Abstract
Generally, where scientistic attitudes towards the order of creation tend towards the reductive, postmodern attitudes tend towards the deconstructive. The given order of beauty tends to be made problematic. The surface of things is often invested with an equivocity that, whether reductively or deconstructively, we can only approach with epistemic-ontological suspicion. In the following reflections I focus on the connection between given beauty and the order of creation in light of issues connected to this. Beauty itself is inseparable from some sense of formed wholeness. Is there is a givenness to beauty in nature which belies the (postmodern) claim that order is just an imposition of (our) power on flux? The notion of creation is inseparable from the origination of order, but the order comes to be, arises from originating sources that allow forms of beauty to be that are more than our determination or self-determination. Something marvelously original comes to be, comes to shine. There is a shine on things. But what shines on things when we come to appreciate their given beauty? Is it just our shine on things, as if we were the sole source of light? Is it the shine of things, as if the things were luminescent in their own being there? Is it a shine on things, such that the source of the light was not just ours, nor confined to the thing of beauty? These questions will be explored.
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- 1.
A somewhat shorter version of this chapter appeared in an earlier form in William Desmond , The Gift of Beauty and the Passion of Being: On the Threshold between the Aesthetic and the Religious (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2018), chapter 3. Permission to reproduce is acknowledged.
- 2.
It is crucial to keep in mind important differences between wonder in the modalities of astonishment, perplexity, and curiosity. Curiosity is more related to objectifiable determinations of given being, perplexity to indeterminacies we cannot quite make univocally determinate, astonishment to ontological porosity to given being in its wonderful overdeterminacy. Beauty is to be correlated with the modality of astonishment, as its incarnational companion. On these three modalities, see my The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics after Dialectic (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), chapter 10, “Ways of Wondering: Beyond the Barbarism of Reflection.”
- 3.
A. N. Whitehead’s account of this in Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925) is still marvelously fresh.
- 4.
A sample: Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); also Lyotard’s Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (London: Routledge, 2007); Jean-François Courtine, ed. Of the Sublime: Presence in Question (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993); Hugh J Silverman, and Gary E. Aylesworth, eds. The Textual Sublime: Deconstruction and Its Differences (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). Not quite postmodern, but illuminating and engaging, Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
- 5.
See notably, Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. I: Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, edited by Joseph Fessio S.J. and John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982).
- 6.
Umberto Eco, ed. History of Beauty (New York: Rizzoli, 2004) and On Ugliness (New York: Rizzoli, 2007).
- 7.
I want to thank Renée van Riessen warmly for her very engaging and thoughtful remarks in response to an earlier version of my reflections, and am at one with her in granting that we cannot avoid the horror. Admittedly, my search here concerns more the consent than the horror.
- 8.
A sample: Joan Copjec, ed. Radical Evil, (London and New York: Verso, 1996); María Pía Lara, ed. Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001); Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: an Alternative History of Modern Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Richard Bernstein, Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); Martin Beck Matuštík, Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope: Postsecular Meditations (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008).
- 9.
See Lyotard’s Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime.
- 10.
See Barnett Newman, “The Sublime Is Now,” Tiger’s Eye 1.6 (1948): 51–3; Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” in The Lyotard Reader, Andrew Benjamin, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) chapter 10; also “Newman: The Instant,” chapter 13.
- 11.
On technological sites, skyscrapers, the Golden Gate Bridge, and such, as places of spectacle and tourism, see David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass. and London: M.I.T. Press, 1994). On technology and the sublime in contemporary American writing, see Joseph Tabbi, Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1995).
- 12.
Immanuel Kant , Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Eric Matthews, Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), § 27.
- 13.
Hegel, G.W.F. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion : One Volume Edition, The Lectures of 1827, trans. and ed. Peter Hodgson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 328–74.
- 14.
See my Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? (Aldershot: Ashgate Press 2003).
- 15.
See my Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), chapter 6.
- 16.
eikon tou noētou theos aisthētos.
- 17.
pasa ananke tonde ton kosmon eikona tines einai.
- 18.
W. B. Yeats, Explorations, selected by Mrs. W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1962), 325.
- 19.
If the imageless univocity of the scientistic is believed to come with the rational perfection of science, the imageless univocity of the iconoclast is held to come, say, in an assault on Catholic veneration of sacred images or supposedly “Papist worship” of images of the saints.
- 20.
See my Art, Origins, Otherness: Between Art and Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).
- 21.
