Читать книгу A John Haught Reader - John F. Haught - Страница 12

We have seen that the encounter with depth, futurity, and freedom requires an attitude of allowing ourselves to be grasped by them. Our typical response, though, is one of initially shrinking back from entering into the embrace of these horizons (which are really three ways of thinking about a single horizon) while, at the same time, being irresistibly drawn toward them. Rather than allowing ourselves to be immediately comprehended by depth, futurity, and freedom, we try to place them under our control. Such a response is inevitably unsuccessful, however, and we finally realize that our sense of well-being, our happiness, requires that we surrender ourselves to them.

Nowhere is this need to surrender more obvious than in our encounter with beauty. In order for us to experience the beauty of nature, other persons, a great event, or an artistic masterpiece, we have to allow ourselves to be “carried away” by the aesthetic phenomenon. This experience of being grasped by the beautiful is one of the clearest models we have for expressing what is involved in the intuition of the divine. In fact, it is more than a model. We may even say that our ordinary experience of the beautiful is already an encounter with ultimacy.

The experience of beauty is as two-sided as is the religious experience of the sacred. On the one hand, great beauty is overwhelming in its seductiveness and attractiveness. It is a mysterium fascinans that compels us and invites us to surrender ourselves to it. At times we have all experienced the seductiveness of the beautiful, especially as it is embodied in other persons, but also in the glories of nature, music, and literature. At the same time, we have felt the pangs of unfulfilled longing that accompany every aesthetic experience. We are implicitly aware of the chasm that lies between the beauty embodied in any particular object of aesthetic delight and the unlimited beauty for which we long in the depths of our desire. This abysmal distance is a mysterium tremendum from which we shrink back. Our recoil from ultimate beauty takes the form of a fixation on particular, limited, aesthetic objects; this fixation is accompanied by an anaesthetizing of our deep need for a wider and fuller beauty.

In short, our quest for beauty is a quest for the divine. That ultimately satisfying beauty which we long for—but continues to elude us—is what the word “God” means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it and speak of the ultimately beautiful for which you are continually searching in the depths of your desire. Perhaps, in order to do this, you must forget much that you have learned about God, perhaps even that name itself. For if you know that God means ultimate “beauty,” you already know much about the divine. You cannot then call yourself an atheist, for you cannot think or say, “I am completely indifferent to beauty.” If you could say this in complete seriousness, then you would be an atheist; otherwise, you are not. For as long as you have some longing for a wider and deeper beauty than you have experienced thus far in your life, you show that you have already in some way encountered the divine, or rather, that the divine has taken hold of you. Another way to think about God, therefore, is as the horizon of ultimate beauty toward which you are irresistibly drawn.

Scholars of religion rightly make a distinction between religious and aesthetic experience (as we shall call the experience of beauty). Religion, they often say, involves the symbolic sense of a “totally other” dimension that becomes transparent to the believer in the images and objects that stand for and mediate the “sacred.” The aesthetic experience, on the other hand, is not explicitly concerned with the symbolic transparency of the aesthetic object. It does not have to understand a beautiful object as standing for any sacred reality “beyond” itself. The beautiful seems sufficient in itself and does not inevitably lead us into another dimension, whereas the religious sense does.42 To many individuals for whom the “sacred” means nothing at all, the “beautiful” means a great deal. Therefore, some distinction must be made between “the sacred” and “the beautiful.”

But can we so neatly set one experience apart from the other? I am uncomfortable with too sharp of a distinction between the aesthetic and the religious experience. To segregate them too crisply seems artificial and out of touch with what actually happens in our encounter with the beauty of reality. For if we carefully ponder what is involved in the experience of concrete beauty, we may think of it as continuous with our encountering the divine. By our tasting the beauty in our ordinary experience, we are already being invited into the realm of ultimacy, although we may not wish to interpret it as such. Nonetheless, the point of the following is to argue that this is indeed the case. An examination of our ordinary encounter with beauty may disclose to us that the beautiful is a mysterium tremendum et fascinans too, and that we respond to it with the same ambivalent wavering between repulsion and attraction that the experience of the sacred evokes in homo religiosus.

Can we state conceptually what it is that makes things appear to us as beautiful and some things as more beautiful than others? Alfred North Whitehead, whose philosophy is permeated by aesthetic considerations, tells us that beauty is the “harmony of contrasts.”43 What makes us appreciate the beauty of things is that they bring together nuance, richness, complexity, and novelty on the one side, and harmony, pattern, or order on the other. The more “intense” the synthesis of harmony and contrast, the more we appreciate their union. Nuance without harmony is chaos and harmony without nuance is monotony. Beauty involves the transformation of potentially clashing elements into pleasing contrasts, harmonized by the overarching aesthetic pattern of the beautiful object or experience.

