David Bentley Hart claims postmodernity severs the unity of Being from Goodness and Beauty, and either places Being’s Truth, or origin, or determination, either behind a veil of the Sublime - call it difference, negation, chaos, alterity, or whatever - which cannot be seen or represented, no communion between it and us, the world as some deformed version of some “real” reality hidden behind appearances that we can never really know, only sense in the terrifying rupture of the "sublime" (as opposed to the peace of Beauty)....or Being just as brute fact, the world as chaos and flux, which one either affirms joyously in all its violence or retreats from in horror….
So, from Beauty of the Infinite, here are some quotes from Hart explaining our present postmodern predicament :
Writes Milbank, “Postmodernism ... articulates itself as, first, an absolute historicism, second as an ontology of difference, and third as ethical nihilism. . . . its historicist or genealogical aspect raises the spectre of a human world inevitably dominated by violence, without being able to make this ghost more solid in historicist terms alone. To supplement this deficiency, it must ground violence in a new transcendental philosophy, or fundamental ontology. This knowledge alone it presents as more than perspectival, more than equivocal, more than mythical. But the question arises: can such a claim be really sustained without lapsing back into the metaphysics supposedly forsworn?"
Milbank's answer is that it cannot, and that the metaphysics to which it must resort is nothing other than a version of an ancient pagan narrative of being as sheer brute event, a chaos of countervailing violences, against which must be deployed the various restraining and prudential violences of the state, reason, law, warfare, retribution, civic order, and the vigilantly sentineled polis…
The event of modernity within philosophy (which arrived, at least visibly, in the age of nominalism) consisted in the dissolution of being: the disintegration of that radiant unity wherein the good, the true, and the beautiful coincided as infinite simplicity and fecundity, communicating themselves to a world whose only reality was its variable participation in their gratuity; and the divorce between this thought of being, as the supereminent fullness of all perfection, and the thought of God (who could then no longer be conceived as being and the wellspring spring of all being, revealing his glory in the depth of splendor in which created things are shaped and sustained).
…the "forgetfulness of being") that being itself could now be conceived only in absolutely opposite terms: as a veil or an absence, thought or unthought, but in either case impenetrable - the veil that veils even itself, the empty name that adds nothing to the essence of beings, sheer uniform existence. And God's transcendence, so long as nostalgia preserved philosophy's attachment to "that hypothesis," could be understood now only as God's absence, his exile beyond or hiddenness within the veil of being, occasionally breaking through perhaps, but only as an alien or an explanatory cause. Being, no longer resplendent with truth, appearing in and elevating all things, could be figured then only as the sublime.
…it is not implausible to say that the entire pathology of the modern and postmodern can be diagnosed as a multifarious narrative of the sublime, according to the paradigm of Kant's critical project: what pure reason extracts from experience and represents to itself is neutral appearance, separated by an untraversable abyss from everything "meaningful"; and what reason sees in appearance can have, obviously, no more eminent significance: beauty does not speak of the good, nor the good of being.
Questions of the good, of being, of value, of the possibility of appearance itself do not so much exceed the world as stand over against it; truth is not, finally, the seen, but the unseen that permits one to see. With the dissolution of an ontology of the transcendent, of that infinite eminence in which what appears participates, every discourse that would attempt to speak not only of the things of the world but also of the event of the world must inevitably resort to the mysticism of the sublime and its dogmatisms: not a mysticism that seeks to penetrate the veil, but a mystical faith in the reality of the veil, an immanent metaphysics. And the only moral effort permitted by such a faith takes the form of paradox and tragedy.
However one phrases the matter, this much is certain: insofar as the "postmodern" is the completion of the deconstruction of metaphysics, it usually depends upon one immense and irreducible metaphysical assumption: that the unrepresentable is; more to the point, that the unrepresentable (call it differance, chaos, being, alterity, the infinite ...) is somehow truer than the representable (which necessarily dissembles it), more original, and qualitatively other: that is, it does not differ from the representable by virtue of a greater fullness and unity of those transcendental moments that constitute the world of appearance, but by virtue of its absolute difference, its dialectical or negative indeterminacy, determinacy, its no-thingness.
