PFSCL XLVII, 92 (2020) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2020-0002 Grace and Beauty: On Mystical-Erotic-Aesthetic Experience (Augustine, Montaigne, Pascal, Bouhours, Kant) C HAD A. C ÓRDOVA (E MORY U NIVERSITY ) Introduction: “Who is right, Kant or Stendhal? ” Disenchanted with Schopenhauer’s world-weary version of pessimism, Nietzsche became - in his mind, at least - a citizen of France. 1 This spiritual Francophilia was based in no small part on his affinity for a quasi-tradition of psychological analysis, the sort of thinking and writing of which les moralistes are paradigmatic. 2 In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), when Nietzsche gave reasons for French superiority in Europe, France’s “old, manifold, moralistic culture” (moralistische Kultur) was one of them. This “culture,” whose most recent incarnation was Stendhal, had developed over centuries of refining what Nietzsche called the “voluptate psychologia”: the peculiar “pleasure” of demystifying, psychological critique (§254). The incisive psychological sensibility of moraliste writing provided an antidote, Nietzsche saw, to the idealism that had long dominated European philosophy and morality, and which had received renewed power with Kant. Against this reigning idealism, Nietzschean-moraliste analysis pursues the pleasurable deconstruction of tidy delineations and the metaphysics they rely on, by reframing philosophical discourse in terms of a philosophical “psychology,” now reinstated as the “queen of the sciences” (§23). 3 Aesthetics, whose hermetic contours Kant had attempted to secure in the late 18 th century, offered a choice target for this sort of analysis and its “pleasure.” 1 On Nietzsche’s French connection, see Campioni, Der französiche Nietzsche. 2 See Pippin, Nietzsche, moraliste français; Pippin, “Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology.” 3 Nietzsche seems to be making fun of Kant, who wrote, in Critique of Pure Reason: “metaphysics was called the queen of all the sciences” (A viii, 99). Chad A. Córdova PFSCL XLVII, 92 (2020) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2020-0002 28 And pleasure itself was at stake. Anticipating Freud’s critique of the purity of aesthetic pleasure and experience (Freud 97ff), in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Nietzsche sets Stendhal against Kant (and “philosophers of beauty” in general) as the figurehead of a more embodied, psychological, and experiential aesthetics. As opposed to Kant and his proverbially cloistered ways, Stendhal was an artist, traveler, and cosmopolitan figure, a worldly writer with the sort of lively energy Nietzsche so valued. Compared to Stendhal’s hedonism and proclivities for Italian women, music, and art, Kant’s aesthetics could only cast a pale, Northern shadow: the dream of a metaphysician still beholden to an abstract, if empowered, idea of rational subjectivity à la Plato or Descartes. Kant’s role in the emergence of a modern, autonomous aesthetics could only be ironic, Nietzsche thought. Theorizing aesthetics on its own terms, Kant refined beauty to the point of disappearance. Trying to ennoble art, he did away with it entirely: Kant thought he was honoring art when among the predicates of beauty he emphasized and gave prominence to those which establish the honor of knowledge: impersonality and universality. […] ‘That is beautiful,’ said Kant, ‘which gives us pleasure without interest.’ Without interest! Compare with this definition one framed by a genuine ‘spectator’ and artist— Stendhal, who once called the beautiful une promesse de bonheur. At any rate he rejected and repudiated the one point about the aesthetic condition which Kant had stressed: le désintéressement. Who is right, Kant or Stendhal? (§6) 4 Kant erased the erotic from aesthetics, the seductive, stimulating lure of what beckons and reveals without disclosure: the gift and mystery of the promise. By distinguishing, in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), between what pleases due to discernable predicates ultimately related to the empirical subject’s “interest” in the empirical existence of object, and what pleases without respect to empirical existence at all, Kant sublimated aesthetic experience. It ended up coming close to the form of cognition (“determining judgment”) from which it was said to be distinct (as “reflecting judgment” [Intros. and §§1-22]). One intertwining undoes another: Nietzsche’s moraliste critique of Kant aims to undo the reduction of aesthetic experience to the impersonal disin- 4 For an aesthetics in this Nietzschean vein, see Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness. Stendhal’s line is found in Rome, Naples et Florence I: 49. The reflection arises from the view of “belles femmes,” but this experience is distinguished from mere gazing at bodies. Their beauty is “noble et sombre” and “fait songer au bonheur des passions,” not of sex. Rather than submitting to the gaze, “leur beauté fait baisser les yeux.” Grace and Beauty : On Mystical-Erotic-Aesthetic Experience PFSCL XLVII, 92 (2020) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2020-0002 29 terest of knowledge by revealing aesthetic experience’s proximity to erotic allurement. Moraliste critique proceeds, then, by counteracting any purification of (aesthetic) experience, any refinement of concepts in which autonomy is secretly submission, and the epistemic relation from which experience (of beauty) is supposed to be free is smuggled back in. What remains after this critique is, once again, a hybrid: the Kantian insistence on the absence of a determinate concept under which beauty is subsumed is now combined with interest, erotic mystery, and the promise, which, as Stendhal’s definition recalls, were, before Kant, long held to be one with the experience of beauty. 