Why Do Students Misread “The Ugly Duckling,” or In Defense of Beauty as an Essential Spiritual Good

 

    I read a student paper last semester that argued against sharing Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Ugly Duckling” with children because of its emphasis on beauty. This struck me because I did share it with my children for the same reason. The student and I, however, mean very different things by beauty. The student read the transformation of the ugly duckling into the swan as an allegory for a homely girl hitting puberty and becoming beautiful in the sense of sexy, like a model. This understanding of beauty is familiar to us all. Dissatisfaction with the body is commonplace in industrial (or post-industrial) society. In place of the standard of health, our culture imposes narrowly defined physical ideals that exclude most real bodies. These “models” – reductive forms of beauty marketed as norms – create deep suffering, especially among the young. Girls and boys alike are taught to measure themselves against artificial images of desirability, while true beauty—often visible in health, strength, and character—is obscured. The result is a lifelong struggle to “accept one’s body,” driven by industries that exploit insecurity while pretending to heal it. The cure is part of the disease. The sufferer becomes a customer.[1]

      I agree with the student: if that is what beauty is about in “The Ugly Duckling” – if the swan is an allegory for the model – I reject it, too. But I deny the antecedent: that has nothing to do with the love of beauty as exemplified in “The Ugly Duckling.” That story draws on a much older and deeper understanding of beauty. True beauty is a spiritual good. Modern culture, however, reduces beauty to appearance, indeed to a commodity. Enclosed within the bubble of modern culture, it is no wonder that even capable, well-meaning students are blind to this aspect of the story. I want to present an argument for the deeper conception of beauty as a need of the soul; then offer a sketch of an explanation of why it is that capitalist society is blind to it.

 

Plato and Platonism

     Beauty, in the classical tradition, is not an ornament added to reality but one of its deepest features. In both Platonic and Thomistic thought, beauty is what philosophers call a transcendental, which means: something that is not limited to a particular kind of thing, but that applies to all beings as such. In this tradition, to be is to be intelligible (truth), to be desirable (goodness), and also to be beautiful. Wherever something truly exists, beauty, goodness, and truth are present in some measure, even if they are obscured or not immediately perceived. This understanding stands in stark contrast to modern views that treat beauty as merely subjective, a matter of individual taste or social construction. For Plato and Aquinas, beauty is not a personal projection onto things, but a quality that is discovered as well as a feature of being that calls forth a response.

        Plato describes the experience of beauty in visionary and mythic terms. In the Phaedrus, he offers one of his most elaborate allegories of the soul, comparing it to a charioteer guiding a pair of winged horses. One horse is noble, disciplined, and obedient to reason; the other is unruly, passionate, and easily led astray. The charioteer represents reason or intellect. When the soul in its earthly life sees true beauty, it is reminded of the beauty it once saw in the divine realm, before it fell into the material world. This memory causes the wings of the soul to tremble and begin to regrow. Beauty, then, is not just attractive; it is recollective. It reawakens the soul’s memory of its former vision of truth, justice, and especially beauty itself.

      The horses in the allegory symbolize the divided nature of the human being, torn between aspiration and appetite, spirit, and desire as we are. The noble horse wants to ascend, to follow the beautiful vision to its source (love). The unruly horse pulls downward, seeking gratification and possession (addiction). The charioteer, or reason, struggles to govern both. When the soul sees beauty and is stirred, a conflict arises: desire is awakened, but its object is not purely sensual. If the charioteer is strong, and the soul well-trained, beauty will lift the soul upward toward contemplation and virtue. If the lower horse dominates, beauty will be pursued possessively, and the soul will fall back into confusion and disorder.

      This allegory expresses Plato’s conviction that beauty plays a central role in moral education. The soul is not moved to virtue by argument alone; it must be drawn, enchanted, even troubled by what is higher and more real. Beauty has this power. It causes “divine madness,” Plato says, which is not the madness of chaos of inspiration, of being taken out of oneself and lifted toward the divine. The person who loves rightly begins by loving the beauty of the beloved’s body but is led beyond it to love the soul, of which the body is like a picture (Wittgenstein).

      At the beginning of the Phaedrus, Phaedrus is enchanted by a speech of Lysias, which argues that it is better for a young boy to give his favors to a non-lover than to a lover. The non-lover, being rational and self-controlled, will not be driven by jealousy or obsession, and will thus treat the boy more fairly. Love (eros), on this account, is destabilizing, irrational, and dangerous. Socrates initially responds with a speech that mimics this logic, conceding that love is a kind of madness. But he quickly reverses himself. Claiming he has committed impiety by slandering love, he offers a second, deeper speech: the myth of the chariot soul. This myth does not merely praise love; it redefines it as something potentially divine.

     This shift in the dialogue reframes both the nature of love and of rhetoric. Socrates now identifies eros not as blind appetite but as a spiritual longing awakened by beauty. When rightly governed, it leads the soul upward toward truth. Beauty, perceived in another person, acts as a mediator between sense and reason, between the unruly appetites (the lower horse) and the intellect (the charioteer). The lover, far from being a danger to the beloved, becomes a guide leading the soul of the beloved upward through admiration and shared desire. The dangerous madness of love becomes, in Socrates’ revision, divine madness, a force that brings the soul into contact with the eternal.

