Regarding elegance

Appendix to the volume Idea de Principe en Leibniz, probably written in 1947. Text not included in the Complete Works, published in the El Arquero collection, pages. 375-378.

“The thing is devilishly paradoxical but, at the same time, hopeless. Because to choose is to exercise freedom and it turns out that to be free we have to be free by force. It is the only thing for which man is ultimately not free: not to be free. Freedom is the most onerous burden that the human creature carries on himself, because by having to decide, each one for himself, what he is going to do at each moment, it means that he is condemned to sustain his entire existence, without being able to download on anyone. If we turn the figure of freedom upside down, we find that it is responsibility. This is the great sorrow: all the others, the sorrows in the plural, originate from it. As the actions that make up my life spring from my choice, I am responsible for them. Responsible, not before a court of this or another world, but for now responsible before myself. Because if the action has to be chosen, I need to justify the preference in my own opinion, to convince myself that the chosen action was, among the possible ones, the one that made the most sense. Indeed, the various projects of doing that are suggested to us by each situation are almost never presented to us as equivalent. On the contrary, as soon as we discover them they are placed before us automatically, forming a rigorous hierarchy at the top of which one of the projects appears as being the one that makes the most sense and therefore the one that should be chosen. If this were not so, if the various projects of possible action had the same dose of meaning, if they were, therefore, indifferent, it would not be possible to speak of choice. Our will would settle by mechanical chance on any of them as the roulette ball remains in the alveolus of a number: which is not a choice but "good tun-tun". Choosing means having in view the various cards that can be played: the optimal one, the simply good one, the one that is not worth it and the one that is frankly contradictory. Certainly, we are free to prefer the latter, even knowing that it is not preferable, but we cannot do so with impunity. The foolish action or the one that makes deficient sense, once chosen, will fill an inexchangeable piece of our vital time, it will become, therefore, a piece of our reality, of our being. The will has played us, then, a trick. Instead of making us be that optimal reality that was possible, instead of giving way to that best being of ours that was presented to us as what we had to be, therefore, as the authentic one, it has supplanted them by another inferior character. This is equivalent to having annihilated a portion, greater or lesser, of our true life that no one will be able to resurrect because that time does not return. We have violated our own person, we have committed a partial suicide and the wound remains open forever, biting we do not know what mysterious incorporeal part of our personality. Whatever its caliber, we are aware of having committed one last crime, of which that inextinguishable bite is "remorse." Intimate crimes are characterized by the fact that the man feels of them, at the same time, author, victim and judge.

There is no order of existence, big or small, that does not force us to choose between doing things better or worse. And it is already a terrible symptom to believe that the drama of the election occurs only in the great conflicts of our lives, in situations that have historical significance. No: a word can be pronounced better or worse, and such a gesture of our hand can be more graceful or coarser. Among the many things that can be done in each case, there is always one that must be done.

But the most radical division that can be established among men lies in noticing that most of them are blind to perceive that difference in rank and quality between possible actions. They just don't see it. They do not understand behaviors as they do not understand paintings. That is why they have so little grace and it is so sad, so desert dealing with them. That moral blindness of the majority is the greatest ballast that humanity drags along its route and makes the mills of history grind so slowly. There are very few, in fact, the men capable of choosing their own behavior and of discerning the success or the clumsiness of others.

In the most ancient Latin, the act of choosing (elegir) was called elegance, just as of urging (instar) is called instance. Remember that the Latin would not pronounce to elegir but to eleguir. Otherwise, the oldest form was not eligo but elego, which left the present participle elegans. Understand the word in all its active verbal vigor; the elegant is the «eligente», one of whose species manifests itself to us in the "intelligent." It is convenient to return that word to its elevated meaning, which is the original one. Then we will have that not being the famous Ethics but the art of choosing our actions well, that, precisely that, is Elegance. Ethics and Elegance are synonyms. This allows us to attempt a renovation of the Ethics that by dint of wanting to become mystagogic and grandiloquent in order to inflate its prestige has only managed to lose it altogether. As this could be seen coming, I have been fighting for a quarter of a century, so that Ethics is not treated in a pathetic tone. The pathetic has suffocated Ethics by handing it over to demagogues, who have been the destroyers of all civilizations and the great manufacturers of barbarism. That is why I have always believed that instead of taking Ethics from the solemn side, with Plato, with Stoicism, with Kant, it was convenient to enter it from its frivolous side, which is the deepest, with Aristotle, with Shaftesbury, with Herbart. Let us, then, let Ethics rest for a while and, instead, avoiding solemnity from the threshold, let us elaborate a new discipline with the title: Elegance of conduct, or the art of preferring what is preferable. The word «elegance» also has the additional advantage of irritating certain people, coincidentally the same ones that, for many other previous reasons, one did not appreciate."