An example of such harmony of contrasts may be seen in any great novel. What makes such a novel beautiful is its weaving together into a unified whole the many subplots and characterizations that might have easily led to confusion. A poor novel would be one that was so concerned with overall order that it failed to establish sufficient tension and conflict to bring about the nuanced complexity required by beauty. At the opposite extreme, an inferior novel would degenerate into chaos, failing to bring its details into the unity of a single story. Either lack of harmony or absence of complexity would impoverish the artistic masterpiece. Our appreciation of the work of art, or of anything beautiful, is the result of our implicit sense that the beautiful precariously balances the order and novelty brought together in the aesthetic object.

If we reflect on the elements of the beautiful, however, we are led to the conclusion, also emphasized by Whitehead, that every actuality is, to some degree at least, an aesthetic phenomenon. Every “actual entity” is a patterned synthesis of contrasting elements. In the simplest objects the contrasts are not intense, but they are there at least to some small degree. Nothing would be actual at all unless its ingredients were patterned in some way or other. Whether we are talking about an electron, an artistic creation, a person, a civilization, or the universe as such, these entities would not have any identity whatsoever unless their constituent elements were patterned in a definite way. Their “actuality” corresponds by degrees to the mode and intensity of their synthesizing harmony and contrast. This means that all things are actual to the extent that they are beautiful and all things are beautiful to the extent that they order novelty and complexity into aesthetic contrasts.44

Beauty, therefore, has what philosophers call a “transcendental” nature. This means that “the beautiful” is not any particular thing, but instead a metaphysical aspect of all things (being, truth, unity, goodness, and beauty are the “transcendentals” usually mentioned by metaphysicians). For this reason alone, we may suspect that we cannot casually disassociate any possible encounter with beauty from the experience of the divine, which is said to be the supreme exemplification of the “transcendentals.”

We experience beauty in nature, in the physical appearances or personalities of others, in great architecture, art, music, poetry, and other types of literature. But one of the most intense instances of aesthetic experience lies in the spectacle of an heroic story. Since such stories involve the narrative patterning of struggle, suffering, conflicts, and contradictions into a complex unity, they stand out as one of the most obvious examples of beauty. In fact, it is often our being conditioned by the stories of great heroes that determines our whole sense of reality, personal identity, and purpose, as well as the quality of our aesthetic experience in general. From the beginning of human history, it appears that the consciousness of people—their sense of reality, identity, and destiny—has been shaped primarily by their sense of the heroic as it is deposited in the paradigmatic stories of their traditions. In myth, legend, ballad, history, epic, and any other type of story, people have woven around themselves a narrative womb with all the ingredients of ordered contrast that I am here attributing to beauty.

In this light, the seemingly nihilistic dismantling of tradition, history, religion, and story in the “deconstructionist” element of modern criticism may be interpreted as itself a moment of contrast that adds nuance to the wider pattern of beauty for which we remain forever nostalgic. The way in which human consciousness has, at times, been frozen in particular narrative patterns deserves the kind of negative criticism one finds in a deconstructionist philosophy. In spite of its inevitable protests to the contrary, I would suggest that, like Nietzsche, its criticism is directed less at narrative as such than at narrative fixation. Deconstructionists are by no means the most significant threat to the integrity of story. For the demise of story is first of all the result of our childish obsession with particular versions of a dynamic narrative tradition. The attempt to freeze a particular tradition in an absolutely conservative way is already the end of story, the true “nihilism” that prevents the story from remaining alive. Story-fixations bring about the end of story and, with it, the impression of the death of God, long before modern deconstructionists begin their work. Nietzsche himself was well aware of the implicit nihilism buried in the superficial narrative fixation of much Christian theology and spirituality. By bringing the “ending” into narrative view prematurely, by failing to wait in the midst of struggle, and by narrowing the ending down to dimensions too suffocating to satisfy the human desire for the infinite, story-fixation is itself already the death of narrative. To be properly narrative, the cosmic and human story must remain in process. To freeze the story artificially is to kill it. Hence, the deconstruction of story(-fixation) of which we have been speaking is an essential nullifying operation undertaken for the sake of the survival of narrative itself. The stories, histories, and cosmologies taken apart by deconstructionists are, in my view, highly caricatured versions with which some (but by no means all) believers are uncomfortable anyway. Although its proponents would undoubtedly deny it, deconstructionism announces not the end of story as such but rather the end of naive story-fixations. And thus it may be seen as contributing, in the final analysis, to a wider aesthetic vision.

However, the narrative sense which our critics have rightly tied to the idea of God is incapable of being absolutely eradicated. Their own writings display a narrative undercurrent of which they are not always aware. They themselves tell a story about story. Their tale has a beginning, a period of struggle, and an end. Deconstructionists envisage themselves as living in the “final days,” when history and narrative have come to an end, when an eternal “play” of language eschatologically appears.45 Ironically they usually invoke and transform ancient myths (stories)—like those of Sisyphus, Eros, Thoth, Prometheus, Zarathustra, and others—to instruct us about the futility of myth. In the very performance of the deconstruction of narrative, they give evidence of the ineradicably narrative quality of all human experience and consciousness.

