Beauty's Appeal: Measure and Excess

302 Pages·2007·5.77 MB·English

by  A-T. Tymieniecka

BEAUTY’S APPEAL
ANALECTA HUSSERLIANA
THE YEARBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
VOLUME XCVII
Founder and Editor-in-Chief:
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka
TheWorldInstituteforAdvancedPhenomenologicalResearchandLearning
Hanover,NewHampshire
Forsequelvolumesseetheendofthisvolume.
BEAUTY’S APPEAL
Measure and Excess
Edited by
ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA
TheWorldPhenomenologicalInstitute,Hanover,NH,U.S.A.
Publishedundertheauspicesof
TheWorldInstituteforAdvancedPhenomenologicalResearchandLearning
A-T.Tymieniecka,President
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
THEMATIC STUDY
BRIAN GRASSOM / Beauty, Truth, Alterity: Beyond
Cause and Effect xiii
SECTION I
LAWRENCE KIMMEL / Eros/Kalon/Agathos: Love,
the Beautiful, and the Good 3
GABRIEL HINDIN / The Beautiful Recollected:
Memory and Beauty in Plato’s Phaedrus 13
JOHN BALDACCHINO / Art after Beauty: Values
before Standards 21
PIERO TRUPIA / The Semantics of Beauty: The
Grammar of the Sign and the Phenomenological
Gaze for a Knowledge of Reality beyond the
Sign 33
SECTION II
MARIA GOŁASZEWSKA / The Aesthetics of
Possibility: Beauty in the Post-Conceptualist
State of Art 67
MARIOLA SUŁKOWSKA / Aesthetization of
Aesthetic Values? 75
VALERIE REED AND MAX STATKIEWICZ /
Shattering Beauty: Rilke’s Aesthetics of the
Fragmentary 85
VICTOR GERALD RIVAS / From Perfect Beauty
to a Conscious Life: An Elucidation of the
v
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
Postromantic Import of Love and Friendship,
Based on Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton 103
ROBERT D. SWEENEY / Von Hildebrands, Father
and Son, and the Beautiful 127
SECTION III
RAYMOND J. WILSON III / Measure or Excess: The
Unity of the Aesthetic, the Ethical, and the
Political in Dante, Marlowe, and Molière 139
BRIAN GRASSOM / Measure and Excess 155
TSUNG-I DOW / Harmonious Balance: Ultimate
Essence of Beauty and Goodness, A Confucian
View 165
VLADIMIR MARCHENKOV / The Dialectic of the
Serious and the Ludic in Myth and Art 173
SECTION IV
MACIEJ KAŁUZA / The Theater of the Absurd and
Reality 183
PATRICIA TRUTTY-COOHILL / Too Much Is Never
Enough 187
DIANE SCILLIA / Minimalist Art: “Less is More”
or the Paradox of Boredom 195
BRUCE ROSS / Dances with Bears: The Beginnings
of Western Art 207
SECTION V
JAMES WERNER AND ELENA STYLIANOU /
The Re-Emergence of Beauty in Contemporary
Technology 215
ARTHUR PIPER / Beauty and Truth in Science
and Phenomenology 225
TABLE OF CONTENTS vii
CHRISTOPHER WALLACE / Action and the Open
Work 239
MATTI IKONEN / Lived Worlds Re-Revisited: The
Opacity of the Transparent. A Time-Dweller’s
Voyage in the World of the Film Titanic 263
MÜNIR BEKEN / Impenetrable Historiography and
Value in Academic Music Composition 281
ANDREW JAY SVEDLOW / Hermeneutic
Phenomenology of Mark Rothko’s Painting 287
INDEX 295
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The present collection of studies comes from two annual conferences that
the International Society of Phenomenology, Fine Arts and Aesthetics held
for its annual 10th and 11th conferences at the Harvard Divinity School in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, in May 27 and 28, 2005, and May 26 and 27,
2006. The topics treated respectively were “Beauty’s Appeal in the Trans-
formation of Standards for Valuation” and “The Happy Choice: Measure or
Excess.” These themes fitted together beautifully within a common network
ofourmetaphysico-aestheticdiscourse,sothatIfounditmostappropriateto
combine their texts.
I thank the authors most sincerely for their personal, insightful, and
inventive work.
My secretary Jeff Hurlburt merits thanks for his careful preparation of the
editorial work, and Springer Publishing for copyediting and proofreading.
A-T. T
ix
THEMATIC STUDY
BRIAN GRASSOM
BEAUTY, TRUTH, ALTERITY: BEYOND CAUSE
AND EFFECT
Pulchrumautemrespicitvimcogniscitivam;pulchraenimdicunturquaevisaplacent.
Ontheotherhand,beautyrelatestotheknowingpower,forbeautifulthingsarethosethatplease
whentheyareseen.
ThomasAquinas1
In James Joyce’s novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the hero,
Stephen Dedalus, has recourse to the writings of Thomas Aquinas on two
occasions. This passage on beauty from the Summa Theologica is quoted
whenStephen,asastudent,isinconversationwithhiscollegedean.Stephen
is uncertain that beauty can be defined in such a way—he suggests, for
example,thatthefirethatthedeanisbusykindlinginthegratewhilearethey
talking might please the sight in one instance, whilst the fires of hell would
have the opposite effect. Later, he confides to his friend Lynch his newly
developed thoughts on beauty and art. The difficulty for Stephen is first of
all in defining what it is that beauty, particularly beauty in art, consists of,
andconsequentlyhowhe,asawriter,shouldaspiretocreateinhisworkthat
element, whatever it might be, that is essential to a work of art. He differen-
tiates between a hypothetical stasis as the apprehension of aesthetic pleasure
and the kinesis of physical pleasure. This stasis is effected by “pleasing” an
aesthetic sense, which in Aquinas’ text is communicated by the words “visa
placent”, suggesting a kind of seeing. Separating beauty and truth, Stephen
pointsouttohisfriendLynch,whohadonceenjoyedscrawlinghisnameona
copyofPraxiteles’sculptureofVenus,thatheprobablywouldnotbemoved
toaddhisnametothehypotenuseofaright-angledtriangle.Truthappealsto
the intellect through the intelligible, he says, as intellection; beauty appeals
through the sensible not to the body, but to the imagination as aesthetic
apprehension.
The problem of beauty that confronts Stephen is its relative nature. He
resolves this problem of the universal and the particular by hypothesising
that whatever the particular object of beauty, it has sensible relations that
coincide with certain stages of aesthetic apprehension, and it is they that are
universal. He goes on to explain how the Thomist principles of wholeness
xiii
A-T.Tymieniecka(ed.),AnalectaHusserlianaXCVII,xiii–xxiii.
©2008 Springer.