5 As Nietzsche saw, this sort of critique of Kantian aesthetics could be situated within the tradition of the moralistes. Indeed, beginning with Montaigne, what one might call moraliste aesthetics was inseparable from the mysterious causality of love and the mystical event of theological grace. These experiences were related by structural, conceptual, and affective affinities: they exceeded, in specific ways, the bounds and authority of knowledge and language, surpassing the mind and will they so powerfully, even ecstatically, affected. Many of the concepts and discourses relevant to studying this dense, pre-Kantian form of aesthetic experience can be found in a passage in the Essais on Fortune’s massive role in the “arts”: [A] Or je dy que, non en la medecine seulement, mais en plusieurs arts plus certaines, la fortune y a bonne part. Les saillies poëtiques, qui emportent leur autheur et le ravissent hors de soy, pourquoy ne les attribuerons nous à son bon heur? puis qu’il confesse luy mesme qu’elles surpassent sa suffisance et ses forces, et les reconnoit venir d’ailleurs que de soy, et ne les avoir aucunement en sa puissance: non plus que les orateurs ne disent avoir en la leur ces mouvemens et agitations extraordinaires, qui les poussent au delà de leur dessein. Il en est de mesmes en la peinture, qu’il eschappe par fois des traits de la main du peintre, surpassans sa conception et sa science, qui le tirent luy mesmes en admiration, et qui l’estonnent. Mais la fortune montre bien encores plus evidemment la part qu’elle a en tous ces ouvrages, par les graces et beautez qui s’y treuvent, non seulement sans l’intention, mais sans la cognoissance mesme de l’ouvrier. (I: 24.127) “Venir d’ailleurs que de soy” is an apt expression for a crux of moraliste aesthetic experience. Intentionality and conceptual thought succumb to the force and paradox of what disrupts the distinction between interiority and exteriority, activity and passivity. Aesthetics verges on ecstasy, a movement 5 E.g., Plato, Symposium; Ficino, De amore; etc. On “interested art” before and after Kant, see Agamben, The Man Without Content 1-7; cf. Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture” 116. Chad A. Córdova PFSCL XLVII, 92 (2020) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2020-0002 30 outside the self from within (hors de soy), and through the self from without (venir d’ailleurs que de soy). Admiration and étonnement arise from what is held to be the most proximate and familiar: the painter’s own hand, the poet’s or orator’s own voice, the essayist’s own pen. 6 Commonsense notions of project (dessein) and ownness are suspended. The “graces et beautez” for which we are powerless to offer any ground, become gifts, sites, and experiences of other powers from elsewhere, “aucunement en sa puissance.” A dispossession of the self occurs, something by definition unforeseeable and unprogrammable: the poet’s work and effect cannot be ascribed to a rational mind, but originate from “son bon heur.” The 16 th -century orthography keeps apart what was only later sutured into one word, reminding us that modern bonheur emerged through the oblivion of certain concepts, which Montaigne lays bare. Before being only “bien être,” “bon heur” meant “fatalité heureuse, chance,” and evoked the augur or omen, the “heur,” that promised such happy fortune (“Heur”; “Bonheur”: Le trésor de la langue française). 7 Grace and beauty originate in “bon heur,” and thus do they serve as the promise, as omen, of “bonheur” itself: promissory sign of a power immanent and transcendent to its gift. This quasi-tautology recalls that happiness was not always placed firmly in the individual’s hands: happiness seemed to shine forth from mysterious events, chance experiences, when the individual was pulled beyond itself. “Bonheur” might be precisely what one is powerless to bring about oneself. With Nietzsche, then, we can see the moralistes as figures of critique, who counteract the purifying tendencies of idealism, humanism, and rationalism, replacing us within a dense discursive matrix from which modern (aesthetic) experience emerged. The moraliste liaison of the aesthetic, theological, and erotic is my focus below. This fragmentary genealogy of modern aesthetics, which is also a contribution to its salutary “destruction” (Agamben, The Man Without Qualities 6), leads from Augustine to Pascal and Bouhours, then back to Kant. I. Augustine: The Shape of Grace It might seem odd to turn to Augustine in order to discern the prefiguration of a shape of experience one will later recognize in figures such as Montaigne and Pascal, were it not for the extraordinary influence of 6 For the autonomy of the hand, which figures that of Montaigne’s writing, see Montaigne II: 6.376. 