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More on Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite

More on Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:10 am by Peter Leithart

More on Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite 2017-09-07T00:10:11+06:00 Peter Leithart

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Part 1: Dionysus against the Crucified.

Section 1: City and the Wastes.

Hart raises the question, What is postmodernism? And he answers by citing Milbank?s claim that postmodern French philosophers, for all their differences, are united in an ?ontology of violence.?EBeginning from a radical historicism and perspectivism, postmodernists move to a metaphysics where only violent difference is transcendent. Postmodernism can be understood within the Nietzschean scheme of Dionysus v. Apollo (or the traditional philosophical opposition of Heraclitus and Parmenides), but instead of joining most Western philosophy in celebrating Apollo?s violent ordering of the chaos, it celebrates the violence of the chaos itself.

Hart suggests that Hegel is to blame for unleashing the Dionysian, precisely because his was the ?most unrestrained, regal attempt to bring the dynamism of becoming into the fold of magisterial metaphysics.?EIn so doing, he ontologized strife and violence, incorporating it into the overall system. With the system?s failure, however, Dionysus declares independence from Apollo. Hegel did not pose an alternative of two histories and two cities, a true and a false; instead, the true and false, peace and violence, are ?convertible.?EWhen the ?totality?Eof the system collapses, there is nothing but the naked violence left, celebrated by Nietzsche. Hart notes that in both the Hegelian and the Nietzschean position, the antinomy of flux and fixity defines the limits and parameters of thought. A Christian understanding of the infinite will offer an alternative not confined by this antinomy.

Hart reviews Milbank?s treatment of Heidegger, whom Milbank also charges is complicit with the ontology of violence. Milbank focuses on the notion of the ?fall?Eof being into specific ?epochal situations?Eand into the realm of beings. For Heidegger, all manifestation/unveiling of being within beings is simultaneously and necessarily a veiling. Not only does this imply a univocity of being (since ?every showing is a withdrawal?E?Ethere is no other mode of being than veiling) but also it implies that ontological difference is itself a rupture within being. There is for (Milbank?s) Heidegger no analogical ?interval?Ebetween Being and beings and no idea that being is gift that suffers violence contingently. Heidegger?s es gibt (?there is?E givenness) therefore excludes the ?it is good?Eof Genesis, and thus excludes also the possibility of beauty.

Hart wants to modify Milbank?s account in some measure. The ??presencing?Eof beings as a ?rupture?Ein the ?unanimity?Eof being might make it seem as if Heidegger thinks of being as some thing from which other things must positively break out into the open, rather than as the sheer letting be of what is: not exactly something hidden made manifest, but the manifestation of the manifest.?EYet, the ?generosity?Eof being consists precisely in its withholding itself, in ?its nothingness among beings, its ?refusal?Eto appear as the absolute,?Eso that being is not the ?plenitude of light?Ebut rather darkness, ?the dialectical negation that perpetually, indifferently grants beings their finitude.; and this is, if not violence itself, the tragic fatedness to violence.?ETruth is a ?being-manifest,?Ebut at the same time ?a struggle of obscurity and light . . . to that peace and strife are inseparably joined.?EThus, despite his differences with Milbank, he concludes as well that Heidegger?s ontology is an ontology of violence.

II. The Veil of the Sublime.

In the opening portion of this section, Hart introduces the notion of the ?sublime?Eas another way to characterize and categorize postmodernist trends. After the opening section where he describes the sublime in Kant and Lyotard primarily, and in the remainder of the chapter examines four ?narratives of the sublime?Ein postmodern thought: the differential, the cosmological, the ontological, and the ethical.