Appendix to the volume Misión de la Universidad, written in 1949. Text not included in the Complete Works. Published in the collection The Archer.

“People tend to have a stupid and superficial idea of ​​this [of elegance]. It is completely ignored that it is an ingredient and, at the same time, a symptom of all authentically energetic life. [...]

Elegance must permeate, inform the entire life of man - from the gesture and the way of walking, through the way of dressing, following the way of using the language of carrying on a conversation, of speaking in public, to reach the most intimate of actions and intellectuals. Our way of reacting to what our neighbor does to us can be elegant or inelegant. Seizing the shares of a large industrial company can be done elegantly or inelegantly. Finally, it is well known that a mathematical problem —for example, proving a theorem— can give an "elegant" solution. Whoever wants to specify for himself what are the features that make mathematical reasoning elegant will understand, as if illuminated by a lightning bolt of intellection, everything that I have hinted at about the vital human virtue called elegance.”

The myth of man beyond technique, 1951. Complete Works, IX, page 622.

“But this being found himself, for the first time, before these two completely different projects: before the instinctive ones, which still encouraged him, and before the fantastic ones, and that is why he had to choose; select.

There you have this animal! Man will have to be, from the beginning, an essentially electing animal. The Latins called the act of choosing, selecting, eligere; and he who did it was called eligens or elegens or elegans. Elegans or elegant is nothing more than the one who chooses and chooses well. So man has an elegant determination beforehand, he has to be elegant. But there is still more. The Latin noticed —as is common in almost all languages— that after a certain time the word elegans and the fact of the "elegant" -the elegantia- had faded somewhat, for this reason it was necessary to sharpen the issue and they began to say intelegans, intelligentia: intelligent. I do not know if the linguists will have to oppose something to this last etymological deduction. But it can only be attributed to mere chance that the word intellegantia is not used in the same way as intelligentia, as it is said in Latin. Thus, man is intelligent, in the cases in which he is, because he needs to choose. And because he has to choose, he has to make himself free. From there comes this famous freedom of man, this terrible freedom of man, which is also his highest privilege. He only became free because he was forced to choose, and this was because he had such a rich fantasy, because he found in himself so many crazy imaginary visions.

Idea of ​​principle in Leibniz, 1947. Complete Works, VIII, page 293n.

“But those people who understand nothing, least of all understand elegance, and do not conceive that a life and a work can take care of this virtue. Not even remotely suspected for what essential and grave reasons is man the elegant animal. Dies irae, dies illa.”

Meditation of our time, Course of Buenos Aires 1928, pages 228-238. Not included in the Complete Works. Editorial F.C.E.

“But what is elegance? In preparing for this lecture I have stumbled upon some old notes that I have never written, developed or communicated, where an attempt is made to answer that question. I would like to propose your ideas to your benevolent judgment [...] by making a brief meditation on the elegance [...]

Perhaps you have forgotten that this question did not arise arbitrarily and as if from the hatch. I pointed out, and I am interested in reiterating it, that the aspect taken by life in almost all European-American peoples is today of an unusual beauty, very rarely achieved in historical settings. And this beauty, even more than vaguely so, must be called elegance. There have always been elegant people, which should be enough for the fact of elegance to have attracted a little more the meditation of the meditative, since that persistence from the most primitive peoples to the day reveals that elegance is a dimension or power essential to man. It would be enough for me to know, as I do, that Julius Caesar was an elegant man and that he took great care to wear his toga undressed just a little more than it was use, for the subject to attract me, because if there has been in the landscape of humanity a figure of exemplary man, essential and complete has been his.

But also, I repeat, if we think about any hour of history, you can be sure that we will surprise someone who is elegant, and along with him, someone who wants to be. The elegant man and his shadow, I mean his inseparable snob, have been defined in all the moments of the past.

However, it is not this too trivial truth that I wanted to insinuate, but rather, to be characteristic of our time what has almost never happened: that the life of the average man is elegant, that it is therefore elegant even the one who is not it by his own gift.

But the gentleman who always finds out a little late when new ways of looking start, I hear him tell me: that is an observation worthy of a gossip columnist. [...]

