David Hart - Beauty

It's slow going, my reading of The Beauty of the Infinite, due to the small print and my lack of philosophical knowledge. The way David Bentley Hart writes makes it worth the effort, though. Here's a bit from the book about beauty ....

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As it happens, beauty has fallen into considerable disfavor in modern philosophical discourse ..... There is an unsettling prodigality about the beautiful, something wanton about the way it lavishes itself upon even the most atrocious of settings, its anodyne sweetness often seeming to make the most intolerable of circumstances bearable: a village ravaged by pestilence may lie in the shadow of a magnificent mountain's ridge, the marmorean repose of a child lately dead of meningitis might present a strikingly piquant tableau; Cambodian killing fields were often lushly flowered; Nazi commandants occasionally fell asleep to the strains of Bach, performed by ensembles of Jewish inmates; and no doubt the death camps were routinely suffused by the delicate hues of a twilit sky.

Beauty seems to promise a reconciliation beyond the contradictions of the moment, one that perhaps places time's tragedies within a broader perspective of harmony and meaning, a balance between light and darkness; beauty appears to absolve being of its violences. But in an age when, by and large, a philosophical decision has been reached - correctly - that the violence of experience must not be placed within a context of transcendent reconciliation, but must simply be met by an earnest and wary ethical vigilance on the part of reflective intellects, beauty - conceived as a gracious stillness artificially imposed upon the surface of the primordial ontological tumult - mocks the desire for justice; if beauty is really no more than a diversion from the spectacle of worldly suffering, philosophy would be excruciatingly remiss not to assume the aspect of a kind of Brechtian theater, impatient with being's charms and the mystifying ministry of the beautiful.

And frankly, there is from a strictly theoretical standpoint an infuriating imprecision (though one might prefer to say richness) in the language of beauty; the modern disenchantment with the beautiful as a concept reflects in part a sense that while beauty is something whose event can be remarked upon, and in a way that seems to convey a meaning, the word "beauty" indicates nothing: neither exactly a quality, nor a property, nor a function, not even really a subjective reaction to an object or occurrence, it offers no phenomenological purchase upon aesthetic experience. And yet nothing else impresses itself upon our attention with at once so wonderful a power and so evocative an immediacy. Beauty is there, abroad in the order of things, given again and again in a way that defies description and denial with equal impertinence.

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