The Wednesday Society
A podcast that takes a philosophical deep dive into forgotten or intentionally neglected texts.
The Wednesday Society
04 | On Beauty | Beauty and morality
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The third step in Diotima’s ladder asks us to see the beauty of goodness. But what kind of beauty is this? And how can we think of beauty as having to do with the good when - so often - it seems to also be embroiled in evil?
In this episode, Dalia and Simon consider an essay by the twentieth-century French philosopher, Simone Weil. She was described by Albert Camus as the only great spirit of our time. Weil’s thinking was imbued with moral and ethical questions. For Weil, beauty and morality go hand in hand because the desire for goodness is an expression of beauty. Does this mean that the hunger for the good, even in its absence, is an expression of beauty?
The Wednesday Society is hosted by Dalia Nassar, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. In this first season, Dalia discusses beauty in its many forms with concert pianist and writer, Simon Tedeschi.
- Producer: Sarah Allely
- Composer: Russell Stapleton
- Sound engineer: Bethany Stewart
Email us: wednesdaysocietypodcast@gmail.com
This podcast was made possible through the support of the Australian Research Council, recorded at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Media Room at the University of Sydney, and supported by the School of Humanities at the University of Sydney. The Wednesday Society was created on Gadigal, Kuringai, and Dharug country.
Hello and welcome to the Wednesday Society, a podcast that invites you to slow down, reflect, and discover. And we do this by discussing texts. Texts that aren't all that well known, that have been forgotten or intentionally neglected. I'm Dalia Nassar, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. This first season of the Wences Society takes you on a journey through experiences of beauty and asks the question that so many philosophers, poets, and artists have asked: can beauty change our lives? To think through this question with me is a practitioner of beauty, pianist and writer Simon Tedesky. Hello, Simon.
SPEAKER_00Hi, Dahlia.
SPEAKER_01So, this episode, we're considering the relationship between beauty and morality. And someone recently asked me this question: Is there actually a relationship? Now, this was coming from a political philosopher, someone who thinks about morality quite often, and he was quite surprised that we can describe morality in aesthetic terms, in terms of beauty. This made me wonder about whether he and I were using different conceptions of beauty, and so I asked him a little bit to elaborate, and he said, well, beauty means that someone is physically beautiful, and morality doesn't have anything to do with physical beauty. And I wondered then, there's something there, I thought, about what he's saying. There's something in it. Because when we think about beauty, we think about things that appear in the world or that we can hear. We think about vision, we think about our capacity to listen. We might even think about taste and touch. So beauty is really, it seems to me, bound to the senses, to the physical senses. And here we are saying, maybe there is another conception of beauty that is not something that we can gain through our physical senses, but through the mind's eye, something like an inner, hidden beauty, a beauty that has to do with the person's moral character. So I guess to start us off thinking about the topic of today's episode, the relationship between beauty and morality, I just want to put this out there as, well, is there a conception of beauty? Is there a way in which to think about beauty, where beauty is not just what we get through our physical senses, but something that we can grasp with our non-physical senses, with what some people call the mind's eye. What do you think?
SPEAKER_00It's very interesting, everything you're saying, Dahlia. And it reminds me of a Facebook message that I received recently from a woman who uh I had just friended. I had not seen her in a long time, and she wrote to me, first thing out of the blue, hi Simon. Just so you're aware, my posts are sometimes very confrontational. They are not um designed not to im upset people, and I find that the concept of art for art's sake, beauty existing only for itself to be decadent, and I find it to be indulgent, um, because art should always be concerned with morality, and beauty should as well. And it really got me thinking, because for me the beauty of art, the beauty of true art is that in a world where everything is for something else, especially in a capitalist world, art is autotelic in the sense that it's a Greek term meaning it exists only for itself. And for me, that is its moral character. So it's a paradox. It is, it has, it is already imbued with a morality because it exists only for itself. I'm sure I'm not the first person to come up with this idea, but this is how I've always instinctively felt, without being a philosopher.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell So Simon, this actually sets us up really nicely. We're going to be talking about a text by the French philosopher Simone Vey.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell Very exciting for me, I should say, not only as someone who loves philosophy but loves writing, because she's one of the great writers. And in her writings, Vey is very, very preoccupied with beauty. But the essay where she discusses it most directly is called Love of the Order of the World, and it comes from letters and essays written in the final period of her life.