Beauty, Vulnerability, and the Limits of Sense
Wednesday, 04 June 2025, 16:00-18:00
Senate House, Room 349
.
According to a long tradition, when engaging with beauty and art, we make sense of ourselves, our world, and those we share it with. Through aesthetic experience, we can become clearer about our “humanity” (Kant, CPJ, 5:355) or encounter “a truthful image of the human condition” (Murdoch SoG, 84). Aesthetic experience is among the fundamental ways through which we find the world and others intelligible, even when we seem not to have ready-to hand resources to understand them.
It is less noted that our openness to beauty is tied to our willingness to expose ourselves and to be vulnerable to something else, and that it often pushes us not towards greater understanding, but to the limits of sense. Or so I argue in the paper, drawing on Virginia Woolf and Cora Diamond. For Woolf, exposing oneself to beauty involves “the danger of being led away and tricked by [life’s] deceitfulness” (LaN), and even beauty’s “terror” (TtL). While this vulnerability to complete otherness and the ensuing change in oneself are valuable, this openness to beauty “can throw us” (Diamond, 2008: 60) partly because “we cannot fit it into the understanding we have of what the world is like” (ibid.). On this view, seeing the world’s beauty just is seeing that which we cannot (or refuse to) find intelligible and which leaves us “unhinged” (Diamond, DoR).
Are these two conflicting approaches to beauty and intelligibility?
While one task of this paper is to bring out the vulnerability, risk, and limits of intelligibility involved in aesthetic experience, the other task is to recommend a negative answer to this question. I argue that these two takes on aesthetic experience are not opposed to each other, but make sense only in light of a shared background commitment to the indeterminacy of human life: human nature is not fixed and given in advance of what human beings make of themselves. I recommend thinking of these thinkers as sharing a commitment to this indeterminacy, the way it shapes our meaning-making practices, and the related unavoidable vulnerability of human life. And they all think of aesthetic experience as fundamentally entangled in this indeterminacy and in the way we shoulder the burden of open-endedly making sense of ourselves, our world, and others. In short, the two approaches share an orientation to the limits of human sense and to the role of aesthetic experience in throwing us on them.
.
.
Following NHS guidance, all attendees are strongly encouraged to be vaccinated (including boosters) against Covid-19, unless medically exempt. Our group is diverse; please continue to be considerate of those who wear face coverings and those who don’t. Thank you.