Hart briefly traces how the sublime became a key theme of postmodernism, especially those forms of postmodernism that accept the assault on metaphysics from Kant and Heidegger but want to avoid the despair of ?destructive nihilism.?EModern philosophy is the story of the disruption of being, the disintegration of confidence in ?that radiant unity wherein the good, the true, and the beautiful coincided as infinite simplicity and fecundity?Eand the divorce between the notion of being as ?supereminent fullness of being?Eand God. As a result, being could only be conceived of as an absence or veil, and transcendence could only be thought of as God?s absence or exile or alienation. On these premises, being can be figured only as the ?sublime.?E

Fundamentally, the ?sublime?Eis the unrepresentable, and hence something distinct from and beyond the beautiful. For postmoderns, the unrepresentable is ?accorded an unquestioned critical weight,?Eand is ?somehow ?true,?Ewhile representation . . . must dissemble this prior and alien truth to achieve its quite necessary, but ultimately illusory, stability.?EThe sublime thus repeats the gesture of Kant?s first Critique with its prohibition on metaphysics, but also in relation to the sublime ?transforms prohibition into a positive revelation of the limits and possibilities of thought and freedom.?E

Lyotard?s account of the sublime serves to illustrate. In this concept, Lyotard finds a notion of the unrepresentable more radical than the ?noumenon?Eof Kant?s first critique because the sublime actively impinges upon representation and ultimately undermines it. Lyotard writes, ?The aesthetic of the sublime . . . comes about through the distension of beautiful forms to the point of ?formlessness?E . . . and . . . , from that very fact, brings about the overturning, the destruction, of the aesthetics of the beautiful.?EBeauty, Lyotard says, involves a marriage of imagination of nature and mind, of imagination and understanding. But the sublime breaks through this marriage, so that the sublime, as a sentiment of the mind (Kant?s notion), involves the mind in feeling only itself. Nature is ?lacking for it.?EThus, experience of the sublime involves a sacrifice of the imaginative nature in the interests of practical reason. One way to characterize the point is to say that for Loytard the aesthetics of the sublime are part of an attack on totality: it ?belongs to a war upon totality, which claims to have had done with the ancient desire to make difference obey the plot of the universal, and which preserves thought?s critical distance from every representation.?EThe sublime is not occasional either: it is ?at the very foundation of sensibility,?Eand thus ?helps thought to achieve an extranarrative vantage from which the strategies of totality become visible.?EThe sublime thus becomes ?an abolition of beauty, the revelation that beauty becomes lost in its own contradiction and vanity.?ELyotard?s analysis, Hart argues, breaks with Kant?s at a crucial point, in that Lyotard is involved with a ?renunciation of reason that Kant would never have countenanced.?E

A summary of an article by Rogozinski leads Hart to point out that ?the entire pathology of the modern and postmodern can be diagnosed as a multifarious narrative of the sublime,?Ein which ?what pure reason extracts from experience and represents to itself is neutral appearance, separated by an untransversable abyss from everything ?meaningful.?? The good and being do not so much exceed the world as stand over against it, and ?truth is not, finally, the seen, but the unseen that permits one to see.?EPostmodernism is in the grip of a ?mystical faith in the reality of the veil?Eof the sublime, which forces it into an immanent metaphysics (since it cannot pass the veil). In this paradigm, there is no true transcendence: the unrepresentable is ?more original, and qualitatively other,?Eand ?it does not different from the representable by virtue of a greater fullness and unity of those transcendental moments that constitute the world of appearance,
but by virtue of its absolute difference, its dialectical or negative indeterminancy, its no-thingness.?E

1. Differential sublime.

Having generally sketched the notion of ?sublime,?EHart turns to the first of the postmodern discourses of the sublime, the discourse of difference. Here Hart focuses particularly on Derrida. Postmodern thought in general is an ?imperative to think difference,?Eand to ?prioritize?Edifference over fixity, hence also the ??priority of change, absence, and exteriority.?EAny attempt to confine the chaos of difference, to ?still the Heraclitean flux,?Eis an act of violence. Metaphysics arises from precisely this violence.

