So, here's what happens when one of the greatest violinists of the 20th Century, David Oistrakh, takes on one of Tchaikovski's more heart-rending compositions:
It's performances like these which enliven for me Hermann Lotze's case for including beauty among the pieces of evidence to be considered when assessing worldviews that posit something transcendent. I've quoted this before, but here's how Lotze puts it at the start of his Outlines of the Philosophy of Religion:
Then there are the...aesthetic feelings that yield themselves admiringly to the beautiful which they discover in the world, and by means of it are incited to form a picture of an ideal world. This they do without any egoistic interest in the consolation desired; but rather with the sure conviction that what is so fair and full of significance cannot be an accidental product of that which is without significance, but must be either the very Principle of the world or closely related to its creative principle.
Lotze couldn't have had Oistrakh's performance above in mind when he spoke of that which is "so fair and full of significance," but had he heard it I'm sure he would have pointed to it and said, "This."
“It's performances like these which enliven for me Hermann Lotze's case for including beauty among the pieces of evidence to be considered when assessing worldviews that posit something transcendent.”
ReplyDeletePerhaps even more than that. Beauty is the visible manifestation of God. In beholding what’s beautiful we behold God.
And, as we know from personal experience, beauty is hardly there to be seen but requires some degree of interaction, of participation, of giving. By playing the violin yourself you experience in Oistrakh’s performance beauty I don’t, or at least a kind of beauty I don’t. One who loves music more will see more beauty in it – and not just the other way around. Similarly, one who loves others experiences them as being more beautiful, even when they are evil. One who loves life sees its beauty, even when it’s hard.
Often my mind goes back to the bit in the Gospels which says “The pure of heart will see God”. This is normally interpreted as referring to the afterlife, but I think it refers to the human condition even in this life. It is I think an error to think about “evidence for God”, for God is the nature of all things and thus all things are evidence for God. But to realize that is not a matter of how one thinks about the evidence but a matter of how one experiences the evidence.