An excerpt
More from the introductory chapter of David Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite:[T]he beautiful is prior to all schemes of isolable meanings: it is excess but never formlessness, a spilling over, jubilant, proclaiming glory without 'explaining' it. For just this reason it fixes reflection upon the irreducibly particular, the momentary, fragile, and fortuitous. In the beautiful, when it is liberated from the 'symbolic,' a purely serial infinity is implied – such as Hegel dreaded – and the circular infinity of synthesis and transcendental reconciliation – such as Hegel heralded – is resisted. Beauty arranges the world not according to a logical or semeiological syntaxis or hypotaxis, obedient to a rigid hierarchy of accidental and essential, form and meaning, but according to a boundless and 'superficial' parataxis, whose meaning is its ceaseless sequences of supplement, addition, variation, departure, and return: elliptical divergences, unanticipated convergences, whose effect is musical, not dialectical. In the moment of the beautiful, one need attend only to the glory that it openly proclaims, and resist the temptation to seek out some gnosis secretly imparted.
posted by paul bowman @ 1:18 PM
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