Though the ethics of reading can surely include the benefits to the reader herself, our focus here is on the way other, often unknown, persons are the beneficiaries of one’s reading. There are at least three paths by which beauty contributes to this outcome.
First, beautiful things (whether poems, mathematical equations, or faces) have attributes—such as symmetry, vivacity, unity—that anticipate those same, but much more difficult to achieve, attributes in the realm of justice. Symmetry is at hand in, for example, the meter of a poem, and provides inspiration and guidance for the centuries it will take to bring about symmetry in the realm of justice—whether it is John Rawls’s justice as fairness, which requires “the symmetry of everyone’s relations to each another”; or Plato’s aspiration for a symmetry between crimes and punishments, which we are still a very long way from; or Hume’s symmetry between expectations and their fulfillment.
Second, beauty interrupts and gives us sudden relief from our own minds. Iris Murdoch says we undergo “an unselfing” in the presence of a beautiful thing; “self-preoccupation” and worries on one’s own behalf abruptly fall away. Simone Weil refers to this phenomenon as a “radical decentering.” I call it an “opiated adjacency,” an awkward term but one which reminds us that there are many things in life that make us feel acute pleasure (opiated) and many things in life that make us feel sidelined, but there is almost nothing—except beauty—that does the two simultaneously. Feeling acute pleasure at finding oneself on the margins is a first step in working toward fairness.
Contact with the beautiful has one additional effect. Diotima tells Socrates who tells Plato who tells us that coming into the presence of a beautiful person or thing gives rise to the desire to bring children into the world. Diotima says contact with the beautiful also gives rise to the desire to create poems, legal treatises, and works of philosophy. Modern philosophers such as Wittgenstein have said the same. Recognizing our own capacity for creating is again a prerequisite for working for justice: while beauty can be either natural or artifactual, justice is always artifactual; it always takes immense labor to bring it about. So anything that awakens us to our own power of creation is a first step in working to eliminate asymmetries and injuries.
Read the rest at Boston Review.
Thank you, Veerle.
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