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell So one thing I realized when I was uh doing a bit of research for this episode on Vey is that Camus, the philosopher Albert Camus, published a lot of Vey's work. And this really took me by surprise because as our listeners will uh hear shortly, Vey is a deeply religious person. She was someone, I mean, this essay is called Love of the Order of the World. It appeared in a book that's called Waiting for God. And she talks about the order of the world as a kind of opening onto the divine. And Camus is an atheist, is probably the most well-known atheist of the 20th century, the author of The Plague, The Stranger, The Rebel, The Myth of Sisyphus. He believes in the absurdity, that there is no meaning at all. And when he came across her work in 1948, he was taken aback. He said, This is a major thinker. And he took it upon himself to start publishing her work. And most of the works that we have were, of course, published after she died. We'll talk about that later. And Camus was the one who made sure that they were published. When he was given the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm, before he traveled to Stockholm, Camus went to Ve's childhood home and asked her mother if he can sit in her room and meditate and think about her. Now he never actually met her, but he needed to be in close connection with her the day before he flew to Stockholm. And then when he was, and he asked her mother, may I take a picture of Simone Vey with me to Stockholm? Because I want to tell people, I want to tell the world about this woman. So he took her picture with him to Stockholm, and he said in his speech that she was one of the most important spirits of our age. This really took me back, and the fact that he was so excited about her work, about discovering it, but also about publishing really took me by surprise. And I'm curious as to why perhaps the most well-known atheist of the 20th century thought of We, perhaps one of the most important theological thinkers of the 20th century, as one of the most important thinkers of the era.
SPEAKER_00I would go so far as to say that Vey is the most celebrated writer and thinker in a religious sense for atheists, full stop, in the same way that Johann Sebastian Bach, the most religious and the most sanctifying of God of all composers, is loved by everyone because of this beautiful divine or divine inevitability and logic that uh permeates every one of her sentences in the same way that Bach has this uh beautiful sense of inevitability to it.
SPEAKER_01I think that's so interesting, and I think we're gonna get to it um as we discuss this essay. So let's talk about We, the person. She lived a short life, like Gunde Rode, whom we discussed in episode two. We was born in Paris in 1909 and died in England in 1943. She was only 34 when she died. She may have died of her convictions. Why? Because she restricted her food intake in solidarity with the French who were at that time under Nazi occupation. And this arguably led to heart failure.
SPEAKER_00It's extraordinary. She studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure along with Simone de Beauvoir. Vay topped the class of men, beating her only female peer in Beauvoir, who came second. And the pair actually had a bit of an infamous disagreement. Vay stated that, quote, one thing alone mattered in the world today, the revolution that would feed all people on Earth. And Beauvoir replied that the point of life was to find meaning, not happiness. Vey cut her off in response, saying, It's easy to see you've never gone hungry. Wow, what a burn. Unlike many thinkers of her period, Vey wasn't content to just lecture from above, but wanted to be amongst the very people she cared about. She wasn't just a philosopher sitting in an ivory tower, but she wanted to be in society.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell You know what I think super interesting about that from my research on women philosophers, often women philosophers were much more in the world, writing for the world, writing out of their lived experiences. And in part this was because they were ostracized, they were not allowed to be part of academia. But in Vay's case, she was part of academia. She studied at the École Normale, which is the most prestigious uh university, tertiary level education of its kind in France, and she chose not to. So she's following in a tradition of women thinkers who participate in everyday life and write philosophically in response to and for the sake of this life. So they worked as a teacher in various parts of France, and she also worked in factories. And I think that's so important. She wanted to understand what it is like to be poor, to be a factory worker dealing with serious poverty. She became involved in trade union and left-wing politics, and she briefly also got involved in the Spanish Civil War. But she wasn't on the front. Now, Vay was Jewish, and so during the Second World War, she fled France and eventually went to England, where she worked with the free French government in exile. As we were just saying, most of her work was published later by Camus. So a lot of it wasn't published in her lifetime, but some of these works include the books Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, Waiting for God, the book that this essay comes from. So it's worth noting that because a lot of Vey's work appeared after her death and was assembled by others, it sometimes seems a little bit fragmentary. It's assembled by editors like Camus. And so it's sometimes like, where's she going with this?
SPEAKER_00I would go so far as to say that Vei's fragmentary quality was considered essential for that time. How to express the terror and horror of experience in between not only the First World War, which was the so-called war to end all wars, but then World War II. And so she joins a great pantheon of writers and thinkers like Pessoa and Eliot, who felt compelled to write in fragments. Like the how do you say Fouleton?