7 Cf. Montaigne’s translation of a Latin citation, II: 12.564: “[B] GAUDEAT DE BONA FORTUNA, qu’il jouisse de ce bon heur.” Grace and Beauty : On Mystical-Erotic-Aesthetic Experience PFSCL XLVII, 92 (2020) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2020-0002 31 Augustine and his theories of “grace” in early modern Europe. Especially in the 17 th century, Augustinianism informed the critical, antihumanist anthropology of thinkers and moralistes such as Jansenius, Pascal, Nicole, and La Rochefoucauld, whose incisive moral and psychological pessimism responded to Jesuit theology as much as to Cartesian rationalism and Neostoicism - to discourses, in a word, that accorded considerable power, autonomy, and lucidity to the individual ego. 8 The notion of grace, in its rigorous Augustinian formulation, encapsulates a theological anthropology focused on what cannot be achieved by the individual’s own, rational, conscious will (Duffy 75-119). 9 Grace is less about activity than about active passivity, about what occurs in the gaps and suspensions of what one willfully does. Book 8 of the Confessions offers an archetype of the event of grace in the account of conversion. The gift of grace resolves an unbearable tension. Knowing is not enough for wholehearted willing; certainty brings no full commitment, no transformation of the self. This crisis is that of akrasia, which, for Augustine as opposed to a philosophical tradition stemming from Plato, is no impossibility: akrasia is the basic experience of the inner division of postlapsarian selfhood (Taylor 138; Hundert 86-104; Marion, Au lieu de soi 240-7). At the outset of Book 8, Augustine has no more uncertainties as to the existence or ontological power and status of God: “All doubt had been taken from me” (i (1) 133). He doubts not, he understands fully, and yet he wavers to commit his life. Despair and anxiety well up in this gap, this seemingly unmotivated hesitation, when the mind appears to grasp a truth towards which the whole self still hesitates to turn. The will is divided; it is impotent to fully will, and thereby be, itself (ix (21) 148). Against the sort of rationalist metaphysics of the will behind the philosophical reduction of akrasia - which Descartes would reassert with such influence -, Augustine uncovers a “monstrosity” or paradox (monstrum [ix (21), 147]): the force and movement that self-transformation requires cannot come from voluntarism or the pursuit of truth via knowledge alone. 10 There is no stepwise, continuous route, no method, one may follow to where one yearns to go. A moment comes when one reaches an abyss, and it is as if no progress had ever been made. It was the illusion of progress itself, perhaps, that was standing in the way: 8 See, e.g., Gouhier, L’anti-humanisme au XVII e siècle; Lafond, La Rochefoucauld; Bénichou, Morales du grand siècle; Sellier, Pascal et Saint Augustin. 9 For 16 th -17 th -c. debates about grace, see Gheeraert, À la recherché du Dieu caché 5-32. Cf. Montaigne II: 12.438-49, 602-3. 10 See Marion, Au lieu de soi 230, who cites Mediations III (AT VIII, 59), where Descartes asserts that clear understanding is enough for the will to follow. Chad A. Córdova PFSCL XLVII, 92 (2020) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2020-0002 32 But to reach that destination one does not use ships or chariots or feet. It was not even necessary to go the distance I had come from the house to where we were sitting. The one necessary condition, which meant not only going but at once arriving there, was to have the will to go [nam non solum ire verum etiam pervenire illuc nihil erat aliud quam velle ire] - provided only that the will was strong and unqualified, not the turning and twisting first this way, then that, of a will half-wounded, struggling with one part rising up and the other part falling down. (viii (19) 147) The movement required is not what takes place on a spatiotemporal line, whether as the transport across physical distance by feet or chariots, or the progress of the mind from ignorance to knowledge. Grace is eruptive, its temporal form that of the instant: a rupture of the line of time and mind, when the knotted will is undone and overcome: “At once [statim] […] it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded my heart” (xii (29) 153). 11 In this moment, when truth exceeds the knowledge that tried to reach it, the tension between the desired but impossible “law” and life (or “flesh” beholden to habit’s “law”) is overcome through their indistinction (v (12) 141; cf. Paul, Rom. 7: 21-25). Grace is the incarnation, a precipitous becoming flesh, of this other logic (the “law” of the Other) that ends anxiety and promises happiness. This law seemed lofty and burdensome so long as one tried to reach or incarnate it by epistemic and voluntary means; the love that the phenomenon of grace instills exceeds such orders and measures. 