Derrida?s project, Hart argues, is an inversion of Hegel, in which all the ?negatives?Eof Hegel?s system ?Ewhich in Hegel?s story function as median points in the emergence of the Idea ?Ebecome irreducibly part of the origin. Derrida affirms the ?primordial dispossession that permits thought to move and beings to be, without any ?departure?Efrom or ?return?Eto plenitude.?E

Derrida works this out particularly in relation to writing, by which he refers to the originary absence that precedes and unsettles and illusion of presence. There is an arche-ecriture, characterized by ?perpetual displacement of meaning, a referral and deferral along an axis of interminable supplementation, dissemination, and slippage, never reaching the terminus of an achiever reference?Ethat is ?prior to any present meaning.?EDifferance ?Edeferral and difference ?Ealways outstrips being. Writing is always already begun, and the deferral is always already at work.

Hart cites Milbank?s criticism that Derrida has simply assumed that all supplementation is dissimulation, and his suggestion that Gadamer?s idea of ?an original supplementarity?Ethat is both the ?open interminable repetition whereby the origin is?Eand also ?a faithful supplement of an origin that is itself pure giving.?EHart notes that Milbank?s criticism, arising out of Trinitarian concerns, is more ?confessional?Ethan ?critical,?Eand also questions whether Derrida necessarily denies the peacefulness of the supplement. But he endorses the substance of Milbank?s charge, pointing out that Derrida has simply inverted the traditional priority of difference to presence, rather than challenging the dialectical framework as such.

Hart admits that, with Derrida, Christian thinkers will affirm an originary violence, but that, contrary to appearances, this violent writing is ?a palimpsest, obscuring yet another text that is still written (all created being is ?written?E but in the style of a letter declaring love.?EThat is, the violence that Derrida finds inscribed in the foundations of all culture is secondary, a deviation from an original peacefulness. That is, again, Derrida ontologizes the fall. Moreover, for Christian thought, violence and dissimulation is not secondary to an ?unexplicated origin, a naked being given as immediate presence, mediation in alienation from itself?Ebut rather to ?a being that is itself mediation.?E

For Derrida, then, the sublime is glimpsed somehow in the gaps between flux and fixity, and it has been identified as ?necessary incommensurability and struggle between the world?s power to appear and the appearance of a world.?E

2. The cosmological sublime.

Here, Hart?s is concerned with the Nietzschean sublime of Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze makes Chaos supreme, taking the place of the Neoplatonic One, the ?simple?Ein which all forces are gathered, which explicates itself in ?problems.?EBelow representable space is an unrepresentable and indifferent spatium, and below representable time is an unrepresentable infinite linearity of time without a present (the aion). Representable space and time explicate the spatium and aion because what is unexpressed is ?subject to the original Question that evokes an infinite variety of answers in the form of signs.

Got that? More manageably, Hart suggests that Deleuze?s project is an effort to affirm the Platonic ?simulacrum?Eor ?phantasm,?Ethat shock that impinges on thought and raises the possibility of a difference between appearance and reality. For Deleuze, this simulacrum ?resists similitude, analogy, or even any form of structuralism?Eand is ultimately the unrepresentable, the sublime, the experience of which precedes all representation, and which both founds and defies representation. In an effort to complete the Kantian transcendentalism, however, Deleuze focuses on the unharmonizable experiences in our faculties, and argues against both a Platonic opposition if idea and likeness and a Kantian subordination of intuition to representation. Instead, he follows a Stoic notion that ideas are incorporeals ?dwelling on the surface of the actual.?EThese surface ideas are ?images that are quite dead ?Ethat never lived,?Eand thus ?actuality, in the virtuality of its depths, is formless, violent, disjoined, unsynthesizable, and incapable of analogy.?EThought in its representational or analogical modes always encounters difference as ?a violent provocation,?Eto which it reacts with a contrary violence of dissimulating representation.

