Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview
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C O N A T U S
12. Approaching Beauty
‘It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world is eternally justified.’
Ludwig Wittgenstein
‘Beauty is a body bowed from the weight of a life fully lived. Beauty is hair bleached in the light of a life fully loved. Beauty is the angular, bony edges of a life fully risked.’
Sharon Blackie — The Enchanted Life
‘Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.’
Simone Weil — Gravity and Grace
In this first chapter on beauty, the paradoxical treatment of beauty is put under consideration. Out of our three big themes of philosophy — truth, beauty and goodness — it is very often beauty that is the poor cousin of the other two. In approaching the question of beauty, we can ask: Is there an absolute beauty that exists somewhere outside of the everyday world, or is beauty in some way relative?
It seems much easier to dismiss the idea of an absolute of beauty than it does to dismiss an absolute truth. There is no good reason why this should be — perhaps it is just a reflection of
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