SPEAKER_01Filleton.
SPEAKER_00I'm not going to try that. That was actually funny. We could keep that in. My French sucks.
SPEAKER_01So for readers, reading Ve could seem a little bit more challenging because of the character of her writings. She is writing about a lot of things at the same time. In this case, in the essay that we're going to be talking about, the title is Love of the Order of the World. So it's a bit of a wordy title there. So she's bringing in a lot of different ideas together. And sometimes the reader can be overwhelmed. So we invite our readers to listen to this episode and use it as a kind of a guide for going back over the text. I personally had to read the text three or four times in preparation for today. What about you, Simon?
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell I had to read many paragraphs over and over, but it also reminded me that this is at a time when philosophy is pushing against the nature of language itself. We're we're thinking Wittgenstein, we're thinking Heidegger, we're thinking the poets Celan, we're thinking about the unsayable and how far language can can name experience. And so you could argue that her writing is already imbued with a very, very specific political project in mind. How to really say the unsayable.
SPEAKER_01So this takes us directly to the question that we want to talk about today, which is what is the relationship between beauty and morality? And for Vay, it's clear that there is a relationship. All of her thinking is imbued by moral questions. And so when she turns her attention to the question of beauty in this essay, where she describes the order of the world is itself beautiful, she is also thinking about it in moral terms. And just as a kind of beginning to think through these difficult kinds of this difficult text, I just want to signal three concepts that really strike me as helping us to understand the relationship between beauty and morality for Vay. The first is attention, which is perhaps the most important concept for her. Attention is the beginning of love. When you love someone, you give them attention. And she thought that you can't have a morality unless you are attentive to people because you're not going to be able to see what they need. And attention is giving over of yourself to another. And again, attention plays a role in beauty because beauty, she says, shocks us, wakes us up, makes us attentive. So you could say attention that you achieve through experiences of beauty is like a segue to becoming a more attentive person and therefore a more moral person. The other two concepts that I think are really important for her are the real, what is reality? And finally, purposiveness without a purpose. And this kind of goes back to what Simon was saying just now about beauty being, what was the word you used, Simon?
SPEAKER_00Autotelic.
SPEAKER_01Autotelic. Its purpose is internal to itself. There's something necessary about the work of art, for instance. You wouldn't want to change anything about it. So its form, its wholeness is just right. It's purposive. But its purpose is not there. It's the you can't ask why does it exist? Why do it is its own reason for existence.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, what you're saying, Dahlia, I think also reflects what I was saying earlier, which is that conflict between art or beauty existing for itself, but also the relationship with morality. And somehow, Vay manages to stretch both concepts so that they're interlinked with each other. It's that pure attentiveness, almost in an ascetic sense, um, almost in a complete renunciation, beauty through renunciation, and yet through renunciation comes the outreach, comes the passion, comes the expansiveness. And in this sense, to me, without being an expert, it uh it has a distinctly uh um theological, almost a medieval uh flavor to it. Um it reminds me of Meister Eckhart, and it also reminds me of uh the Hebraic or Kabbalistic concept called Tsimzum in Hebrew, which is that God could only create the world by removing himself from it. And uh what you were saying earlier I found very, very interesting because it is almost like Vey is trying to cast the poet as the creator by removing oneself from it in this act of pure renunciation. And so the act of creation, like Bach again, is itself a deeply creative, embedded, generative but non-selfish.
SPEAKER_01You know, so many thoughts there. The first is I have been listening to Gregorian chant in preparation for this because one of the um artworks that Vay regards very highly is Gregorian chant. I want to pick your brain about that, Simon. Why you think she thinks this is so interesting. There's a medieval quality about it. She says at one point, Gregorian chant is different from popular music because you can listen to it over and over and never get tired of it. Whereas pop music, you can hear it maybe a thousand times, but not in the way. It's it there is a kind of a time frame. And at one point it just becomes bad. So it has to go with the taste of the time. Whereas Gregorian chant outlasts all time, perhaps. I'd be curious to hear what you have to think. But with regard to the Hebraic or Kabbalistic concept, I've been thinking a lot about that, about this idea of how do you say it in Hebrew?
SPEAKER_00Timtum.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, exactly. That the um the divine withdraws from the world and therefore gives us the freedom to choose how to be. And I see that in Vei. And this is maybe why she and Camus agree on so much, or Camus sees so many parallels in their thinking. Because for Vei, God isn't everywhere, right? God has left, and we have to find God. We have to work hard to be attentive, and beauty is this opening onto God. But we have to be careful because sometimes, you know, if we don't see it as an opening onto the divine and see it as something that is just uh enough in this in this world, then we can start fetishizing beauty or becoming idolatrous to use religious religious language. So I've been thinking exactly about those kinds of connections. This medieval connection, the Kabbalistic connection. So she is a thinker with lots of influences.