Deleuze works a bit with Kierkegaard?s conception of repetition. In Kierkegaard, repetition is set against recollection, which, particularly in its Platonic variety, is an effort to swim upstream against the flow of time back to an original eternity. For Christian though, Kierkegaard argues, eternity is future, and is achieved by perseverance through change, which Hart describes as ?a repetition within difference, of which identity is an effect.?EDeleuze, however, conflates Kierkegaard?s concept with the Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence, in a way that reduces to repetition to an act of the will to power. Repetition for Deleuze is not a forward motion, but instead ?imparts what is repesated in the form of loss.?E

As a result of these moves, Deleuze has no place for substance, presence, or analogy. He adopts instead a Spinozan version of the univocity of being, so that ?being must be said of all things ?in the same voice.?? Deleuze eliminates the ?God or nature?Efrom Spinoza, replacing it with the ?necessity?Eof ?chance.?EThus, pure univocity at an ontological level, however, requires a pure equivocation at the ontic level. Hart chides Deleuze for a simplistic understanding of analogy (?the equivocity of being, the univocity of attributes?E, but agrees that if analogy is no more than ?the simple binary proportion of attribution,?Ethen Deleuze is right: If analogy is merely about resemblance of attributes, and doesn?t include a notion of true transcendence, then each analogy does in fact merely identify abstract properties that may be ascribed to both God and creatures. The will to power becomes the force of ontic becoming, while the eternal return is the only ontological possibility.

Hart suggests that the ethical import of Deleuze?s viewpoint is a joyous acceptance of all, an embrace of all being, however ambiguous it may be, and a childlike delight in it. Hart spots a kind of tragic wisdom here, which doesn?t imagine a way of escape from the world, and so bears all joyously.

3. The ontological sublime.

In this brief section, Hart treats the sublime as it appears in Heidegger, especially as it is expressed in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. Heidegger discovers the beginning of an ontology in phenomenology?s withdrawal from ontology, in the very phenomenological effort to collapse ?it is?Einto ?it appears.?EFrom this, Heidegger concludes that being appears only in the event of its withdrawal, which grants being to beings. This ?ontological difference?Eis conflated with the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, so that the sublime is not an intuition of something beyond the sensible world but of the ?eventuation of the difference that gives (and closes off within itself) the world.

For Nancy, the moment of sublime is a perception of the way that formlessness gives rise to form, that what is not-limit gives rise to wh
at is limited. From there, ?sensibility . . . accomplishes a passage to the limit itself,?Ewhich questions representation and presence in the light of the nothing that makes them possible. Contemplating the sublime, for Nancy (against Kantian rationalism), involves a sacrifice of reason which is an event of freedom. The sublime grants the true sense of the world, namely, that it is ?open?Eand that it ?comes as nothing but the arrival and dissolution of its own sense.?EFor Nancy, there is no continuity between the sublime and beautiful, but an ?indissoluble bond of dialectical difference.?EThe sublime is the Truth that gives beauty its misleading untruths.

4. The ethical sublime.

This is the most bracing section in Hart?s treatment of the sublime, since he takes to task Emmanuel Levinas, the postmodern philosopher that many perceive as perhaps the most useful to theology. Hart thinks otherwise, charging that Levinas?s work represents ?poor philosophy?Ethat is ?Manichean, Orphic, or Gnostic,?Eand even ?perhaps a little depraved.?E

For Levinas, the sublime is the ?Other,?Ewhich escapes our will and efforts to control, our efforts to bind it within the framework of ?the Same.?EThe Other imposes demands, an ?infinite obligation that permits us no respite and excites in us an ethical desire susceptible of no satiation.?EAt the same time, the Other always condemns, so that to ?hear the call of the Other is to know oneself as guilty.?EPerhaps the clearest way to say this is to point to how Levinas treats those common goods that we ?live from?E?EHart mentions light, air, shelter, food. Unwilling to say that such are ?good,?ELevinas suggests that they are instead characterized by ?sincerity.?EYet, since they ?compose our world of self-concern,?Ewhen the ?circle of enjoyment is crossed by the Other, it is rendered guilty.?EAnother way to state the point is that Levinas sees no bridge from Eros to Agape, but instead argues that the erotic is possibly good ?only in its surrender to what eludes enjoyment.?EHe denies the goodness of conatus, the desire to be. Levinas?s model of Eros is the ?caress,?Erather than the embrace, since the caress does not make any claims, does not possess, as the hand passes over and comes back empty. This dissatisfaction is the experience of sublime, since ?What is a defect in the finite order becomes an excellence in the infinite order.?EThe Other becomes a torturer, a persecutor, who is always only negatively related to our desires.