     This has serious implications for rhetoric. The speech of Lysias is not simply wrong in content; it is false in form. It flatters conventional opinion. It aims at persuasion without truth. It appeals to self-interest rather than the good. It is what Plato will later call rhetoric without dialectic – a technique of manipulation, not a pursuit of wisdom. Socrates, by contrast, offers a model of true rhetoric, which guides the soul toward self-knowledge and truth by awakening its memory and desire. Such rhetoric must be erotic – not in the sense of being sexually charged, but in being attuned to what the soul truly longs for. It must speak not only to the intellect, but to the imagination, the passions, the moral memory. It must pass, as C. S. Lewis might say, through the chest.

     This helps better understand Socrates’ relationship to Phaedrus. Phaedrus is not just an audience; he is the object of Socrates’ loving instruction. He begins the dialogue under the spell of bad rhetoric and a reductive view of love. Socrates does not shame him, but leads him out, not only by argument, but by erotic pedagogy, by letting him feel the soul-moving force of a truth that elevates rather than flatters. In this sense, Socrates plays the part of the lover described in his own speech: one who, having seen beauty, is struck by reverence, guided by reason, and moved to share that vision with the beloved. His eros is philosophical, but not bloodless. It is charged with the power of beauty to mediate between the divine and the human.

     The implication is this: beauty and eros are not enemies of reason or rhetoric, but their necessary intermediaries. Without them, speech becomes flattery, and reason becomes sterile. Schiller saw this too, when he argued that beauty restores the harmony of the human soul. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, called this the chest: the seat of rightly ordered sentiment. Plato, Schiller, and Lewis each recognize that if love and beauty are excluded from education and rhetoric, we are left with nothing but appetites below and abstractions above. Only when the soul is trained to love the beautiful can it learn to see, to speak, and to live rightly.

    In the Symposium, Plato’s character Diotima describes love as a ladder of ascent from the love of one beautiful body, to many, to the beauty of souls, to laws and customs, and finally to “the form of Beauty itself,” which is eternal, unchanging, and pure (Symposium 210a–211d). This account has often been read as suggesting that individual persons are stepping stones – temporary appearances – on the way to a higher and more abstract, purely spiritual reality. But such an interpretation – while perhaps in accord with Plato’ intentions – distorts a deeper insight opened up in the dialogue. Martha Nussbaum, in The Fragility of Goodness, challenges the view that the lover should “leave the world of particular human beings behind” as he climbs the ladder (p. 180). She argues instead that the value of the beloved is not surpassed or discarded but deepened through the ascent. The individual person becomes more, not less, beautiful when seen as an image or embodiment of divine beauty. Love begins in the body not to escape it, but to teach the soul how to recognize the radiance of form – what Plato calls “the eternal nature of beauty” – shining through the particular (Symposium 211d–212a).

     On this view, beauty is not something we abstract away from persons and things, but something that is made manifest in them. The beloved’s body, voice, gesture, and presence are not illusions or distractions, but revelations of something more real than utility or surface appeal. The philosophical lover is not someone who ceases to value the beloved’s particularity, but someone who sees more deeply into it, who perceives its meaning as a trace of the eternal. As Nussbaum puts it, the love of beauty does not require “a flight from the human, but a reverent seeing of it” (Fragility, p. 179). This reading harmonizes with the sacramental intuition found in Christian Platonism: that the visible world is good and real, and that beauty does not lie in escaping it, but in perceiving the light that transfigures it from within.

        This vision of beauty is central to Plato’s moral psychology. The one who responds properly to beauty is not the one who seeks to possess it, but the one who follows its light. Beauty calls us to attention, to reverence, and to transformation. In the Phaedrus, the lover who truly sees the beauty of another person is led not toward domination, but toward purification. He begins to love what the beautiful reveals, not merely the surface that first attracted him. Beauty educates desire by giving it a direction: not downward into appetite, but upward into virtue and truth. Thus, even erotic desire can be re-formed and ennobled, if it is awakened by true beauty and a disciplined conforming of the mind and the heart with reality, a reality that is hidden from the sensually-minded, appetite-driven.

      When Alcibiades bursts in, drunk and emotional, he offers a speech that seems at first out of place in the elevated tone of the evening. But it is, in fact, the climax of the dialogue—a dramatic testimony to the kind of love Socrates inspires, and the confusion that love can produce in someone who is both attracted and resistant to virtue. Alcibiades confesses that he tried to seduce Socrates, using his beauty as bait, offering himself in exchange for wisdom. But Socrates does not respond as expected. He resists, not because he is cold or indifferent, but because he refuses to treat Alcibiades as an object or to use eros for pleasure. He sees in Alcibiades not just a beautiful youth but a soul capable of greatness. He wants Alcibiades not for himself, but for the good of Alcibiades. He wants to lead him upward, not follow him downward.