SPEAKER_00So many influences. I just kept going back to Meister Eckhart all the time, who was the one of the great uh purveyors or philosophers of negative theology, that we can only know what God isn't. And while Vay is very affirmative in many respects, there is still this enormous lacuna, this gap in what she's saying, and she's not necessarily trying to fill the gap. I think she's also not necessarily trying so much to define things, what this or what that means, because her language is in some respects like poetry. Um it uh it's deliberately difficult to understand because again we're going back to that limit of human experience. And uh she is truly a philosopher, she's a mystic, there's an ascetic quality about her, but there's also a quality of absolute uh um affirmation and determination and strength. But in many respects, she reminds me also of Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn who converted to Catholicism because he had to, who was a Jew.
SPEAKER_01Um Can I ask you which Mendelssohn? Because for philosophers, it's Moses Mendelssohn. You're thinking probably of Felix Mendelssohn.
SPEAKER_00I'm thinking of Felix. And I was listening to the Italian symphony by Mendelssohn recently. You can hear, oh, this guy's Jewish all the way. There's that nervous energy. Um you could almost say a bit of, you know, Ashkenazi neuroticism. And in Vey, the fact that she's Tsim Tsum is the ghost for me in so much of her writing, um, the Kabbalah, the idea that there's so much uh suffering, of course, not only for the Jewish people, but but uh there is so much suffering and this um this idea that God is unknowable. Um if a person has never really seen an elephant before, how could you really describe it? And this is the uh this idea of God as this great lacuna, and she's trying to say what it is, but not directly. It's this it's it's so poetic to me. I mean, I'm far from an expert, but I'd be very curious to know what you think here.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell I think beauty is the best uh tool for Herve to get at something connected to what God is. But I think she would resist saying what God is, because she thinks that God is beyond any kind of concept we human beings would have. But beauty is the way by which we can begin to approach the divine. So what is beauty for Vay? If we were going to say it very quickly, I think there is no way to do that because it's such a complicated, multifaceted idea. But here's one very, so let's say uh broad brush strokes attempt. Beauty in this essay involves the order of the world. So in ancient Greek, the word for order or the universe is the same as the word for beauty, ornament, cosmos, right? So she also has this ancient Greek background. She loves the ancient Greeks, she loves Plato. Clearly, Diatima is here with us in this essay. And so to love the order. Of the world is to love its beauty. And what does that mean? It's to recognize, to accept the reality of the world, to embrace the world and embrace all the suffering that is there in the world. And to see beauty in this reality. Like I said, reality or the real is a really important concept for Ve. And this just reminds me of like amorfati. You have to just embrace it. And to be able to see the order of the world, to see its beauty despite of all the suffering, despite of all the pain, that is a major kind of moral development for Ve, and it's going to help you to approach God.
SPEAKER_00That's a beautiful way of putting it. Vei for me is the central to her idea is that beauty arrests the ego. And when you when a person falls in love, but truly falls in love, and you listen to, you know, something that you really love, whether it's their heartbeat or their breath or their pulse or touch their skin or listen to their ideas, it's it is a kind of renunciation because you're accepting this human being with all of their frailties. And it reminds me, again, I've said she's a Jewish thinker, but she's a deeply, deeply Christian thinker as well, because I'm thinking back to the Bible where the church is, you know, the bride of Christ. And there is this uh deeply erotic element that I feel in in Vay's writing as well. Christ is almost like a husband. Um Christ and God is to be experienced in a physical level, the blood of Christ. Um and in that sense, she goes back to uh um Hildegard and she goes back to Meister Eckhart and she goes back to Pascal, these uh medieval thinkers. Philosophy and and uh theology and mysticism, these were not separate systems as we would know them, but they're they're part of a vital current that is pulsing through her veins. She's a philosopher of feeling in a in a way that Nietzsche is. Um but uh in a strange way they remind me of each other because there is an affirmation, a a real affirmation. So Nietzsche would probably, being a a uh a sexist, would uh sneer at Vey. But at the same time, I would love to think that he would he would say she's really brought together um affirmation and pessimism and denial, and she somehow brought them together into this beautiful cosmos. Um in this sense, she's completely unique.
