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I don’t really know how to write about beauty — I’ve always wanted to know, however. I’ve always thought aesthetics was the most important branch of philosophy, the mother of ethics, the schoolteacher of metaphysics, the critic of ontology.
I write this while pretending to take notes during a certification program I have to take this summer for my job — I couldn’t be bothered to care; I already know the material (but even if I didn’t).
We have to push back against corporatism of all kinds; against being-good-employees; against being good little machine parts. Perhaps it is our fate to work — to have to work — but we can at least rebel within the framework of our fate, like Milton’s Satan.
Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.
The worship of corporate labor needs to be replaced by any passion for beauty; conformism by resistance of the spirit.
There are historical and economic forces which block access to the sublime and the beautiful; we have rejected aesthetics because the world has become too ugly to withstand aesthetic contemplation; aesthetics reveals the deep destruction of nature.
Instagram — the optics of social media — are necessary because so much of our living environment is crass; we idealize images — we crop and filter — because what we see with our eyes is disappointing.
Instagrams aesthetics are the aesthetics of bad faith; of self-deception.
Aesthetic education means a re-instruction in plain vision; the re-idealization of hard, brutal reality.
