone he could both achieve the political reconstructing he desired, and bring

about economic recovery” (Orlow 67). The German nation had fallen on its knees. One of the
most evil men to ever live became a symbol of goodness to the German people by making them a

great nation again, which brought life to the pride of the German people in their heritage. With

Hitler an almost demonic belief reigned supreme which associated goodness or virtue with the

purity of the German people as greater than any other race, and that the Jews transgressed against

this purity. Hitler partly indoctrinated this belief in them through the art of films. Jennifer

Hansen’s essay on the strategies of Nazi cinema in the Third Reich and Scot Spector’s analysis

of their ideology should reveal this association upon examination.

In her fascinating account on the Nazi film Der ewige Jude, Jennifer Hansen brings to

light how Fritz Hippler (a follower of Hitler) manipulated the German people through the

propaganda in his films. Hansen writes, “Der ewige Jude is infamous for being not only

offensively anti-Semitic and even genocidal, but for constructing in the process a false reality

though illusion and cinematic trickery” (81). Depicting a false reality, Hippler felt he had the

“task of aligning the popular imagination with the iconography of race and nation” (Hansen 83).

This false reality presents the Jew as an unseen parasite “corrupting its [German Civilization’s]

music, art, and culture” (Hansen 87). The word parasite which the “documentary” uses to

describe Jews signifies powerful imagery, for a parasite not only sucks the life out of the host,

but it also brings diseases which make the blood impure. Notably, Hansen records from the

narration, “we recognize that here is a plaque that threatens the health of the Aryan people” (88).

Hippler’s reference to the Aryan people refers to his belief that goodness was inherent within the

purity of German blood. His propaganda wrongfully declared to the German people that the Jews

threatened the survival of the pure, in the same way as a plague threatens life. Although Hansen

does give a vivid tale of how Nazis used propaganda to convince the German people of the Jews’
transgression through German association of goodness with their purity, the imagery which Scot

Spector examines could not paint a better picture of this.

With his examination of German films in the Third Reich, Scott Spector discusses films

which clearly show the ideologies of German purity, while remarking on the fact that the films

were for entertainment. On one page Spector recounts from a film, “The dying body of the boy

who has struggled… for self- realization in the Hitler Youth dissolves into the image of the

wavering flag, representing something greater than death” (Spector 480). Illustrating the

elevation of the German people to a state of immortalization, the film represents what the

German people had associated with goodness. However, the truly unsettling imagery comes in

the film Jew Suss. It perfectly shows the “Nazi anti-Semitic stereotype (Jewish greed,

sneakiness, lust for Aryan women, Jews’ desire to pass as something they are not, and so on)”

(Spector 468). In the film a Jew named Joseph Suss Oppenheimer rapes the “flawless, pure,

innocent,” and Arian lady, Dorothea. The imagery of a Jew defiling a “pure and unblemished”

girl, a member of the “perfect” race, should stagger all from the length the German filmmakers

went through to defame and debase the Jews. The filmmaker outright declares with this scene in

the film how the Jews not only defile what the Germans believe to be good in the world, but also

they contaminate their most precious treasures. While associating goodness with the purity of the

German people as if they were encapsulated within the idea of an innocent young women, Nazi

films accuse the Jews of trying to steal that goodness.

Spector and Hansen’s examination of Nazi films attaching goodness to German purity

has shown how the theory of beauty works. Again, beauty causes humans to pursue these ideals

such as goodness that are the universal frameworks by which they understand the world. In

pursuing these ideals, humans use what they see with their eyes, whether it be propaganda or real
life experiences, to associate them with beliefs, values, or just how the world works. It is not that

the Germans in their propaganda and actions actually pursued what was good, but rather because

this propaganda was pervasive in German society, they associated it with goodness and it then

lead to the death of millions of innocent Jews. Obviously, this version of goodness became

beautiful to them in that anti-Semitism still remains present in modern German society. Nico

Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth inspect the German General Social Survey performed by