Well, what does it matter? If an end of the truth has been lost in the society chronicle, we will go to it without disgust, without remorse or nostalgia, we will abandon the solemn chairs, the reverend treatises where the truth is lacking. Certainly, it is not the most probable thing that in a society chronicle discretion comes to carve out its nest; but neither is it admissible to flee a priori from what to date has not been consecrated by respect. In this way, any progress, any new enrichment, would be impossible.

Man tends to be interested only in those things that are presented with a solemn gesture, with a pathetic gesture, with a traditional past that consecrates them. In this way we could not advance. The past tends to drown us, pretending that we gather in our narrow heart the admirations that the centuries have felt separately. In this way it would happen that the world, all of it fullness, would have to be consecrated to the cult of what it was, and there would be no place or margin for the men of today or tomorrow to live their current life in immediate and fresh contact with the pure essences of living.

Apparently, everything must have its ritual gesture, if not, it will not be believed, and it usually seems necessary for the scientist to have a somewhat pedantic appearance so that his science is recognized or his severe face is seen. and macerated the virtuous trace of his virtue. But this has the drawback that it facilitates fraud, and indeed, in the evolution of every culture, vain gesticulations are constantly appearing, false appearances of inanity like a parasitic vegetation that drowns everything substantial and authentic.

If life and culture itself are not to be strangled, times must come that will prune all these excrescences and prefer to keep only what is substantial and efficient. Those times, when they arrive, have a diabolically disrespectful air, because in effect they seem determined not to recognize their privileges to all these gestures and phraseologies and demand, perforating their cardboard, the reality that they intend to hide behind them.

The superlative disrespect of our time has, along with other less healthy roots, […] a good root which is this: it seems determined that life be reduced to its own truth, to get rid of everything that is not positive and essential. It goes like a nudification of existence.

The young, with their unexpected and at this point adventurous subversion, seem determined to discard all ritual phrases and gestures, convinced that what is authentic —in science, in art, in morality— will continue to be so, better still, it will be more purely authentic. if it does not take refuge in vain gestures and solemn fuss. In short, let us take the solemnity and wring its neck. We want man to stop being a cistern and go back to being a spring.

And now we will see how the theme of elegance [...] insinuates us gently and without giving the air of it, to deep areas of our life. Elegance is a subtle quality, grace, virtue or value that can reside in things of the most varied condition. In mathematics there are elegant solutions, and in literature elegant expressions. Certain utensils and human manufactures can be elegant, the shape of a vase, the line of a car, the facade of a building, the size of a yacht, the cut of a dress. But certain things of nature are also elegant, the profile of a mountain range, the spindle-shaped poplar, the plant of a horse or a bull. The man can possess elegance in the figure of his body, but also in his soul or way of being; and there are elegant gestures and there are actions that are, since there is a moral elegance that is not equal to simple goodness or honesty. In short, there are even elegant feelings, because it is curious to remember that two beings as distant in everything as Aristotle and the Gothic queen Doña Blanca de Navarra, almost coincide in the words of this same sentence: «melancholy, typical of every well-born soul , melancholy is an elegant feeling; sadness is not».

Do you see it? Every topic is thankful. It was enough that we gave a puncture with the peak of attention in the disdained fashion chronicle so that the elegance escaping from it threatens to invade the world. As if now the difficult thing is not to get lost in such a vast and multiform panorama and find the essential and unique note that instills elegance in so many and so different elegant things.

What does the mathematician call an elegant solution of a problem, an elegant proof of a theorem? Note that mathematics is strictly interested in solving and proving. Since inelegant solutions and demonstrations ultimately achieve the same as elegant ones, it means that mathematical elegance goes beyond the strict virtues of mathematics, that it is something superior or at least foreign to this science, and that it suddenly comes to the fore. shine and penetrate inside her. A proof is said to be elegant when it is possible to prove a theorem with the least number of intermediate ideas [...]

Well, I would say that mathematical elegance consists in finding the shortest intellectual line between a theorem and its proof. Where the excess is eliminated, there is elegance.

