The Dynamics of Beauty

Abstract

The debate on the “two cultures” is regaining strength as we approach the 50th anniversary of Charles P. Snow’s famous lecture entitled precisely The Two Cultures. The opposition between scientific culture and humanistic culture has sometimes assumed overheated and almost grotesque tones. Actually, the relationships between the so-called two cultures are very tight and their scopes and aims are closer than one can suppose. First, they meet in, and are produced by, human beings; and, second, they share the goal of seeking adequate and meaningful representations and models of the world and of man. Although they speak different languages and one is driven by tendentially objective and communicative goals and the other by subjective and expressive goals, finally both turn out to be intersubjective. I would like to put forward some considerations on beauty in the hope that it turns out to be a bridge between the two cultures.

La beauté est là, dès l’aube. Levée bien avant nous. Fidèle, elle attend. Son haleine se répand dans le moindre silence, dans l’air autour des amandiers. Elle attend que s’ouvre en nous le chemin où elle pourra venir sans se blesser. Elle attend des heures entières, et le mouvement de son attente est celui du jour qui pointe, fleurit puis décline, mourant à nos pieds, méconnu, délaissé. Chaque jour ainsi, quelqu’un vient, quelqu’un qui tient entre ses mains un fin couteau de pluie ou bien un seul pétale de rose, de ceux que l’on glisse entre les pages d’un livre épais, plus léger que l’air sur le ventre des moineaux.

(Beauty is there, since dawn. She got up long before us. She is waiting, faithfully. Her breath spreads in the faintest silence, in the air around the almond trees. She is waiting for a path to open in us that she can follow without being hurt. She waits for hours and the movement of her wait is that of the day that dawns, blossoms, then declines, dying at our feet, relinquished, unappreciated. Every day like this, someone comes, someone holding a sharp knife of rain in his hands, or one petal of a rose, such as those that one inserts between the pages of a thick book, lighter than the air on the chest of a sparrow.) Christian Bobin, L’homme du désastre