       Martha Nussbaum, in The Fragility of Goodness, offers a somewhat skeptical reading of Socrates here, seeing him as almost superhuman or inhuman. He resists love so completely that he seems incapable of vulnerability. But another reading is possible, especially when interpreted through the lens of the Phaedrus. In that dialogue, the noble lover does not give in to the unruly horse—the pull of physical desire—but struggles to guide both his own soul and the beloved’s toward the truth. This is precisely what Socrates is doing with Alcibiades. His resistance is not rejection; it is reverence. He honors Alcibiades by refusing to treat him as a means to pleasure.

     With Phaedrus, the relationship is gentler, more pedagogical. Phaedrus is young, idealistic, enchanted by rhetoric. Socrates corrects and educates him through a kind of playful dialectic. He uses myth, irony, and philosophical charm to show Phaedrus the soul’s deeper desires and the danger of manipulation in speech. Their encounter is a turning point for Phaedrus. It is not traumatic, but transformative. Socrates is the guide who helps him see through false rhetoric and awaken to a better love.

        With Alcibiades, the relationship is more dramatic, even tragic. Alcibiades is brilliant, ambitious, and torn. He desires greatness but is enslaved to his image and appetites. He desires Socrates but also resents him. Socrates, for his part, loves Alcibiades deeply but refuses to flatter or possess him. His love is erotic, moral, and philosophical all at once. He sees the potential of Alcibiades’ soul and wants to save it but he cannot force the ascent. He can only remain true to the vision of love he teaches: that to love someone truly is to desire their good above all.

       These two portraits – Socrates with Phaedrus and Socrates with Alcibiades – together reveal Plato’s full vision of philosophical eros. It is not cold, nor is it self-indulgent. It is the power that draws the soul upward. It does this not by repressing desire, but by transforming it. Beauty awakens love, love draws the soul, and philosophy gives it direction. Socrates, as lover, does not deny desire; he redeems it.

      In this view, beauty is not the opposite of truth or goodness, but their companion. The true, the good, and the beautiful are not rival ideals. They are three ways of approaching what is ultimately one: the fullness of being. To perceive beauty rightly is to begin to perceive the world as it truly is, the person as they truly are: as ordered, meaningful, and radiant with purpose. It is also to be awakened to our own vocation: to know the truth, to love the good, and to rejoice in what is beautiful. In a world that often separates these pursuits (or even denies that they are real at all), the recovery of beauty as a transcendental is both a philosophical and spiritual task. For Plato, beauty is not a distraction from reality. It is one of the surest ways to find our way back to it.

Aquinas on Beauty

   Aquinas’s account of beauty is compact but foundational. While he never composed a systematic treatise on aesthetics, his scattered remarks, especially in the Summa Theologiae, offer a coherent framework that unites metaphysics, anthropology, and theology. For Aquinas, beauty (pulchrum) is closely related to the good (bonum), but the two differ in how they affect the soul. “Pulchra enim dicuntur quae visa placent” (“Those things are called beautiful which, when seen, please” – pardon the Latin, I am learning that language now!) (ST I, q. 5, a. 4 ad 1). The good is what all things seek; it is the object of desire. The beautiful, however, is what delights when apprehended. Thus, while beauty is a kind of goodness, it is a goodness that pleases through vision, or more broadly, through intellectual perception or contemplation.

     Aquinas teaches that beauty and goodness are really the same thing. However, they are distinguished by how they are apprehended. The good is that which is desired; the beautiful is that which is pleasing when seen. Both refer to what is real and perfect in being, but they are experienced differently. Beauty delights the soul not just because it is useful or moral but because it reveals order, harmony, and radiance. When we behold something beautiful, we do not want to use it or consume it; we want to gaze upon it, to contemplate it. Beauty thus draws us out of ourselves. It is the quality of being that elicits a disinterested, yet deeply joyful response. It is a kind of intuitive recognition that this thing, whatever it is, is fitting, meaningful, and complete.

    Aquinas lists three conditions for beauty: integrity (integritas), proportion (proportio), and clarity (claritas) (ST I, q. 39, a. 8). Integrity means that a thing is whole and complete, not lacking in what belongs to its nature. Proportion refers to harmony, symmetry, or the fitting relation of parts to each other and to the whole. Clarity refers to radiance or the manifestation of form, especially in relation to the mind. The beautiful thing is not chaotic or obscure; it shows itself. For Aquinas, beauty is not merely a surface phenomenon, but a metaphysical quality that reveals the inner truth of a thing. It pleases not by tickling the senses but by satisfying the soul’s desire for intelligible order and meaningful form.