Between thought's representations and the unrepresentable "that" of the "event" there is an incommensurability, and sublimity marks the fated tragic partage of their union, the sacrificial economy of their collusion, as the symbol of their simultaneous divorce and marriage. That is why one can approach a definition of "postmodernity" by classifying many of its exemplary discourses under various accounts of the unrepresentable.
Metaphysics, in its drive toward totality, classically conceives of the infinite as chaos or negation (or at best a "total" synthesis), and certainly cannot conceive of an infinity that is offered peacefully - without alienation, negation, or deceit - as form. Within this sealed circle, if a form in which peace and the infinite are presented as coinciding should show itself, and offer itself only in the appeal of this harmony, it could appear only as a contradiction or illusion, and must be dismissed as the emptiest of all apparitions: not the beautiful shape of a possible way of being, but only a "beautiful soul."
Thus our second definition of "postmodernity" (the narrative of the sublime) folds back into our first (an "ontology of violence"): if the world takes shape against the veil of the unrepresentable, is indeed given or confirmed in its finitude by this impenetrable negation, then the discrimination of peace from violence is at most a necessary fiction, and occasionally a critical impossibility; as all equally is, and power alone sustains the game of the world, violence is already present in all "truth," though all truthlessness too - sadly or joyously - is violence. This story, again, makes all rhetoric an aggression, sion, all beauty in some sense a lie (an opiate, tactical diversion, or necessary respite spite from the terror of truth), and every exodus an imperial campaign. The desire for an ethical issue from this story is no doubt quite genuine, but probably also quite absurd.
….absolute antinomian affirmation of the world and infinite ethical flight from it - proves perfectly logical: pagans and gnostics both assume the iron law of fate to operate here below low and violence to be pandemic in the sensible order (the former simply choose to celebrate the terror and bounty of life, while the latter depart for the sheltering pavilions of a distant kingdom). Both these extremes must appear - tragic joy and tragic melancholy - and indeed fortify one another, once the rupture of beauty from the good has followed upon the withdrawal of being behind the veil of the sublime. This is part of the pathology of modernity. For most thinkers who accept the dimensions of such a world, the two extremes constitute a difficult choice or a mad oscillation; between the pagan and gnostic options the scales can dip either way....
In every case, though, a faith in the transcendent unity of being and the good (along with the expectation that philokalia, the love of beauty, is the form desire takes when it rises toward that unity) is unimaginable.
For their parts, classical "metaphysics" and postmodernism belong to the same story; each, implying or repeating the other, conceives being as a plain upon which forces of meaning and meaninglessness converge in endless war; according to either, being is known in its oppositions, and oppositions must be overcome or affirmed, but in either case as violence: amid the strife of images and the flow of simulacra, shining form appears always only as an abeyance of death, fragile before the convulsions of chaos, and engulfed in fate. There is a specular infinity in mutually defining opposites: Parmenides and Heracleitos gaze into one another's eyes, and the story of being springs up between them; just as two mirrors set before one another prolate their depths indefinitely, repeating an opposition that recedes forever along an illusory corridor without end, seeming to span all horizons and contain all things, the dialectic of Apollo and Dionysus oscillates without resolution between endless repetitions of the same emptiness, the same play of reflection and inversion.
But the true infinite lies outside and all about this enclosed universe of strife and shadows; it shows itself as beauty and as light: not totality, nor again chaos, but the music of a triune God."
Thus, it is the beautiful, the invisible made visible analogously, that also makes the difference between modern thought and the “interruption of Christ”: for without a proper notion of the supernatural, thought inevitably establishes “an autonomous stance between God and creation,” rendering the narrative of supereminent Beauty very difficult, if not impossible, precisely because it cannot be seen.
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