Hozho - A Comprehensive Navajo Conception of Beauty

Comprehensive Beauty - Hozho

It is usually translated into English as “beauty,” though also as “health” or “balance,” “harmony,” “goodness.” It means all these things and more. It refers above all to the world when it is flourishing; it refers to the community, flourishing in the world; it refers to things we make, which flourish and play a role in the flourishing of other things; and it refers to ourselves, flourishing as makers, as people inhabiting a community that inhabits a world. It is a word for the oneness of all things when they are joined together in a wholesome state. (1)

The above quote describing the Navajo term Hozho is drawn from the final chapter of Crispin Sartwell's 'Six Names of Beauty. Gray Witherspoon, author of Language and Art in the Navajo Universe, is also quoted making this important point regarding the concept:

"It is not an abstractable quality of things or a fragment of experiences; it is the normal pattern of nature and the most desirable form of experience.” (2)

It is this connection between a 'wholesome state' of 'flourishing' and 'the normal pattern of nature' that makes  the Hozho concept ideal to explore the intersection of 'the true', 'the good', and 'the beautiful'. Sartwell refers to this intersection as an 'integration of values', and a 'cross-cultural truth' which he grounds on the recognition that we are all embedded within an integrated system, a system in which we are inter-connected with each other in inter-connected environments. I would argue that any coherent conception of a system requires some degree of integration, and like turtles, its systems all the way down ( and all the way up ).

When beauty is defined as the normal pattern of nature this suggests there is also an abnormal pattern, or a way of acting against the normal pattern, a way of acting against nature. There is also an important argument that needs to be addressed against the idea that nature itself is beauty. As Sartwell points out

we cannot quite say that every single thing in the universe is beautiful, without ‘beauty’ losing whatever meaning it had. But a beautiful thing can have unbeautiful parts, and it may be that the cosmos as a system or even as a mere concatenation is beautiful, though many parts of it are not. (3)

Another way to address this argument is to point out that a thing may be beautiful or ugly depending upon the context in which it is viewed or in light of the whole of which it is a part. I find it very interesting that in the Navajo language the meaning of a word can flip to its opposite with a change in context. With is in mind,

 beauty and ugliness could be conceived as.........a center in which opposites are overcome as opposites or emerge into harmony. (4)

This denotes a great deal of over-lap between Hozho and ancient Chinese philosophical ideas. Sartwell points out similarities with the aesthetics of Confucianism. I am thinking more directly about how this last idea meshes with the thought of  Zhuangzi:

When “this” and “that”—right and wrong—are no longer coupled as opposites—that is called the Course as Axis, the axis of all courses. When this axis finds its place in the center, it responds to all the endless things it confronts, thwarted by none. For it has an endless supply of “rights,” and an endless supply of “wrongs.” (5)

and also with the first 3 ideas I mentioned in my initial post:

1.   things that seem different have ways in which they are the same
2.    things that seem the same have ways in which they are different
3.   receptive exploration of these relations may yield a position that responds non-coercively

On the off chance that anyone might be interested in thoroughly exploring these 3 ideas from the context of Chinese philosophy I can recommend  two excellent books by Brook Ziporyn. Yes, if you think I'm getting overly philosophically wordy on the concepts wrapped up in these 3 ideas here is well over 700 pages devoted just to them 😏💭 :

1. Ironies of Oneness and Difference in Early Chinese Thought; Prolegomena to the Study of Li
2. Beyond Oneness and Difference: Li and Coherence in Chinese Buddhist Thought and its Antecedents

Sartwell, Crispin. Six Names of Beauty (p. 98-101). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.