     Aquinas’s account of beauty becomes even more profound when placed in the context of his metaphysics of being and creation. For Aquinas, being is not a static quality but an act: esse is the actualization of form in existence. Everything that exists participates in the divine act of being, which is ultimately identical with God’s own essence. God alone is ipsum esse subsistens – subsistent being itself. All creatures receive their existence from Him as a gift (ST I, q. 3, a. 4; De Potentia q. 7, a. 2). This vision of reality implies that the world is not a closed mechanism or a self-contained object but a dynamic unfolding of intelligible form grounded in divine love. It is from this metaphysical backdrop that beauty arises: not as surface decoration, but as the radiance of being, shining forth from things that exist in accordance with their intelligible nature (ST I, q. 5, a. 4; q. 39, a. 8).

        Aquinas’s view of creation draws on Augustine’s idea that the forms or Ideas of things exist eternally in the mind of God. Every creature, from the most rational to the most humble, expresses in its own way an aspect of divine wisdom. Creation, then, is not simply made by God but is like a divine artwork. “The whole world,” Aquinas writes, “is like a work of art produced by the divine wisdom” (ST I, q. 47, a. 1). Just as a human artist imposes form upon matter to make beauty intelligible, so God, in an infinitely higher way, reveals His own Being (in a limited way) through the created things (De Veritate q. 3, a. 1; ST I, q. 15, a. 1). To see the beauty of the world, then, is to perceive – finitely but truly – the mind of God made manifest. Beauty thus has a theological foundation: it is the visibility of form, which in turn is the expression of divine wisdom in created being.

       Roger Scruton finds in Aquinas’s formula a deep resource for resisting modern reductionism. In Beauty, he quotes Aquinas to support the view that beauty is not simply what we like, but what “commands our attention” through form, balance, and radiance. Scruton writes, “We call something beautiful when we gain pleasure from contemplating it as it is, not from using it or wanting it.” He points out that for Aquinas, the delight that arises in the presence of beauty is not private or subjective in the modern sense. It is a natural response to the objective reality of form. Scruton also notes that this kind of beauty, when truly apprehended by a soul capable of doing so, elicits a response of stillness and reverence, not consumption or manipulation.

     Aquinas’s view parallels Plato’s in important ways. Both believe that beauty awakens a movement in the soul toward what is real. Plato emphasizes the soul’s upward movement. Beauty stirs eros and becomes a ladder that leads the mind from bodily desire to the contemplation of eternal form (Symposium 210a–212b; Phaedrus 250b–256e). Aquinas is more anchored in the incarnate world. He sees beauty not as a mere pointer to another realm, but as a real participation in divine being. All creatures reflect the Creator, and beauty is one way that the imago Dei (image of God) shines forth in creation. This is especially clear when Aquinas affirms that “the beautiful and the good in things are identical really, for they are based upon the same thing, namely the form” (ST I, q. 5, a. 4 ad 1).

       Beauty, for Aquinas, is not a luxury but a necessity. It belongs to the perfection of the creature, and it fulfills a need of the rational soul. It satisfies not appetite but intellect, which is our deepest power, that which connects us most closely to God. This is why beauty is especially appropriate to human beings: we are not only embodied but also intellectual, and beauty meets us at the intersection of sense and reason. It invites us to pause, to contemplate, and to rejoice. In that joy, Aquinas sees not a distraction from truth, but a confirmation of it.

 

Kant, Scruton, and the Intimation of Beauty

        Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790) marks an important and paradoxical moment in the history of aesthetics. On one hand, it continues the epistemological radicality of his earlier works. Kant famously separates the phenomenal world, i.e., what we can experience through the forms of intuition and categories of the understanding, from the noumenal world, or things as they are in themselves, which lie beyond our grasp. This division has led many to see him as the origin of modern irrealism and subjectivism: the view that our perceptions are not responses to reality, but constructions within a closed human framework.

     And yet, the Critique of Judgment complicates this picture. For Kant, aesthetic judgment is indeed subjective, but it is not arbitrary, sensuous, or purely emotional. When I call something beautiful, I do not report a private feeling. I make a claim, a claim that others ought to share my pleasure, even though I cannot prove it. This is what Kant calls the judgment’s subjective universality: it does not rely on concepts, and yet it appeals to something in reason that is common to all rational beings. In this way, the experience of beauty points beyond the self. It unites sense and understanding in a free play of the faculties, and this harmonious play gives pleasure because it intimates that the world is not alien or meaningless, but fitted to our minds.

      Importantly, Kant sees this aesthetic experience as purposiveness without a purpose (Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck). The beautiful thing gives the impression of being made for us, of having a form that suits our faculties, though we know it serves no practical or moral end. This 'as if' structure lies at the heart of Kant’s account. It is not that beauty reveals the noumenal realm. (That is what the Sublime does.) But it intimates that the world is not alien to the mind. It’s a hint, not a disclosure; a gesture, not a guarantee. In this sense, Kant offers an echo of the Platonic and Thomistic idea that beauty is intelligible and contemplative. The harmony we find in the beautiful is not conceptually grasped, but it is felt as meaningful, and this feeling has real philosophical weight.