In its announcing the “closure” (which does not necessarily mean chronological end) of history, self, and narrative, and in its endorsement of a formless and insignificant play of language, deconstructionism also falls short of giving us the ultimate aesthetic fulfillment we all long for. In the final analysis, this philosophy is not a space within which one can live. If it has any value at all in terms of our aesthetic needs, it is only as a “moment” in the process of moving toward a wider narrative vision of beauty than is allowed by our story-fixations. Unfortunately, in its repudiation of the tension intrinsic to narrative, and in its artificial efforts to force the eschaton of play into the temporal narrowness of the present, it is reduced to one more version of the gnostic escapes from history to which religious people are always tempted whenever they grow tired of waiting and struggle. Once again, it is worth recalling Tillich’s words: “We are stronger when we wait than when we possess.”46 This applies not only to our search for depth but also to our quest for an ultimate beauty.

The Absence of God

The quest for a completely satisfying aesthetic experience always leaves us with some element of discontent. In the first place, an intense experience of beauty never lasts indefinitely. The most memorable sensations we have of being carried away by beauty are often only instants that quickly fade and that resist adequate repetition. In the second place, there is always a region of our aesthetic longing that remains unfulfilled—even by the most poignant encounters with beautiful persons, music, art, or natural phenomena. It is not difficult for any of us to conjure up examples from our own lives of the elusiveness of beauty. We are seemingly unable to completely control the beautiful, but must instead patiently await the summons to be taken into its grasp.

The experience of never being completely filled up by particular aesthetic experiences is of course frustrating. It might even tempt one to an “absurdist” interpretation of reality. The inability of particular aesthetic manifestations to satisfy the infinity of our desire for the sublime might easily be construed as just another instance of the insuperable incongruity of humans and the universe. And it would be very difficult to offer an empirical refutation of this tragic view.

However, there is another at least equally plausible interpretation of our aesthetic frustration. It stems from our thesis that, ultimately, the beautiful is the divine, a mysterium tremendum et fascinans. And if the divine is the beautiful or sublime, then, in keeping with what we have noted in each of the preceding chapters, we should expect not so much to grasp beauty as to allow it to comprehend us and carry us away into itself. However, as we have also emphasized, our initial instinct is usually that of resisting and even denying the gentle envelopment of our existence by the mysterium—in this case, the beautiful. Aesthetic frustration, therefore, is not so much a failure on the part of the beautiful to meet us as it is the result of our shriveling our aesthetic sensitivity to restrictive dimensions that “protect” us from the beautiful. The “absurdist” interpretation would insist that our aesthetic frustration is the result of the fact that while we ourselves have an insatiable, even infinite, capacity for experiencing beauty, reality is limited in its ability to satisfy our needs. Hence, absurdism places the source of our frustration in the universe itself instead of in the possible limitedness of our own aesthetic perceptivity. The view that I am presenting, on the other hand, holds that the “doors” of our perception are possibly too narrow to let in the fullness of the beautiful, while the inner chamber of our consciousness continues to ache in emptiness for a beauty that would fill it and to which our perceptivity is inadequate. Aesthetic frustration stems from the inadequacy of our perceptive faculties to the deep inner need we have for limitless beauty. The absurdist view seems to be based on an unrealistic notion of perception.

Whitehead has shown how an unduly narrow doctrine of perception has dominated most of modern thought, including our understanding of beauty.47 According to the commonly accepted view of modern, empirically oriented thought, the five senses are the only doors of our perception. If we are to be in touch with the real world, we are instructed to attend primarily to the data given to the mind by the senses of taste, touch, smell, sound, and especially sight (aided of course by scientific instruments of perception). But without denying that our senses do put us in touch with the real world, Whitehead emphasizes that the senses give us only a very abstract and narrow range of the universe. They are inadequate to mediate the full complexity—and beauty—of the world in which we are organically situated. They bite off only a very narrow range of the contemporary world and leave behind the unfathomable temporal depths and aesthetic intensity of the universe as a whole. And so, we typically tend to ignore the wider aesthetic patterning of reality, since it is left out by the clear and crisp impressions given to us by the five senses.

41. The following text is an excerpt. Previously published in Haught, What is God?, 69–91. Reprinted with permission.

42. See Dupre, Other Dimension, 228–42.

43. See Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 252–96.

44. See Whitehead, Religion in the Making, 115.

45. See Taylor, Erring.

46. Tillich, Shaking, 151.

47. See Whitehead, Process and Reality, 110–26 and 168–83; Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 148–69; and Whitehead, Symbolism, 12–59.