Hart points out that Levinas ultimately ends with an Other that is not really other: He asks whether Levinas?s austere ethics, complete disinterest, hyperbolic selflessness might ?perhaps serve a somewhat self-aggrandizing moral heroism, a selfishness so hyperbolic that it must ultimately erase everything distinct, desirable, and genuinely other in the other to preserve itself from the contamination of need, dependency, or hope??EBehind Levinas Hart sees not merely the Kantian or Fichtean Ego; Levinasian postmodernism is the climax not the contradiction of the aspiration to freedom found in modern thought.

There is much else in Hart?s account that is worthwhile, but several brief points must suffice. First, Levinas claims that the relation to the Other is a ?relation without relation,?Eand is not an act of communion. It is completely contextless. Hart responds, rightly, that there is no genuine relation with an other that is not ?thematized?Eaccording to some cultural codes. Second, he points out that for Christian ethics, ethics flows from love and joy, rather than from mere obligation, and that love has a necessarily erotic component ?Esome aspect of desire for the other. Third, Hart affirms conatus because the desire to be is most frequently a desire to be with. Conatus is not merely self-interested, but interested in self precisely for the sake of the other. Finally, he points out that analogy provides a framework in which recognizing the other as ?alter ego?Eis not totalizing; analogy is not identity, and the ?reduction to analogy?Ethat Levinas decries is reduction of the other to another other.

Hart traces Derrida?s interactions with Levinas, concluding that Derrida?s rejection of Levinas?s infinity and sublime, and his confinement of philosophy to history and the immanent, actually yields a more ethically responsible position than Levinas. Yet, he also argues that Derrida?s position entails an inherent violence in history and the impossibility of a non-violent rhetoric.

Hart admits that his taxonomy of postmodernisms by their view of the sublime may be somewhat arbitrary, but he points to a number of common themes throughout the writers he surveys:

1. Beauty belongs to the realm of the representable, the realm of limit, possession, and stability, and because of that beauty necessary falsifies the truth.
2. That the truth of being is other than presence; truth has an absolute otherness.
3. The sublime is ?the intimation of this difference, and as such is both the opposite and the condition of the beautiful.?E
4. The ?infinite?Ecannot be rendered in the ?ontic?Esphere; there is no ?participating analogy, and no actual continuity with the world apart from the sublime instance that adumbrates it under the form of radical discontinuity.?E
5. Beauty gives nothing ultimate, and hence is merely a ?soporific?Ethat distracts from the truth of the world, which is ?wholly other than its representable present.?E

Hart concludes that his two descriptions of postmodernism ?Eontological violence and discourse of the sublime ?Eare ultimately the same: ?if the world takes shape against the veil of the unrepresentable, is indeed given or confirmed in its finitude by this impenetrable negation, then the discrimination of peace from violence is at most a necessary fiction, and occasionally a critical impossibility.?E

The options available in postmodernity are thus the tragic melancholy and resignation of a Levinas or the tragic joy and exuberance of the Nietzsche. Of these, Hart finds Nietzsche the more congenial, since Nietzsche is able to say ?it is good?Eto the world and, with the Christian, recognize that even pain is not incompatible with a good creation. Further, Nietzsche calls Christianity back to its original form, a rhetorical one, yet also poses the challenge of whether there can be a rhetoric of peace. Hart will turn to Nietzsche in the following section.

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