       Roger Scruton, who was deeply influenced by Kant, builds on this insight. He agrees with Kant that beauty is not reducible to private pleasure. Like Kant, he insists that judgments of beauty make a claim about the object, even if they cannot be verified like empirical facts. But Scruton also goes further. He interprets the Kantian 'free play' not as an abstract structure of the mind, but as the ground for a personal, moral, and cultural education. For Scruton, the experience of beauty educates our attention, forms our character, and situates us in a meaningful world. Where Kant remains skeptical about whether beauty reveals anything about things-in-themselves, Scruton treats beauty as a kind of revealed order, which is not demonstrable, but real notwithstanding.

      Thus, even if Kant stops short of affirming that beauty is a property of being itself, his account of aesthetic judgment preserves a vital opening. Through the disinterested contemplation of beauty, we are given a powerful intimation that stops short of conceptual knowledge. It is a deeply felt awareness that reality may be ordered, meaningful, and responsive to the structure of reason and desire. Beauty, in this sense, becomes a meeting place between sense and intellect, between the particular and the universal. It is as if being were shining through, even if we cannot name it as such. Scruton takes this intimation seriously. For him, the experience of beauty is not proof of metaphysical order, but neither is it an illusion. It is a moment in which the soul is formed by what it loves, and learns to see the world not only as useful or available. The truth is that it is something to be revered whether we happen to be able to experience it as such or not.

        Kant’s thinking is not as robust as Plato’s or Aquinas’s. But in the Critique of Judgment, he partly overcomes the pernicious effect of his largely successful attempt to murder metaphysics, preserving at least an intimation of a truth that earlier thinkers had confidently believed in.

      Friedrich Schiller deepens this same insight. In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794), which I read with delight as a student, Schiller argues that beauty mediates between two opposed drives within the human being: the sense drive, which binds us to time, need, and material existence, and the form drive, which seeks unity, order, and rational law. These two powers, roughly corresponding to Plato’s lower and higher horses in the Phaedrus, pull the soul in different directions. Neither, on its own, can lead to human wholeness. The answer, for Schiller, is a third drive: the play drive (Spieltrieb), which arises through the experience of beauty. In beauty, we do not choose between the senses and reason; rather, we are freed to experience both at once, in harmony. The play drive is not frivolous. It is the name for the condition in which the human being can become fully human: neither enslaved to appetite nor alienated by abstract reason, but free, whole, and joyful. In this way, Schiller varies the very line of thought we have traced in Plato, Kant, and Scruton: beauty is not a distraction from the serious life, but its inner condition. It educates the feelings without coercion, reconciles freedom and form, and restores the inner unity without which no real morality, love, or truth is possible.

 

 

 

C. S. Lewis on Beauty, Value, and the Formation of the Soul

      C. S. Lewis, writing in the middle of the twentieth century, confronted a cultural world that had drifted far from the metaphysical foundations we have been tracing. His concern was not merely that people no longer believed in God or beauty or truth, but that they no longer knew what it meant to believe in such things. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis takes up what might seem a minor example: a textbook that 'debunks' the language of a tourist who describes a waterfall as 'sublime.' The authors claim the man is not describing the waterfall but merely his own feelings about it. Lewis sees in this moment a subtle but devastating shift. What has been lost is the sense that value might be in the world – that a waterfall could be objectively sublime, not just because we feel awe, but because the thing itself calls forth a fitting response. For Lewis, this is not just a question of aesthetics. It is the loss of realism about value – shared by Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. In all these traditions, to call something 'beautiful' or 'noble' or 'sublime' is not merely to emote; it is to recognize that the thing itself participates in a moral or metaphysical order, and to be moved rightly by it.

       Lewis's diagnosis is that modern education and culture are training people out of this kind of seeing. We are taught to 'look at' things – to analyze, measure, and manipulate – rather than to 'look along' them, to see their significance from within. This distinction, which he develops in his essay “Meditation in a Toolshed,” recovers something akin to Plato’s ascent through beauty: the realization that true knowledge involves not just detached observation but participation in meaning. Modern science, according to Lewis, has achieved much by bracketing meaning. But when this bracketing becomes a metaphysical claim that there are no meanings that are not purely subjective, that beauty is not in things but in us, then science has overreached, and human understanding has been impoverished. Lewis’s concern is not anti-scientific; it is anti-reductive. He teaches that we cannot live fully as human beings unless we recover a view of the world in which qualities like beauty, truth, and goodness are not merely projected onto reality, but discovered in it.

        For Lewis, the emotions are not irrational by nature. On the contrary, they are the necessary medium through which we apprehend certain kinds of truth (particularly moral and aesthetic truths). He draws on the classical idea, found in Plato and Aristotle, that the task of education is not to suppress emotion, but to form it, to train the affections so that the student will take joy in what is truly admirable and feel aversion to what is base. In this tradition, emotional response is not opposed to reason; it is its servant and fulfillment. Without rightly trained sentiments, reason itself becomes ineffective or perverse. Lewis famously calls this the problem of producing 'men without chests': people whose intellect may be developed, and whose appetites are strong, but whose moral emotions have been hollowed out by skepticism and reductive thinking. The 'chest' is the seat of rightly ordered feeling, and it is precisely this capacity that beauty most profoundly addresses. Beauty trains our attention. It educates desire. It shows us what it means to be drawn out of ourselves in joy, reverence, and delight in a response that is appropriate to the thing as it is.