SPEAKER_01You know, when we first met Simon and you told me that you're interested in Nietzsche, you're writing on Nietzsche, I came back home and I was thinking a lot about what you had said, and and I thought, Simon needs to read Vei. And so I'm glad you see the connection there too, because the amorfati, the whole the the stoic embrace of reality despite the suffering, is present in all in both Vei and uh Nietzsche. And I'd be just so interested, this is a conversation for another time about how you would see uh Vei and uh as a response to Nietzsche's nihilism. But maybe I'll just pick up on another point that you were bringing up. This idea of that at the heart of Vei's thinking is desire, and there is this Platonist element there. Of course, Eros is there. And so love is also there. The essay is called Love of the Order of the World. And for Vei, and this is so important for us as philosophers to remember, because so often when we think of what is morality, we think of a set of concepts established by reason, and the goal is to rationally achieve a certain uh to achieve these concepts like justice, fairness, goodness, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And everything is very rationally determined, and reason is the source, we say, of morality. But what is Vay saying? No, reason is not the source of morality. Reason can actually take us off track because it can justify, can be used to justify immorality or evil. What is the source of morality? It's desire, and more specifically, it's the hunger, the longing for goodness. That's the source of morality. And this goodness is not in the world. It's absent. And a good person or the source of a goodness in an individual person is the desire to bring goodness into the world.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. Vay, in this sense, is a deeply, deeply political thinker, but not political in the cheap sense that so many of us understand today with uh drop mic statements and clapbacks. She is a political thinker in the sense that philosophy and mysticism and religion is an engagement with the interrelation between human beings and um what makes us human. So in this sense, everything is political, but the the term political has been debased so badly in our time. So I actually, to return to our original point, do agree with the concept that beauty is political and that beauty is moral, and that morality and beauty are interlinked, but not in the sense that we might know them today, that, oh, that person is beautiful, that person is not beautiful. Um that is a very ugly philosophy, that is an ugly political system, but in the deepest, deepest sense, it is harmony, it is synthesis, it is integration, and that is why I love Vei. But even that can be seen with regard, it can be seen uh in a sort of dangerous way. Reading Vey after all of these years, and for that I have to thank you, Dahlia, I'm reminded how much of her writing is is embedded with presuppositions. Th she might say, this is, this is the case, this is the situation, God is blah. And this, in a sense, I think is, I suppose, what to a s you know, a strict analytical philosopher might be dangerous, but it also is why she is a mystic and why for some people she's trying to smuggle theology into aesthetics. It's at its very worst, Vay has been accused, I think with some fairness, of sanctifying suffering. Um, the idea ultimately that, I mean, it comes down to this. If God is ultimate renunciation out of creation, out of beauty, out of love, he's really not there. Ultimately, through all of her beautiful language, he is watching, you know, Gaza be destroyed, he's watching my relatives be killed, he's watching um October 7, he's watching Bondi happen. And that's the ultimate problem people have with Vay, because beyond all of the beautiful and the language that is so precise, perhaps arguably more than any writer, she is arguing for a God who has left the room. And I don't have an answer to that. Um, I really don't have an answer to that. But it hurts me to read because I know what's going on, and we've all seen, you know, this the suffering children of the Congo. What would Vay really feel about that? What would she say about that? She lived through World War I and World War II. That's not a God I want to get behind.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, really hard questions, Simon. I don't know if we're going to be able to answer all of them or if I'm going to even be able to approach an answer to all of them. But here are some ways by which to think with Ve. And think about our times in light of her. So let me just pull back for a minute and say this concept of purposiveness without a purpose is really important for Ve. And I think it is the kernel of what she thinks beauty is. So here's a passage, and it's a very tricky passage, so we might need to slow down and unpack it. She says, beauty is the sole purposiveness here below. As Kant said so well, it is purposiveness that does not contain a purpose. A beautiful thing does not contain any good other than itself in its totality, such as it appears. We go towards it without knowing what to ask of it. It offers us its own existence. We do not desire anything else, we have got it, and yet still we desire. I'm gonna pause there because I think that this can really help us to understand what this idea of purposiveness without a purpose is. It is a good, it does not contain any good other than itself. Its existence is self-justifying. And this is so different from the way that we today might think of the relationship between beauty and morality, as in an artwork is beautiful and moral when it has a message that is outside of the artwork. And here she's saying its beauty and its goodness are contained within it. It does not need to offer any messages beyond what it is, it simply is there. And our ability to appreciate it. This is how she keeps going. We do not quite know what. We would like to go beyond the beauty, but it is only surface. It is like a mirror that reflects back on us our own desire for the good. So when we look at beautiful things and we see that they contain goodness simply in themselves, without any external messages, what are they for? They don't have to justify. Somehow we see goodness embodied in this form, and then this reminds us of our own desire for the good. And then she continues it is a sphinx, an enigma, a painfully frustrating mystery. We would like to feed upon it, but it is an only an object for looking at. It only appears at a certain distance. The beautiful only appears if we are not fully involved with it. We need a bit of distance and we need to be able to allow it to show itself.
