This short monograph is a reflection, by Han, on the changing conceptions of beauty. As usual, Han brings to bear historical philosophical interpretations of the beautiful and contrasts them with the ideals of modernity. And again, as usual, he finds today’s digital social milieu lacking. Han asserts, “Today, the experience of beauty is impossible. Where the wish to please, the Like, edges its way to the foreground, experience, which is impossible without negativity, withers…. Smooth visual communication takes place in the form of contagion, without any aesthetic distance…. Communication reaches its maximum speed where like reacts to like…. Today, nothing endures. This impermanence also affects the ego and de-stabilizes it, makes it insecure.” Today, beauty is all about the Self. It only reflects back towards itself, the subject. He continues, “The temporality of digital beauty… is the immediate present without a future, even without history. It simply is present…. In this digital inwardness there can be no sense of wonder. The only thing human beings still like are themselves.”
Han contrasts modernity’s take on the beautiful with that of the sublime. “The aesthetics of beauty is a genuine phenomenon of modern times. Only, in the aesthetics of modern times, the beautiful and the sublime become separated…. The beautiful is juxtaposed to the sublime, which—due to its negativity—does not cause immediate pleasure.” Han begins his dive into the historical. “Plato… does not distinguish between beauty and the sublime. The beautiful is unsurpassable precisely because it is sublime…. The sight of beauty does not cause pleasure, but shocks…. The onlooker becomes ecstatic, is seized by awe and terror (ekplettontai). A ‘madness’ takes hold of him. Plato’s metaphysics of beauty is in sharp contrast to the modern aesthetics of pleasure which confirms the subject in its autonomy and complacency, instead of shocking it.” Han concludes, “Beauty and the sublime have the same origin. Instead of opposing the sublime to the beautiful, one should return to beauty a sublimity that cannot be subjected to inwardness, a de-subjectivizing sublimity, and thus undo the separation of beauty and the sublime.”
Han believes that true beauty must remain hidden behind its veil. It is never exposed and displayed, but remains in mystery. He quotes Walter Benjamin at length, “The task of art criticism is not to lift the veil but rather, through the most precise knowledge of it as a veil, to raise itself for the first time to the true view of the beautiful…. Never yet has a true work of art been grasped other than where it ineluctably represented itself as a secret.” Han riffs on Barthes’ distinction between the erotic and the pornographic. “The erotic photograph is a picture ‘that has been disturbed, fissured’. The pornographic photograph, by contrast, has neither fractures or fissures. It is smooth. Today all pictures are more or less pornographic. They are transparent.” Again, Barthes, “What I can name cannot really prick me. The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.” Rilke suggests beauty “is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure.” Adorno adds, “The image of beauty as that of a single and differentiated something originates with the emancipation from the fear of the overpowering wholeness and undifferentiatedness of nature.” Han weighs in, “Negativity is the invigorating force of life. It also forms the essence of beauty. Inherent to beauty is a weakness, a fragility, and a brokenness [Gebrochenheit]. To this negativity, beauty owes its power to seduce…. Beauty is illness.” Adorno claims, “Beauty is such a curative sickness. It arrests life, and therefore its decay.”
In the modern world, beauty has even come to be opposed to that which is sexy. “Consumption and sexiness condition each other. The self that is based on sexual desire is a product of consumer capitalism…. The ideal of beauty evades consumption…. Sexiness is opposed to moral beauty or beauty of character. Morality, virtue and character have a specific temporality. They are based on duration, solidity and permanence…. Consumption and duration exclude each other…. The ideal consumer is a person without character.”
This wouldn’t be a Han book without a deep dive into Hegel. Han posits, “Central to Hegel’s aesthetics is the ‘concept’. It idealizes beauty and confers on it the brilliance of truth. Beauty results from the concept manifesting itself in the sensual, or ‘the Idea as the immediate unity of the Concept with its reality’…. No ‘aggregate’ is beautiful. Concepts take care that wholes do not disintegrate, or dissipate, into ‘heaps’…. The beautiful object is something over against the subject, something with which the subject develops a free relationship…. Only in the aesthetic relation with the object is the subject finally set free…. The beautiful object is an object over against the subject, in which any kind of dependance and compulsion has disappeared.” Hegel claims, “Thus the contemplation of beauty is of a liberal kind; it leaves objects alone as being inherently free and infinite; there is no wish to possess them or take advantage of them as useful for fulfilling finite needs and intentions.” Han continues, “Hegel’s aesthetic of beauty is an aesthetic of truth and freedom, which withdraws beauty from any form of consumption. Neither ‘truth’ nor the ‘concept’ can be consumed. Beauty is an end in itself…. Consumption and beauty are mutually exclusive…. [Beauty] does not tempt you to enjoy or to possess it. Rather, it invites you to linger in contemplation…. Beauty as well as truth is something exclusive. Thus they do not occur often [haufig].”
Han loves to linger. He critiques the modern world as one in which lingering has become verboten. We, moderns, are always in a rush: to do, to work, even to play. “Beauty itself actually invites us to linger; it is the will which stands in the way of contemplative lingering. But at the sight of beauty, willing retreats…. Beauty frees me from myself. The ego immerses itself in beauty. It rids itself of itself in the face of beauty.” Schopenhauer states, “Aesthetic pleasure in the beautiful consists to a large extent, in the fact that, when we enter the state of pure contemplation, we are raised for the moment above all willing, above all desires and cares; we are, so to speak, rid of ourselves.” Proust praises “the kind of beauty which infiltrates slowly, which we carry along with us almost unnoticed, and meet up with again in dreams.” Han concludes, “The experience of beauty as recollection evades consumption.”
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