From David Bentley Hart's essay "That Judgment Whereby You Judge: Beauty and Discernment" in You Are Gods:
What, after all, is it that fascinates or compels us in those moments when we encounter the beautiful in its most generous expressions? What calls us to itself, away from our own small and particular interests and predilections, in a canvas by Chardin, in Bach’s second unaccompanied violin partita, in Rublev’s icon of Abraham’s angelic visitors? It is never merely some objective or concrete aspect of its composition. Nor, certainly, is it merely the neural effect it has on us, or some pleasing set of associations, or even some obvious appeal to our sentiments. Even the greatest degree of artisanal virtuosity by itself can leave us quite unaffected if there is not something in addition, something at once elusive and ubiquitous that shines through the mere craft of the work, the mere proficiency. The most polished technique can impress us, even momentarily enchant us, but it cannot truly awaken anything in us if the work itself fails to recommend and offer itself, however mysteriously, as something at once utterly inevitable in its fittingness and yet utterly needless in its existence.
If this seems somewhat vague, I am sorry for that. But it seems clear to me that the special delight provided by a genuine encounter with beauty is in great part an irreducible sense of the sheer, needless event of the beautiful in every particular, unanticipated instance of its disclosure—the gratuity with which it manifests itself, or gives itself. It is an ontological fortuity to which our disinterested appreciation corresponds, and so we see it here as we would not elsewhere. What transforms the merely accomplished into the revelatory is this invisible nimbus of utter gratuity. Works that fall into this class command our regard not by oppressing us with what must be, and certainly not by their utility or banausic value as commodities, but entirely by their freely imparted and irreplaceable contingency.
In a sense, the experience of beauty is our most privileged encounter with the difference between Being and beings—between, that is, the ontological source that cannot not be and the finite realities (ourselves among them) that might never have been but for an outpouring of grace. In a sense, the experience of the Beautiful always takes us back to that primal moment of sheer existential wonder that is the beginning of all speculative wisdom and all spiritual yearning. This amazement perhaps lies always just below the surface of our quotidian consciousness; but beauty stirs us from our habitual forgetfulness of the wonder of being, reminding us that the fullness of reality, which far exceeds the moment of its disclosure, graciously condescends to show itself, again and again, in the finitude of an event: of a mere instance. It is an experience that restores us momentarily to something like the innocence of childhood. If, that is, we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
Having said this, however, I have to add that this is only one side of our encounter with beauty. There is another, equally constant and crucial feature of any act of critical discrimination that is all too easily, and all too frequently, wholly overlooked. Every act of evaluation—this is good, this is true, this is beautiful, and so forth—is an act of rational deliberation and judgment, if only in the trivial sense of attaching a predicate to a subject and then perhaps assigning that predicate a degree—this is very good, this is partially true, this is somewhat beautiful, and so on. But, then, how can any act of judgment not be in some sense reflexive or even reciprocal? How can one judge without passing a judgment on oneself in that very act? Or, rather, without submitting to a judgment from beyond oneself? In venturing any judgment, one does not only evaluate something—an object, an act, an idea—in light of one or another transcendental standard; one exposes oneself to that same light, subjects oneself to that same standard, and thereby reveals oneself as a sound or unsound judge: either a saint or a sinner, a sage or a fool, a god or a monster, or (more typically) something somewhere in between the one or the other. That judgment whereby one judges is always also a judgment whereby one is judged. This is not only a spiritual admonition, a warning regarding the providential calculus in the ultimate balance of all things, a reminder that the eye of God is ever upon us. It is also a truth of ordinary experience and elementary reasoning. Thus, every act of judgment is to that extent an act of “moral” discrimination, if not as regards the object of our evaluation, at least as regards what we reveal ourselves to be through our evaluation of that object. (pp. 39-40)
This idea of how our judgments judge us needs more unpacking, but not today–except for a quick thought:
As a final project in one of my classes, I had my students write their philosophy as an honest statement about what was their understanding of the world and their place in it. I asked them to organize it under four headings. Epistemology, Ethics, Metaphysics, and Aesthetics, the four classic philosophical categories. The last, aesthetics, always seems to be the least philosophical for most people. Isn't beauty in the eyes of the beholder? Isn't it just a matter of subjective taste? What's beauty got to do with the truth?
Well, it depends on the nature of your encounter with beauty. I tried to convey to my students that perhaps for some of them "aesthetics" could be the experiential foundation upon which they should extrapolate their metaphysics. They should ask themselves–what is the world that such an experience of beauty is possible? And then from that, their ideas about what is true and good follow.
Again this goes to the quantitative vs. qualitative in our judgments: What is statistically rare nevertheless has the potency to overthrow a mountain of data. No matter how miserable most of the moments of one's life, there are still those few that stand in contradiction to it. And then you have to judge: which is true? The misery or the beauty? Everything depends on the choice you make. Your judgment judges you.
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