“Don’t Educate Me - Move me!” Labours of Love and Participations in the Beautiful – in art and filmmaking

Abstract

This paper explores art’s (especially film’s) formative potential in two parts. In the first part, I draw on German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer and his notion of ‘education’ as it unfolds in the aesthetic appearance (Darstellung) of the cultural world – with the artwork’s coming-into-meaning as the paradigmatic example. For Gadamer, the artwork’s formative potential is bound up in its capacity to move our senses and intellect into an encounter with what is ‘other’ to our subjectivity. Drawn into a mode of paying attention to what appears (e.g. in film’s moving images), we are called to lose our-selves and be present in a new way to familiar world objects and relations. The second part of the paper imagines the ontological conditions that make possible our aesthetic hermeneutic movement in the world: the mode of the beautiful. Why do certain artworks (Gebilde) shine forth and summon us to be present to them? To pursue this question, I turn to French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain’s notion of Beauty and craftsmanship. Maritain turns us (like Gadamer) to a Neo-Platonic notion of Beauty that is however rooted in Thomas Aquinas’ notion of the mystery of Being (i.e. God). In his reading, our hermeneutic experience of art (and, with that, our movement into self-formation in aesthetic experience) is bound up in the artist’s participation in the mode of the beautiful and her loss of self in the labour of Love of craftsmanship.