So, I will be made to observe, mathematical elegance is simply intellectual economy. It is with it to save effort, to eliminate unnecessary elements. But here we find the strange and substantial of the case. The mathematician knows very well that the economy achieved by elegance is practically minimal and inoperative and, instead, he realizes that his excitement and his enthusiasm for the elegant bias of an argument are caused by precisely the opposite of a saving of effort. . What he applauds is that the elegant man has known how to find a test which, being shorter, is precisely more difficult to find, therefore, that he has used a surplus of intellectual force beyond what is required, which he has done, then, without apparent somewhat more difficult and superfluous effort. And, indeed, the elegant test is the manifestation of an overflowing and elastic intellect, which exceeds the required dose, which represents an excess of power, a child of the mind. There are other opposite ways of manifesting this luxury and excess of power, for example, the one that consists in excessively complicating problems. In that case there is no elegance. Apparently, this resides in the sober expression of a luxurious, exuberant capacity that mathematics does not need, that is added to it and as a gift. Already the fact that in a science like this, where everything is subject to rigorous discipline, which has such conventual manners and habits, this word elegance suddenly appears, always fragrant with worldly aromas, indicates that under it the mathematician feels a greater enthusiasm. than mathematician, the jocundia of perceiving in the midst of his severe work the pure vital endowment of man that is talent, not talent as a specialized faculty but as primary and universal power, an inexhaustible source from which other lesser and forced talents precede.

If we now ask ourselves what constitutes the elegance attributed to the line of a car or the profile of a yacht, we find the following: they are both artifacts created to slide quickly, one on the roads, the other on the back of the sea. Now, it seems to us that the automobile has reached its most elegant line when seen in section it has the figure of an elongated rectangle lying on its longest side. Even the yacht has to be long and narrow. Is this random? It is known that man cannot look at a geometric figure without injecting a certain dynamism into its pure lifeless lines; that we cannot see a column under a pediment without seeing it endowed with an effort that makes it support the pediment or the latter without feeling its burden, its weight acting on the gentle body of the column. This means that figures in space are always a representation of forces, an expression of something dynamic. As the force of the car has to be exerted horizontally, its most adequate expression will be a stretched and elongated figure, and of the stretched and elongated figures the simplest is the rectangle. We have, then, in a matter as distant from mathematics as an automobile is, the same module of elegance: the most sober expression of one of maximum potentiality, of active and functional power. Before it was the function to solve problems, now it is to slide on an element, land or air.

But it is evident that this vital dynamism of the automobile does not exist in it but that we, from our own bodily sensations, project it on the artifact. This matters a great deal to me: only to the extent that we feel an object as living can we discover elegance in it. Merely mechanical force cannot find elegant manifestation. They say that one day the atom may disintegrate and that the force developed by such disintegration will be greater, in such a tiny piece of matter, than in a whole coal mine. However, this atom will never be elegant because its dynamism is not vital. Apparently elegance is exclusively an attribute and grace of life.

This is that the primary elegance is that of the animal and the superlative that of the being in whom life culminates: man, and of man above all that of his corporeality where the decisive vital functions reside. Well, what male figure is more elegant? There is no doubt: the tall and sober man of meats, —that is to say—, the vertical rectangle and the simplest figure. The elegance of a body is its slenderness. In it, with volume in the simplest way, the fullness of elemental zoological powers, agility, elasticity, energy, muscle, etc. is manifested. Instead, the figure of the woman is often obscured [by] grace and beauty which are qualities very different from elegance. In my opinion, this is due to the fact that we do not estimate, we are not interested in women, preferably because of their functionality, because of their ability to carry out this or that activity. We do not see it as put at the service of anything, but still in itself, inactive, giving the atmosphere the odorous irradiation of its being, not the utility of its doing. I think I was the first to formulate that men are worth what they do and women are worth what they are; that the most fertile performance of this does not consist in striving for one or the other, but in a peculiar apparent passivity, in a being and being, like the rose in the rosebush.

And an unexpected confirmation of this idea is represented by the fact that bodily elegance, not clothing, is less transparent in women than in men. In this one we always care about what he is capable of doing and we are pleased that his slenderness declares with the simplest figure the maximum of his bodily power.

It is not possible to continue going through cases of elegance: the analysis remains for those curious about the subject to continue and complete. Something would, however, need to be said about the elegance of the suit; but just to get into the subject we would have to make quite a few preparations. The ideas that abound about what clothing is and its origin in the human species are so far from what is and was the truth, that there would be no way to understand the history and significance of the costume and its variations.

You think that of all the ideas the most erroneous is precisely the most widespread, according to which it would be the origin of the utilitarian suit, with a practical purpose, to cover against the elements. However, the fact today well known by the works of ethnographers is that the first suit was the bird feather that the hunter puts on his forehead, certainly not with the intention of covering himself, but quite the opposite, to discover himself before the eyes. of others, to be noticed. On his forehead, the oblique feather is the accent that accentuates his person. And if it's not the feather, it's the necklace of shells, or of bones, or of wild beasts' teeth. The necklace, the first suit, that is to say that the first suit was an adornment, that the suit began as the opposite of utility and practice, for being an ornament, for being a superfluous care of the body.