Germany on their people in 1996 and 2006. These surveys “contain data from 5300 respondents

[the ones who have German parents or grandparents out of the true 6800 respondents] in 264

towns or cities (Voigtländer and Voth 2). They write, “17% of German respondents felt that Jews

should blame themselves for their own persecution, 25.7% were uncomfortable with the idea of a

Jew marrying into their family.” The Nazis and their propaganda so infused this association of

goodness with German purity that even fifty years after the death of Hitler a sizable proportion of

the German people still believe in its beauty (Voigtländer and Voth 2). Truly, it is saddening that

they would focus so tightly on one aspect of beauty that they completely lost sight of what

goodness even was and pursued the annihilation of an entire race.

In conclusion, the linking of goodness with German purity propagated by Nazi films

shows how this theory works. As seen, beauty lives within justice, pleasure, goodness, truth, and

other ideals, so humans doggedly pursue them. However, these ideals also make up the human

framework of viewing the world. Humans see the world in terms of whether or not it is

pleasurable. Whether or not it is true. Whether or not it is good. Beauty, in this this way, does

determine how humans view the world, while humans interpret the aspect of beauty through their

life to determine what they perceive as beautiful. Remarking on human perception of the world,

David Eagleman states, “Eventhough we accept the reality that’s presented to us, we’re really
only seeing a little window of what’s happening.” Beauty is a painting that entices humans to

gaze upon the world, but they perceive the world through the microscopic lens of their lives. This

theory of an objective beauty matters because it suggests humans have the ability to judge if the

belief they associate with an aspect of beauty truly represents that ideal, and work together with

other humans toward a greater perspective of the world that magnifies all of beauty in

completion. For according to Martin Luther King Jr “a human has not started living until he can

rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of

humanity.”

By writing, “everyone therefore must become divine, and of godlike beauty, before he

can gaze upon God and the beautiful itself,” Plotinus appears to have failed understanding that

different people truly hold different beliefs beautiful, for they pursue them vigorously (Plotinus

8). While Hume grasped this in stating, “One Person may even perceive deformity, where

another is sensible of beauty,” he failed to recognize that humans do pursue certain ideals

universally (qtd. in “Sartwell, Crispin”). When stating “every individual ought to acquiesce in his

own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of other,” Hume could not have imagined

the horror of Nazi German that the German propaganda sensitized the people to see as beautiful

(qtd. in “Sartwell, Crispin”). In seeing beauty in the eye of the beholder, Hume could not see the

truth of beauty. The truth that an objective beauty bombastically reaches far beyond sight to

become the veil which humans see the world through.

 Work Cited

Hansen, Jennifer. "The Art and Science of Reading Faces: Strategies of Racist Cinema in the

Third Reich." Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, vol. 28, no. 1,

Fall2009, pp. 80-103. EBSCOhost,

db26.linccweb.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9

h&AN=47532466&site=ehost-live.

Orlow, Dietrich. "The Historiography of the Decline of Bruning and the Rise of the Nazis:

Comment and Review Article." Central European History (Brill Academic Publishers),

vol. 17, no. 1, Mar. 1984, p. 63. EBSCOhost,

db26.linccweb.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9

h&AN=5698218&site=ehost-live.

Plotinus. An Essay on the Beautiful. Translated by Thomas Taylor, 2009.

"Beauty." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 3rd ed., 2014.

Spector, Scott. "Was the Third Reich Movie-Made? Interdisciplinarity and the Reframing of

'Ideology.'." American Historical Review, vol. 106, no. 2, Apr. 2001, pp. 460-484.

EBSCOhost,
 db26.linccweb.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9

h&AN=4424619&site=ehost-live.

Voigtländer, Nico and Hans-Joachim Voth. "Nazi Indoctrination and Anti-Semitic Beliefs in

Germany." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of

America, vol. 112, no. 26, 30 June 2015, pp. 7931-7936. EBSCOhost,

doi:10.1073/pnas.1414822112.