SPEAKER_00That is a beautiful way to put it. And again, I'm thinking of Nazi rallies, and I'm thinking about what happens when beauty is entered, when beauty is not only entered but embodied, and when the person becomes the very artifact that they're looking at. And I'm thinking of uh Walter Benjamin here with uh the his philosophy of fascism as spectacle, with a very specific um fashion sense and aesthetics and lines and rhythms and sounds. And I think Vay here is touching on something very, very important. She's effectively saying the beautiful thing is telling us I am not yours, but you may love me anyway. And that is a a beautiful, beautiful way to approach a piece of music, and unsurprisingly Vey considers music to be the most ideal kind of art because it is made for her of obedience and disappearance and time. And that really touches me. So when I go, you know, to Italy and I stand in a cathedral, I need this distance to appreciate the sheer magnificence of what I'm seeing. If I am too close to it, I'm overwhelmed. And it's often after when I'm back in the hotel and I'm drinking a coffee that I can truly appreciate the beauty of what I'm seeing. It's a kind of renunciation. So you could argue that the human being has to effectively mimic Tsim Tzum in encountering beauty. And this echoes so many of the uh medieval concepts of God who so loved the world that he had to be out of it. Um this is such a both a Christian and and a Jewish idea that God had to be removed through sacrifice, or God had to be um actually remove himself from the objects that he created. There is no God in the actual world which explains suffering. And so you could argue that Vay despite everything, her her philosophy is one of theodicy. Um, it is one where God has been removed. And perhaps she would argue, no, that is not the case. I think she is a, and I I think this is the word, a theodical a theodical thinker. Um God is not here because it was necessary for the beauty of creation that he leave.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell So one of the things that you've been touching on, Simon, is this uh withdrawal and that the human being is called upon also through these experiences of beauty to see, first of all, that um these there are things in the world, beautiful things in the world, that are simply what they are. They don't serve a purpose. And in contemplating them, she says we open ourselves up to become like these beautiful things. In other words, we stop thinking of ourselves as having a purpose, having an intention, because purpose is the same as intention. And and this is a passage that I thought was really interesting. She describes the absence of purposiveness as the absence of intention, and she says, this is the essence of the beauty of the world, that beautiful things don't have an intention beyond themselves. And when we make ourselves similar to the beauty of the world, for instance, she says, she gives this example of we start to make circular movements that make the days and nights. We start to imitate those circular movements. I was reminded of Sufi dancers here, right? And she says, within these circular movements, we too start to represent, to embody the absence of intention. And this is pure beauty. And it's this pulling back of any intention. Just like you talk about God pulling back, we, through experiences of beauty, see an absence of intention and we start to pull back. And she has a word for it. She calls it decentering, becoming less about our egos and more about the world.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely, Dahlia. And in this sense, I'm going back to some of the great ascetics, like Saint Anthony, this absolute renunciation, this emptying out, and the paradoxical filling from the emptying out. We often ask what is beauty? And of course, that's what we're talking about in our podcast. For v for Vay, beauty is not mere prettiness, but it is a kind of metaphysical discipline. Um, I'm thinking of an interaction I had some years ago with a man who was talking about the films of Francois Ozon, who's often known as a quote-unquote gay filmmaker, but he's actually just a great filmmaker who is very preoccupied with themes of homosexuality. And I said, What is it that is so fascinating about Ozon's films? And he said to me something that I suppose one could say is very politically incorrect, but true. He said, It is because love is so concerned with control. And I thought, wow, that's heavy. I think honestly, when we love something or someone as people, we are trying to set them free, but we are also fighting the urge to control that person. And when I say control, I don't mean in a crude sense or an abusive sense, but we we want to touch the artwork. We want to mold it into ourselves, we want the narcissism of experience. And I use that again in the in the not in the pop psychology way. We want them to be more like us, as an extension of us. Vay's argument ultimately is that, in a way, the world is not God. The world is different from God. Um, by creating it, he was effectively being like Francois Ozon. And again, there's that connection between the artist and the creator, um, the poet as creator, which is such a symbolist idea. And so she's again influenced almost by the symbolist conception of artist and poet as creator, who, in ultimately expressing the greatest love, withdrew, but possibly also didn't want to. We all know this feeling when we love something so much, an animal, you know, or a human being. We're fighting um these very um inopportune urges within us. If we're going to be really honest with ourselves, we're we're doing that all the time. That's not just men, it's men and women, it's everyone. Um and this is what I think uh the tension of beauty and art and morality is, and it's what Vay doesn't answer, but it's what she talks about because ultimately there is no answer. