The Compass of Beauty: A Search for the Middle

Abstract

In his chapter, Lars Spuybroek criticises the doctrine of emergence for hindering the reversal that allows wholes to connect to parts of other wholes and only done with beauty; beauty as inherent of things without which they cannot exist make a claim on their environment only by being beautiful. The chapter tries to deal with the question of how beauty constructs this intersection between the two states. He calls this intersection the middle and goes on to sketching its historical transformations and its subsequent variations, combining the two main agents of variability, smoothness and roughness. Things and feelings are both constructed in the same system. That forces subjectivism out of the scene and materialism prevailing as matter is simply what matters. For Whitehead beauty is about both mutual adaptation and patterned contrasts, about massiveness and intensity, about smoothness and roughness. These things have a consciousness of their own, a nonhuman thought. The essay develops a bi-axial structure into a genuine fourfold, and from there into a circular system where aesthetic feelings are equated with material objects.