Beauty and Vulnerability
Wednesday, 04 June 2025, 16:00-18:00
Senate House, Room 349 (Click to register)
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When engaging with beauty and art, we make sense of ourselves, our world, and those we share it with. Or so it has seemed to a long line of writers who connected beauty to our self-understanding as human beings. For Audre Lorde, for example, understanding poems is understanding ourselves because “our poems formulate the implications of ourselves” (PiNL, 39). Immanuel Kant takes beauty to be tied to our powers to understand our “humanity” (CPJ, 5:355) and to voice ourselves to others (e.g., 5:238).
Those who argue in support of beauty’s power to reveal our humanity often take it as indicative of beauty’s value. In Iris Murdoch’s words, beauty’s presentation of “a truthful image of the human condition” (SoG, 84) is an essential part of its value, explaining why beauty is “a kind of goodness” (SoG, 85).
Yet, it is less noted that being receptive to beauty and its revelatory power involves vulnerability. Understanding ourselves through beauty is tied to our willingness to expose ourselves. Or so I argue in the paper, drawing on Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, and Cora Diamond. For Woolf, the willingness of artists, appreciators, and people as such to expose themselves to beauty and life involves “the danger of being led away and tricked by [life’s] deceitfulness”’ (LaN) and taken by beauty’s “terror” (TtL). Open and responsive engagement with beauty, just like entering into a relationship with others (which Beauvoir finds analogous to our engagement with art), is taking a risk; it requires one to be vulnerable and open to complete otherness and to ensuing change in oneself. (No wonder that Rilke takes the imperative of beauty—beauty that sees its appreciators with a powerful gaze—to be “you must change your life”.) While these risks are valuable in various ways (e.g., Nussbaum (FoG) Dover (CS) and Yao (EaA)), Beauvoir, Woolf, and Diamond suggest that vulnerability to beauty often leaves us “unhinged” (Diamond, DoR): it renders us receptive not only to life’s beauty, but also to its horrors; to aspects of the world that we are not able to make sense of.
On the face of it, this contrasts with the tradition I opened with. For Kant, beauty’s power lies centrally in how it allows us to make sense even of what does not seem intelligible through the familiar ways of making sense of our world (primarily beauty itself). Murdoch argues that beauty allows us to understand the world as it really is. To this extent, it is goodness. But if being open to beauty is also facing what we cannot make sense of, what should we make of the idea that beauty is a form of goodness? What kind of goodness has the power to place us at the limits of sense and leave us unhinged? The paper’s two main tasks are to explain the role of vulnerability and exposure in our openness to beauty and its sense-making powers, and to explore the implications of this role for its nature as a value.
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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.