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01So much there that I want to speak about. But I'll just start by talking about my experience as a parent, because the parental love is precisely sitting on that tension. You love the child, you love, you want to give them freedom, you want to support them, you want to withdraw so that they could be, you see their beauty, you want their beauty to be in the world, not your own. And yet you also want them to be little you's. In fact, there are so many advertising campaigns that are all about mama and little you know, princess that wear the same pajamas or have the same hairstyle as I have with my daughter. So, yes, I absolutely agree that there's a tension there between our desire for beauty to contemplate it as at a distance and to recognize its lack of intention. It has these beautiful objects are beautiful, and there's an internal necessity to them to go back to what you were talking about, and they discusses that quite a lot. You wouldn't want to change any line of a poem. It is just right as it is, and you don't ask it why does it exist? It just is, right? Its existence is self-justifying, and you can only contemplate it at a distance. And yet you desire it in this kind of you want to own it, you want to possess it in a possessive way. And she distinguishes between the gesture of contemplation at a distance and eating. And she thinks the experience of beauty is one where we're not eating, we're not possessive. We want to have this ability to distance, but it is a very hard one, and in fact, the whole of the history of aesthetics sits at this tension. Every philosopher is working through what is it, to contemplate at a distance, or is it to eat the beautiful literally to eat God.
SPEAKER_00I mean, could there be a more um erotically charged sentence or phrase than that?
SPEAKER_01She says that.
SPEAKER_00It's an extraordinary, extraordinary phrase, and it just mirrors human experience so perfectly, and it yet it doesn't answer it. And it reminds one, it certainly reminds me, that it is the logical, and I'm talking about emotional logic, it is the endpoint of that uh of that chasm between uh well, in terms of creation. How could suffering exist? And it is really the only possible end point, which is that God is not here, and he's not here by virtue of the fact that he cannot be here because of creation. And that's sort of why so many of the uh most um gifted mystics, again, I'm thinking of Meister Eckhart, who I'm convinced would be a kind of friend to Simone Vey. Um that's why they came to this ultimate um negative philosophy. God is something we don't understand, we can't understand. It's like why a goldfish would possibly understand why I have to earn money in order to feed the goldfish. Um it's beyond its conception. And so we can only really understand the concept of horror and carnage and terrorism and violence with a divine puzzlement. And in this sense, Vei is closer to Camus than she's often given credit for. There is almost an absurdity in it.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely, I think that's right. The divine puzzlement is actually really helpful. And it shows you why the experience of beauty is for Vei, and maybe for us as well, so important. There is an absurdity to the world. We cannot, through concepts, through arguments, through reasons, justify suffering. And yet we experience the world as beautiful, and that beauty is a beauty that lacks intention. That's the essence of beauty for Vei. Beautiful objects stand for themselves, they do not have an answer for why. And they remind us, therefore, of our own desires for the good. And ultimately, I think that's her only answer to the questions that you were posing earlier about what do we do with Vei today? Well, I think the only thing we could do is to say despite suffering, we still hunger for the good. Absent, good. We recognize its absence. Beauty helps us to recognize its absence because we see all of these things are not perfect. We accept them in their imperfections. The world is vulnerable. She says this about animals. You love an animal, you love its beauty, but you also recognize that it's completely contingent. Its parents may have not had it, right? It's vulnerable, it's going to die, and it's uh also filled with imperfections, and yet we see its beauty. And so we recognize in the beauty, it it it offers us an image of perfection and of what is lacking, and therefore we see ourselves in it.