In the German infatuation with the Greeks from the latter part of the eighteenth century onwards, we find a hunger for rich (spiritualized) sensuousness in immanence. Is it because one was barred from going back to medieval Catholicism that pagan Greece became the shining beauty on the hill? This shine is as much a projection of the German lover of Greece as anything else. Yet, it is testament to the impossibility of separating the religious and the artistic, though the name of religion might not always be uttered in this connection. After all, the Greeks were not atheists. As pagans they were religious, perhaps even too religious. Kunstreligion, religion in the form of art, is what Hegel called their form of religion. He also called it the “religion of beauty.” We find something not entirely dissimilar in Wagner and Nietzsche and others. Nietzsche’s hope for the renewal of tragic culture had a sacral side; it was not just merely aesthetic. A different liturgy was sought—an aesthetic pagan liturgy, so to say. One thinks of the ersatz liturgy of the Wagnerian opera—a sacrament without a god—with the opera as Gesamtkunstwerk creating itself as its own redeeming divinity, a kind of causa sui – als ob (mar dhea, as we say in Irish).
- 22.
See Werner Herzog’s film, “Grizzly Man.” Herzog seems to want to communicate the violence of amoral nature. Nature is not good, not evil, though often it is more like evil than good from our perspective. We are tempted to see something blind and merciless. However, there is a kind of ecology of fittingness in the interchange of life and death, and one wonders if the amoral way of approaching things remains also too anthropocentric, all appearances notwithstanding.
- 23.
Critique of the Power of Judgement, § 53.
- 24.
The opening stanza is: “Tyger, Tyger burning bright/In the forests of the Night/What immortal hand or eye/Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” The last stanza repeats this opening stanza, except the last line now is: “What immortal hand or eye/Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” (emphasis added).
- 25.
See my God and the Between (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), chapter 12, “God beyond the Whole: On the Theistic God of Creation.”
- 26.
Being struck: this is an example I recall from Whittaker Chamber’s autobiography, Witness (New York: Random House, 1952). He was a card-carrying communist, with the programmatic atheism that went with that. He saw the ear of his new-born infant and was immediately struck by the thought: God exists. The birth of his first child was “the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life.” I would say there is a kind of revelatory power to the beauty of such surplus immediacy: a too-muchness in almost nothing; something more. It was not the functional design of the ear that struck him—this is not an inference, an argument from design, though it may be the intimate source of this argument which itself becomes orphaned in the development of the argument. There is a strike of beauty, a being struck, and a being called out—and nothing is the same afterwards. The same is the same, and yet not at all the same. One not only looks differently, not only do things look different, but as the same world looks different, one lives in the world differently.
- 27.
More fully on the specific sense of what I mean by the idiocy of being, see, for instance, chapter 3 of my Perplexity and Ultimacy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
- 28.
I am thinking again of the way Kant describes the sublime as entailing a subreption—a subreption, as he says, attributes to the object what is properly of us. Hence, it can be recuperated for us, from its alienation in another (to speak Hegelese). The otherness qua otherness does not ultimately count but serves as the occasion of a mediating circuit of self back to self.
- 29.
Inter alia, see Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, 2nd ed., trans. Thomas Carlson (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2001); In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner, Vincent Berraud (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2002).
- 30.
On thinks of how, in German, Schein carries something of the meaning of dissembling appearance, Erscheinung a more positive sense of appearance, a doubleness of which, for instance, Hegel makes some dialectical use.
- 31.
On a plea for a retrieval of the Greek gods without God, see H. Dreyfus and S. D. Kelly, All Things Shining : comment: this space in the full title of the book should be closed up and the margins fixed. I was unable to use the comments function so I am writing this here to flag it. Delete the flag when the corrections have been made. WD
Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (New York: Free Press, 2011). Is this plea for a renewed polytheism credible? Do its authors religiously believe in the Greek gods, or is the matter only aestheticized religion without religion – in Hegel’s terms Kunstreligion without true conviction of religious
reverence? (One sometimes wonders if postmodern “polytheism,” like Lyotard’s for instance, is paganism without the blood, an “as if” polytheism that nobody believes in a truly religious sense.) If the title of this book above recalls the closing lines of Terrence Malick’s 1998 film, The Thin Red Line, for a theological-metaxological interpretation of all things shining , see Christopher Simpson, “All Things Shining: Desmond’s Metaxological Metaphysics and The Thin Red Line,” in Between System and Poetics: William Desmond and Philosophy After Dialectic, Thomas Kelly, ed. (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2007), 239–259.
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Desmond, W. (2018). The Shine on Things: Given Beauty and the Order of Creation. In: Buijs, G., Mosher, A. (eds) The Future of Creation Order. New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion , vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92147-1_3
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