Thus, the received idea is so opposed to what all recent ethnographic studies are showing, that it is better not to go into it. I will only say that this expressive and non-utilitarian character of the body, symbolic of inner states, as was symbolic of the pride felt by the hunter for having put his arrow under the wing of the rare bird, as is the feather, is expressive power, when later in history complicates human existence in society, it acquires a representative symbolic value of vital forces that are no longer the corporeal nor are they purely the intimate spiritual ones, but are the social vital forces.

The elegant suit always announces a latent social power, which is expressed in the most sober way. All elegance is the simplest modulation of a given fashion, and fashion, in turn, is intended to express the well-being of higher social circles.

But I do not hide from you that there is a fatal objection against this theory of elegance. If the prototype of what is elegant is the slender male body, and it is so because it expresses a whole series of luxurious vital powers, of extreme activism, of desire for movement, of running, of agility, of elasticity, we find that throughout the East how elegant is obesity.

How does one compare with the other? It would be fatal for the theory not to find a way out or composure. On the other hand, if this theory explains not only its European norm but also its Eastern exception, it would have achieved the most a theory can hope for, which is to clarify both the rule and the exception. Indeed, the Chinese Apollo, the God of literature, is an obese mandarin, ventripotent, who with his corpulence overwhelms a little white horse. The Buddha, offspring of the most elegant lineage, that of the Shahyas, is represented as an inactive figure, seated, still, with forms always tending towards obesity.

But even more so, in Indian books, especially in ritual books, it is said over and over again that the Mahapurusha, that is, the gentleman, the distinguished man, must be thick so that it is noticed that he has eaten well and you don't need to work.

Here, then, is a form of elegance that expresses the inverse of what Western elegance expressed. This obese elegance announces a desire for stillness, for inactivity.

But now let us remember that through other hints of spirit and history we begin to verify that Eastern man feels in his very roots to live in the opposite direction to the Westerner. For the man of the West, to live is always more to live, to act, to move, to have a mission, to try, to strive. For the man of the East, on the other hand, to live, what he yearns for and feels in living as an ideal is quite the opposite. To live, for him, is to unlive, to live less and less, to feel less and less of his individuality at every moment, which seems to him a sin and a pain, to strive only to dissolve the personality, the individuality in the multiple unity, in the ocean of vitality. universal. For this reason, the whole ideal of the East ends in Nirvana, in ceasing to be, which for the West is a symbol of death and denial of life.

It is therefore fair that whoever, in the very roots of his vital sentiment, foresees existence and idealizes it as a process of ceasing to be, as an aspiration to profound stillness, symbolizes in the elegant obese woman this renunciation of living, this desire to unlive. In either case, it is always the eagerness, the peculiar vital capacity or dynamism, be it positive or negative, that manifests itself and the way it manifests itself in elegance consists in sobriety: it is maximum and minimum.

There is a place in Dante in which, to represent all-flaming souls that are covered as if by an atmosphere, gas or white cloud, he says of them that "parva fuocco dietro all'alabastro": they look like fire behind alabaster. Here, in my opinion, is the motto of all elegance: to be fire and to look like frigid alabaster, to be activity and dynamism and frenzy and to look like restraint and domination and renunciation: the elegance «parva fuocco dietro all'alabastro»."

Origin and epilogue of philosophy, 1943. Complete Works, IX, page 349.

"What to do [...]? It is about avoiding caprice. Caprice is doing anything among the many that can be done. Opposed to it is the act and the habit of choosing, among the many things that can be done, precisely the one that claims to be done. That act and habit of right choice [since it is a habit, it would be a virtue in the Aristotelian sense] the Latins called first eligentia and then elegantia. It is, perhaps, from this word that our word intelligence comes from. Anyway, Elegance should be the name we give to what we clumsily call Ethics, since this is the art of choosing the best behavior, the science of doing. The fact that the Elegance voice is one of the most irritating voices on the planet today is his best recommendation. Elegant is the man who neither does nor says anything, but does what has to be done and says what has to be said.”

What is philosophy?, 1929. Complete Works, VII, page 435.

“The present in which the past is summarized and condensed —the individual and the historical past— is, then, the portion of fatality that intervenes in our lives and, in this sense, it always has a fatal dimension and that is why it is an asset. fallen into a trap. Except that this trap does not suffocate, it leaves a margin of decision to life and always allows that from the imposed situation, from destiny, we give an elegant solution and forge a beautiful life."