SPEAKER_00Couldn't say it better than that, Dahlia. And this is why also for me, they has to be hard to understand and has to be reread, because you're talking about the limits of human representation, you're talking about the world of Celan, you're talking about Wittgenstein, you're talking about people really who are writing in extremis. Um this is the answer to suffering, the only possible answer is to delve within to the extremity of emotion, and it is also renunciation. Um so for me, she fits within that broad spectrum of mystical thinkers who have travelled within, even who were persecuted and killed for their beliefs. I'm thinking of uh the early Christians um as written by Eusebius, many of whom who died with a smile on their faces. And of course, in our very pathological age, we're talking about insanity, we're talking about fanaticism, but where is the line? Because you could argue that Vay sits right at that line between fanaticism, um, the limits of sanity and categorization, and immense renunciation. Um for her, I would argue God is not a figure, he is not the very sort of cheap and debased image of a man with a beard sitting in the sky, but he he is or she or they are almost something that exists within us all. Um almost in a I suppose an animistic sometimes sense or a pantheistic way. There's something universal about it, and it is something we don't understand, and we can only understand it through the flickers of Tsimzum, through the flickers of art, which is beauty, which is a mediating impulse between the mystery of God and our own divine absurdity down here.
SPEAKER_01Yes, so beauty for her is precisely those flickers, those those little instances where we see the potential, where we see the good, but it's not full, it's incomplete. And she's really careful. We shouldn't fetishize these secondary beauties because they are incomplete. They are imperfect, they suffer, they are vulnerable, they're contingent. And as soon as we take them as the endpoint, we end up with really problematic conceptions of beauty and the relationship between beauty and politics. We start to think that that's enough, that is perfect. Those Nazi rallies, once we start to think about them as just these kind of instantiations of the divine, then we have a real problem. Her view would be the exact opposite. These things if anything in the world that we describe as beautiful is reminding us of the lack, the void of the world, not its perfection.
SPEAKER_00Beautifully put. And again, she's such a Jewish thinker, because you go back to Kabbalah and you think that everything that we experience on the earth in Kabbalah is a divine vessel. It is a vessel, but it is not the thing itself. And I just I keep going back to uh Kabbalah, of which I am far from an expert, but the divine vessels, the tsimzum, the uh almost uh and you ca it's similar in Hindu philosophy as well, that these are emanations or avatars of the unknowable. And I think Vei is so universal in that sense because she in a way is as far as you can go with this topic. You keep you know hitting the same um cul-de-sac over and over again. The the problem of uh consciousness and experience and beauty and um especially now in the world that we're encountering, how is it justifiable? There is no answer.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell No, there is no answer, that's for sure. I guess it's good for us to come to a close here. So in light of that, Simon, after reading this text and talking about it, do you think you've changed in any way?
SPEAKER_00No, I don't think I've changed in any way. But when you read someone like Vey, it's a kind of uh almost quasi-divine clarification. What Vey can do is put to words, and this is so difficult, and only great poets can do that, what you felt intuitively, but you didn't have the words for. So there's there's a very uh granite-like um compactness to her writing. Um, and so for me it felt like a clarity, and I thought, yeah, this is what I've always felt, but I just didn't have the mastery of Ve to write it like that. What do you think? How about you?
SPEAKER_01As a philosopher, I am someone who really likes to understand. And Vei is a difficult thinker to put in it into a box. And for me, this was an experience, and talking through it with you really manifested that for me. Is that she's not someone you could just quickly understand and move on. But she is definitely someone worth sitting with, paying attention to. She forces us in the act of reading to become more attentive, to perform exactly the virtue that she thinks so highly of. And so for me, the change is it is actually a genuine change because I want to be sitting with these ideas, these ideas that are in some ways uncomfortable for me. They're not ones that I am super familiar with, and I want to let myself think slowly with Vay.
SPEAKER_00Beautiful.
SPEAKER_01You've been listening to The Wednesday Society, where we take some time out of our rushed lives to read and think together. I'm Daliana Sarr, professor of philosophy at the University of Sydney, and I'm very interested in the question: can beauty change your life?
SPEAKER_00And I am Simon Tedesky, concert pianist and writer based in Sydney.
SPEAKER_01Our producer and editor is Sarah Alley. Russell Stapleton composed our music, and Bethany Stewart is our sound engineer. We would love to hear your thoughts on this discussion and any suggestions for neglected texts. Email us at Wednesdaysocietypodcast at gmail.com. This podcast was made possible through the generous support of the Australian Research Council. We're grateful to record at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Media Room at the University of Sydney and recognize the support of the School of Humanities, also at the University of Sydney. The Wences Society was created on Gadigal, Koringai, and Daruk Country.