Raphaël Enthoven is a philosopher,
philosophy professor, a commentator on Europe 1
and animator of the show "Philosophie" on ARTE.
He is the author of "matières premières"
with publishers Gallimard and the
“Dictionary of Proust” with the publishers Plon.
What is beauty?
Everyone feels what beauty is,
but in a way no one knows it for sure.
So beauty is the object of both
an evidence, an obvious impression,
and at the same time it is an impression
that cannot be formalized. That's the paradox
Very simply if you are with your spouse
or a person you love, in front of a sunset,
and the words that come to you
in that moment are "it's beautiful".
You don't say "I find it beautiful"
you say "it's beautiful".
In other words, you implicitly speak
in the name of humanity of which you
can't imagine that it wouldn’t be moved
by the view that you have in front of you.
At the same time, when you say
"it's beautiful", you are not deducing
the fact that such a sight is beautiful
from a precise knowledge of what beauty is.
You just have your impression.
And the paradox is that your impression
is one that you live as universal.
When you say "it's beautiful" you can’t
imagine someone else finding it ugly.
If the person next to whom you are standing
declares: "no I find it ugly"
you will look at him strangely, yet
you do not know what "beautiful" is,
yet your word isn’t imperialist or totalitarian
And that's the paradox of beauty.
It is the paradox that Kant explains in
paragraph 9 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment
in a lapidary, and brilliant, way he says:
“beautiful is what pleases universally without a concept”.
The universality of the feeling of "beautiful"
cannot be conceptualized.
If we conceptualize it, we lose it,
like a vampire in the sun.
We do not have the possibility of developing a
concept of "beautiful" from which
one could infer that this situation
belongs to this concept or not.
But we have on the other hand
the universal ability that Kant speaks of,
which makes us see a view of which we do not
not know why it is so beautiful, as universal
The result of this is two-fold.
The implications are infinite;
first they are naturally political, since
it suggests for Kant that everyone can talk
about beauty, without knowing what it is.
So in reality we are in a democratic system,
since we are talking about beauty,
as we talk about freedom,
without knowing what it is, by experiencing it
in its implementation or performance.
And this is the reading that Hannah Arendt will
make of this great text.
She draws from the political side that
originally belonged to a seemingly
openly aesthetic intention.
So that's the first implication.
The second implication is that the
consequence of this is that when we are in
the presence of beauty we have no choice
to experience it or to not experience it.
So we are referring to the universal,
to the universality of an emotion,
to the universal communicability,
as Kant would say, of an emotion.
And yet this universal emotion is based
only on a feeling or a sensation, that is,
our most intimate and most distinctive self.
And so behind this there is the idea that
beyond our empirical worries as subjects,
precise considerations make for example
for Kant that "one can't speak of happiness
on the scale of humanity since we all
have the same idea of happiness".
Beyond this, via beauty, there is the
possibility of a universality which transcends
the singularities, and which refers to this
profound paradox of evidence without truth.
So how to grasp this evidence without truth?
There is where ironically Kant and Bergson
who didn't like each other
well, Bergson did not like Kant very much
he thought that he didn't speak
enough about love – which is true.
But Kant and Bergsons' thoughts could work
together because, what Bergson theorizes
in the laughter and his general aesthetics,
is that the point of aesthetics, that is
to say sensitivity, the original point of
aesthetics is to conquer a virginal way of
seeing, hearing and thinking.
It is this youthful glance that Bergson
refers to, to explain that there are
things that transcend everyone’s taste to
design a universal beauty.
In ourselves we have the candor of which we
are capable, by the ingenuity of our gaze,
the prodigious ability to say
what is in the world, what things are, and
and when they are beautiful or when not.
And it is the paradox of an appeal to a
sort of purification
I don't like this word but here it is appropriate
purification of our perceptions which
gives rise to a sensation so faithful to
the situation that, when definitive it
can be called universal.
It is this call that Bergson implicitly
appeals to and allows
- and it's this that I think allows -
to grasp all the consequences of the
Kantian paradox of an evidence that is not
correlated to any truth.
There is no science to beauty,
there is only a sense of beauty and
yet there is a universality of beauty.
And this universality is achieved by
a candid and juvenile re-conquest.
Virginal, rather than juvenile
of seeing,hearing, and thinking.
