“Where to? And from where?” is asked in the
first line of one of the early extant works on the meaning of Beauty in human
history as the walls of the city are crossed to enter the countryside and
enquire into the irrational. Only by cultivating the most pure and highest form
of madness—Love—starting from a fragment of beauty in the sensuous, fluctuating
world of becoming, we could have learned to perceive intelligible beauty. Losing reverence for
beauty would result in losing our capacity to seek it across the spectrum of
human pursuits, laws, and highest ideas like justice; ultimately, beauty would
turn into something to be merely consumed.
Inspired by the postmodern shunning of
beauty, “The Fourth Kind of Madness“ elaborates on Elaine Scarry’s
philosophical work on the relationship between beauty and justice, and the
societal value of the “unselfing” that we undergo when standing in the presence
of something beautiful, what philosopher and political activist Simone Weil saw
as a radical decentering—possibly the only perceptual event in human experience
where loss of perceived or pursued centrality is associated with the feeling of
pleasure.
In the series I reconsider beauty as a
subject, reevaluating it from an alternative perspective that goes beyond
counter-aesthetic frameworks of political and social engagement, and explore
how our pursuit of notions of justice, equality and fairness is assisted by
beauty and its availability to sensory perception.
Seven years in the making, “The Fourth Kind
of Madness“ series reflects on the societal value of the encounter with
something beautiful. Where to? And from where?