       For Lewis, beauty is a moral and spiritual teacher. It does not compel us by force, but moves us by love. To be educated in beauty is to become the kind of person who sees clearly, feels rightly, and acts well. This is why the defense of beauty cannot be separated from the defense of truth or goodness. All three belong together, not only as ideals, but as realities that shape the soul. In a world that treats value as subjective and education as technical training, Lewis’s call is radical: to restore the emotions to their rightful place in human life, and to recognize that beauty is essential to our becoming fully human.

 

Summary

     Beauty, in the tradition we have traced from Plato and Aquinas through Kant, Schiller, and Lewis, is not a luxury or a pleasant illusion. It is a vital, irreducible aspect of reality and a central condition for human flourishing. Beauty is not merely in the eye of the beholder, nor is it simply a matter of preference or taste. It is a response to the form of things that reveals their meaningfulness, their intelligibility, their inner harmony. Beauty, rightly understood, is not a surface property but the radiance of being i.e., that which makes truth lovable and goodness desirable.

      In Plato, beauty awakens love and lifts the soul toward what is eternal. In Aquinas, beauty is a transcendental property of all that exists insofar as it is rightly ordered, proportionate, and radiant with intelligibility. In Kant, beauty cannot be known as a property of things-in-themselves, but it still intimates that the world is purposive and meaningful. Schiller recovers beauty’s moral dimension, seeing it as the reconciliation of reason and desire, the path by which human beings become whole. And for Lewis, beauty is not only objective and real; it is a moral teacher, forming the affections so that we can love rightly and judge well. He sees in beauty the last stronghold of a vision of the world in which value is real, not manufactured or projected.

      All of these thinkers agree that beauty matters because it calls us out of ourselves. It educates desire, purifies perception, and reveals that the world is not indifferent or empty, but charged with meaning. Beauty draws us toward participation in what is higher. Without beauty, reason becomes abstract, morality becomes rigid, and desire collapses into appetite. But through beauty, we come to see not only what is lovable in the world, but how to love it well.

 

The Ugly Duckling

   “The Ugly Duckling” is not a tale about a homely child becoming conventionally attractive. It is a story about the misrecognition and eventual revelation of true beauty – beauty as an inner truth of being that is real but not immediately visible, and whose recognition depends on love, suffering, and rightly formed vision. The duckling is not transformed into something he was not; he is revealed to be what he always was. The tragedy lies not in his appearance but in the inability of those around him to perceive the dignity and beauty already present in his nature.

      Vigen Guroian emphasizes that “The Ugly Duckling” is not about outward attractiveness but about the soul’s journey toward its true identity, a journey that requires patience, pain, and ultimately grace. What the duckling desires is not popularity or praise, but a place where he is seen for what he is. This longing is not vanity; it is a longing to be recognized in truth. The suffering he endures is not the loss of beauty but the world’s blindness to it. The story teaches that beauty, like love, must be received through a soul that has been chastened, awakened, and purified.

      The story is, in this sense, Platonic. The duckling’s journey is an ascent from the realm of distorted appearances and misjudgments to the realm of truth, where the beautiful is seen in its fullness. But it is also Thomistic, for the duckling’s beauty is not an ideal abstraction but a concrete form. It is a created being bearing a nature, possessing integrity, proportion, and clarity that shines with the splendor of its form once it is rightly beheld. It is Kantian, too, insofar as the recognition of beauty is not forced or argued into being but comes through a kind of contemplative delight, a disinterested and joyful recognition that “this is fitting,” “this is true.” And finally, it is Schillerian and Lewisian, because the duckling’s story is also a story about formation: how suffering educates the heart, how feeling must be trained, and how beauty prepares the soul to live not by flattery, but by reverence.

      From the very beginning, the ugly duckling is marked not only by rejection but by a strange inner dignity. He is never cruel. He does not retaliate. He does not become hardened or cynical. Instead, he suffers quietly and persists in seeking what he does not yet fully understand. While others mock or strike him, he keeps moving – not to escape pain, but because something in him is drawn forward. He sees beauty around him and is moved by it. He longs for it not to possess it, but to be near it. When he first sees the swans flying overhead, long before he knows he belongs to them, he is overcome with awe. He does not envy them; he reveres them. He cries out after them with a kind of wounded wonder, not yet knowing that their beauty is the key to his identity. This longing, so misunderstood by the world around him, is his first and most faithful guide. It is what Lewis would call a “stab of joy,” a longing for something real, something transcendent, something that speaks to the soul before it knows how to answer.

      That longing is beautiful not because it is satisfied, but because it is true. It is not the desire to be admired, but the desire to be at home in a world that makes sense, where beauty is not punished, but welcomed. And yet the duckling must suffer through a world where beauty is misjudged and punished, where appearances deceive, and where he himself is judged not only wrongly, but unjustly. His suffering is not redemptive in the sense of earning a reward; it is redemptive because it forms his heart. His pain does not embitter him. He never learns cruelty. On the contrary, his suffering sharpens his desire, purifies it, teaches him patience and humility, and leaves him open to receive beauty as a gift, not a possession.

