'On Beauty and Being Just', part 5
Dec. 15th, 2005 09:11 pmBeautiful as beautiful does:
- Something beautiful fills the mind yet invites the search for something beyond itself, something larger or something of the same scale with which it needs to be brought into relation.
- This pressure toward the distributional is an unusual feature of (the beautiful).
- Through its beauty, the world continually recommits us to a rigorous standard of perceptual care:
- When the same question is asked about other enduring objects of aspiration—goodness, truth, justice—There is, in other words, a continuity between the thing pursued and the pursuer’s own attributes. But this continuity does not seem to hold in the case of beauty.
- An
analogy is inert and at rest only if both terms are present in the
world; when one term is absent, the other becomes an active conspirator
for the exile’s return.
- The face and body of Jesus occasion Aquinas’s famous setting forth of the threefold division of beauty into integrity, proportion, and claritas.
- Kant’s early work, the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime: In the newly subdivided aesthetic realm, the sublime is male and the beautiful is female. The sublime is English, Spanish, and German; the beautiful is French and Italian... “The sublime moves” (one becomes “earnest . . . rigid . . . astonished”).“Beauty charms.”
- Leo Tolstoy, during his decade of deepest commitment to social justice, beginning each day by sweeping his room
- the widely accepted definition by John Rawls of fairness as a “symmetry of everyone’s relations to each other.”
- Beauty, according to Weil, requires us "to give up our imaginary position as the center."
__ The parade is a peculiarly American invention, designed to display within the contracted space of the city street the plurality of citizenry moving together on an equal footing.
__ the luxurious postures the flower adopts in casting down its petals
__ the small flex of the mind, the constant moistening
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