        This is why the duckling’s journey is not simply psychological, but spiritual. The longing for beauty is in him from the beginning. What he suffers is the world’s failure to see. But what he refuses to do is abandon that longing, or to harden his heart against the hope of joy. When, at the end, he sees his reflection and discovers he is a swan, the transformation is not a magical change of nature. It is a moment of recognition – the convergence of identity, memory, and longing. It is not that he becomes beautiful, but that he is finally seen – and can see himself – as he really is.

       The duckling’s perseverance in suffering for the sake of beauty mirrors the deepest human yearning: to be known, to be seen, and to be loved not for usefulness or charm, but for the truth of one’s being. That is what beauty is in this tradition. It is not what pleases the market or stirs envy but what reveals, what draws out love, what awakens the soul. The duckling does not love beauty because he is vain. He loves beauty because he was made for it. And that love, however hidden or humble, is the thread that leads him through suffering to joy.

      Modern readers, conditioned by a commodified and externalized view of beauty, may misread the duckling’s final joy as the triumph of social acceptance, or the moment when he finally becomes desirable in the market of admiration. But Andersen is telling a far older and deeper story. The duckling is not loved because he is beautiful; he is beautiful because he is loved rightly. And in the end, he comes to see himself not through the eyes of judgment or desire, but through the eyes of recognition. He sees the swans, and in them he sees himself, not in a moment of narcissism but of homecoming. His suffering has purified his desire. He does not boast. He does not forget. He enters into joy because he has come into the truth of his being, and because there are now others who can see it too.

    This is what beauty means in the tradition we have been tracing. It is not what flatters, but what reveals. It is not what we demand from the world, but what the world gives us when we look with clear and loving eyes. “The Ugly Duckling” is not a story about becoming beautiful; it is a story about learning to see.

 

Why Modern Readers are Meaning-Blind to the Story

      The modern ideology of autonomy and subjectivism has profoundly reshaped the way individuals relate to truth, goodness, and beauty. In this vision, the human person is understood primarily as a self-creating agent, defined by choice and expression. Milton’s Satan, who declares it is better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven, becomes a tragic archetype of modern autonomy. This heroic rebellion against any external standard or given order makes beauty, once conceived as an objective reality that calls forth reverence, appear instead as a constraint on freedom. Modern selfhood, emphasizing authenticity and spontaneity, leads to a view of beauty not as something discovered, but something invented. As Scruton observes, this mindset flees from the demands of true beauty and settles for kitsch: superficially pleasing, but spiritually empty.

      This ideological shift cannot be separated from the powerful human transformations brought about by the regime of Science-Technology-Capitalism (considered as one interdependent complex). Karl Marx identified the capitalist system as one that distorts human relationships through the fetishism of commodities. In such a world, not only goods but people are treated as objects with exchange value. Identity becomes a brand, worth becomes visibility, and beauty becomes a marketable trait. Rather than being perceived as the radiance of form and the splendor of being, beauty becomes a signal of desirability, useful insofar as it sells. The market teaches that beauty is a matter of preference, that each person defines it for themselves. But in doing so, it strips beauty of its moral and spiritual meaning, reducing it to a temporary advantage in the competition for attention. The ideal of autonomy, once imagined as a tragic rebellion against reality, becomes banal: the consumer is “free” only to curate a lifestyle, to choose among commodities that define identity from the outside in. Autonomy no longer threatens the order of things; rather it preserves the system by producing endlessly customizable selves who believe they are free precisely because they are consuming. In this system, homo economicus replaces the lover of beauty: calculation displaces contemplation, and desire is trained not to transcend but to satisfy.        

        These ideological and economic conditions have produced a culture in which beauty is either commodified, sentimentalized, or desecrated. In a society saturated by images, appearances trump reality, and the self is constructed through performance rather than formed through participation in a shared tradition. The market plays a central role in this transformation, shaping desire through advertising and entertainment, and presenting identity itself as a consumable aesthetic. The advertisement becomes the base cultural form that unites these corruptions: it offers kitsch as comfort, sentiment as flattery, eroticism as product. Autonomy becomes the freedom to curate an image, to express a self through choices among branded lifestyles. There is no longer a common language of value, no sacred order within which beauty can appear as a sign of meaning. Scruton identifies this as a culture of desecration: a deliberate attempt to neutralize the moral authority of beauty by mocking it, trivializing it, or separating it from love and truth. Kitsch gives the illusion of beauty as a narcissistic comfort. Pornography turns beauty into an object of use, severing it from personhood. In both cases, the soul is numbed. Beauty is no longer a window into being, but a mirror for appetite.

      Being on the left (politically, ideologically) used to be associated with a criticism of capitalism and advocacy of universal socialism. Postmodernism on the Left has become one more expression of the logic of Science-Technology-Capitalism. Postmodern left Nietzscheanism (a term often applied to thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, and sometimes Deleuze, though they differ greatly) tends to share Nietzsche’s suspicion of beauty, truth, and moral universals as instruments of power disguised as ideals. From this view, claims to beauty are not responses to reality but (what else?) constructions, that is, part of a cultural system that privileges certain appearances, identities, and narratives over others. Beauty, especially in its classical or moral sense, is seen not as revelation but as exclusion: a way to stigmatize what is “ugly,” “queer,” “non-conforming,” “disabled,” “non-white,” “poor,” etc. (And I am not talking now about real injustice done to people by category.)

      In that frame, a story like “The Ugly Duckling” seems dangerous. On a surface reading, it could be interpreted as a narrative of assimilation, in which the "other" only becomes valuable once he turns out to be “a swan.” In other words, once he conforms to normative standards of beauty. To the postmodern critic, this looks like a story about invisibility and exclusion masquerading as inclusion. The duckling’s suffering would be seen not as a parable of longing and misrecognition, but as a form of violence legitimized by aesthetic norms.

      Thus, beauty becomes suspect because it orders desire and directs attention toward some things and not others. It sets standards. But in the postmodern left-Nietzschean framework, to set a standard is always to exercise power. The deeper claim is: all appeals to universals – truth, goodness, beauty – mask a will to dominate. They are not windows into being; they are tools of social control. And thus the so-called Left embodies the logic of capitalism rather than transcending this logic.

       Modern and postmodern cultures, though different in tone, converge in their denial of value as real – the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Modern capitalist culture reduces beauty to a commodity; postmodern critical theory reduces it to ideology. One sells beauty as a product; the other deconstructs it as a lie. In both cases, beauty is detached from being, and what is lost is reverence. It is very difficult to pop this bubble since the various contemporary culture war factions all share it. But if a child can respond to the story of the Ugly Duckling with love, then they will have one shield to protect them against being assimilated into this bubble.

        Philip Sherrard offers a diagnosis that brings this blindness into focus. He writes that the way we see the world is shaped by how we see ourselves, and that modern humanity, having abandoned a vision of the person as created in the image of God, sees itself – and the world – in an inhuman, godless light. As a result, our perception becomes distorted. We no longer encounter the world in its depth and significance, but only through the narrow lens of utility and self-interest. The spiritual, psychological, and cultural consequences are devastating. We no longer believe in beauty because we no longer believe there is anything to be beautiful. And if there is no beauty in the world, there is no recognition of the soul. Sherrard’s insight returns us to the beginning: without the ability to see the world as bearing light and meaning, we cannot see the duckling as a swan. We cannot see the truth that beauty reveals.

 

Bibliography

Aquinas, Thomas. De Veritate. Translated by Robert W. Schmidt. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1954.

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Bros., 1947.

Berry, Wendell. “The Body and the Earth.” In The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977.

Guroian, Vigen. Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. New York: HarperOne, 2001 (originally 1943).

Lewis, C. S. “Meditation in a Toolshed.” In God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Edited by Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970.

Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin Classics, 1990.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Edited by Gordon Teskey. New York: Norton Critical Edition, 2005.

Nussbaum, Martha C. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Phillip Sherrard. The Rape of Man and Nature: An Inquiry into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science. Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1987.

Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1995.

Plato. Symposium. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1989.

Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters. Translated by Reginald Snell. New York: Dover Publications, 2004.

Scruton, Roger. Beauty: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

 

 

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[1]For the appropriate standard for the body—that is, health—has been replaced, not even by another standard, but by very exclusive physical models. The concept of “model” here conforms very closely to the model of the scientists and planners: it is an exclusive, narrowly defined ideal which affects destructively whatever it does not include. Thus our young people are offered the ideal of health only by what they know to be lip service. What they are made to feel forcibly, and to measure themselves by, is the exclusive desirability of a certain physical model. Girls are taught to want to be leggy, slender, large-breasted, curly-haired, unimposingly beautiful. Boys are instructed to be “athletic” in build, tall but not too tall, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, narrow-hipped, square-jawed, straight-nosed, not bald, unimposingly handsome. Both sexes should look what passes for “sexy” in a bathing suit. Neither, above all, should look old. Though many people, in health, are beautiful, very few resemble these models. The result is widespread suffering that does immeasurable damage both to individual persons and to the society as a whole. The result is another absurd pseudo-ritual, “accepting one’s body,” which may take years or may be the distraction of a lifetime. Woe to the man who is short or skinny or bald. Woe to the man with a big nose. Woe, above all, to the woman with small breasts or a muscular body or strong features; Homer and Solomon might have thought her beautiful, but she will see her own beauty only by a difficult rebellion. And like the crisis of identity, this crisis of the body brings a helpless dependence on cures. One spends one’s life dressing and “making up” to compensate for one’s supposed deficiencies. Again, the cure preserves the disease. And the putative healer is the guru of style and beauty aid. The sufferer is by definition a customer. (Berry, 112)