12 This indistinction of life and law in the event of grace is structurally similar to “the state of exception” theorized by Agamben: a threshold between nature and right, a momentary suspension in which life is directly related, as an excluded inclusion, to the sovereignty immanent in yet above the law (Homo Sacer 26-7). In the event of grace, life both feels and catches sight of the beautiful promise of its reconciliation with constraint. The peculiar conceptual intimacy of violence, grace, love, beauty, and the ineffable reflects a common root in the mystical experience of a force impinging upon life in a moment and movement outside language, reason, habit, and law. Augustine thus bequeathed to the West an experience of grace with formal and affective signatures: eruptive rather than progressive, linear, rational, or logical; ecstatically transformative, in (momentarily) reconciling life and law; actively passive; a being-impassioned by love in an experience of truth beyond knowledge - indeed, as knowledge’s or philosophy’s “trans- 11 Conversion’s punctual temporality is evoked multiple times in bk. VIII: ii (4); vi (14); vi (15); xii (29). 12 On this, see Marion, Au lieu de soi 215. Grace and Beauty : On Mystical-Erotic-Aesthetic Experience PFSCL XLVII, 92 (2020) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2020-0002 33 gression” 13 ; an experience that cannot be foreseen, forethought, or programmed; and that troubles the self-possession and sovereignty (autarchy) of the will. Inner division is resolved not through oneself but by a becoming “other” (aliud) through the event of what “v[ient] d’ailleurs que de soy.” 14 II. Pascal: A “Certain Rapport” A comparison between pensées delineating the multiplicity and heterogeneity of “orders” attunes us to problematic locus of beauty (or “agrément”) in Pascal’s thought, and its possible relation to the structure of grace from Augustine’s Confessions. In one of these pensées, fr. 339 15 on the “trois ordres différents,” we read: “De tous les corps et esprits on n’en saurait tirer un mouvement de vraie charité, cela est impossible et d’un autre ordre, surnaturel.” This well-known division seems confirmed, yet is also altered, by fr. 329, which focuses on a duality alone: “Le cœur a son ordre, l’esprit a le sien, qui est par principe et démonstration. Le cœur en a un autre. On ne prouve pas qu’on doit être aimé en exposant d’ordre les causes de l’amour, cela serait ridicule.” 16 Here, charity is figured, if not replaced by, love (or 13 Marion, Au lieu de soi 197, uses this term to locate Augustine’s conception of beauty and the love of truth (or of “la vérité belle”) vis-à-vis the truths of philosophy, namely, as the latter’s “transgression.” On love and seduction in Augustine’s understanding of beauty and beautiful truth, see Confessions, X. xxvii (38), and Marion, Au lieu de soi 199-200. 14 See Confessions, VIII. xi (25): “punctumque ipsum temporis quo aliud futurus eram”: “the moment of time when I would become different.” Cf. Marion, Au lieu de soi 254: “un autre amour, qui ne peut venir que d’ailleurs.” For a theoretical exposition of the postlapsarian logic of discord (in self) and unity (in alterity), see Augustine, The City of God bk. XIV 441-77. 15 I cite the Pensées from Sellier’s edition. Cf. fr. 460 and fr. 761: “Il y a trois ordres des choses: la chair, l’esprit, la volonté.” 16 Cf. fr. 203, fr. 142: “Les principes se sentent, les propositions se concluent, et le tout avec certitude, quoique par différentes voies, et il est aussi ridicule que la raison demande au cœur des preuves de ses premiers principes pour vouloir y consentir qu’il serait ridicule que le cœur demandât à la raison un sentiment de toutes les propositions qu’elle démontre pour vouloir les recevoir.” But the heterogeneity of orders, and their own homogeneity per se, is undermined by the fact that reason’s order is ultimately founded on that of the heart, i.e., on inscrutable yet felt principles: “c’est sur ces connaissances de cœur et de l’instinct qu’il faut que la raison s’appuie et qu’elle y fonde son discours” (fr. 142). Cf. fr. 455. The impurity of reason’s order recalls how law and justice are founded on force and usurpation (fr. 116, 119, 135). Perhaps it is a function of the aesthetic to bring the impurity of orders to light, challenging the idea that there is “entre les Chad A. Córdova PFSCL XLVII, 92 (2020) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2020-0002 34 the heart). In fr. 91, on “tyranny,” love, serving as the middle term, allows charity (fr. 339) to be figured by beauty or agrément: On rend différents devoirs aux différents mérites ; devoir d’amour à l’agrément, devoir de crainte à la force, devoir de créance à la science. […] Ainsi ces discours sont faux et tyranniques : ‘Je suis beau, donc on doit me craindre. Je suis fort, donc on doit m’aimer. Je suis…’ […]. (fr. 91) 17 The tripartite division of “orders” thus appears to come in multiple forms (or structures). In the two forms delineated above, (1) charity and beauty occupy a similar place in relation to the orders of (2) force (corps) and (3) science (esprits). This topological coincidence encourages us, first, to explore Pascal’s conception of beauty (or agrément) and the corresponding logic of judgment on the basis of a homology and opposition between beauty (and the heart and love) and the rapports of force (and bodies and law) and science (and minds and reasons). Only thus might we make sense of the core paradox, or contrariety, in Pascal’s analysis of the experience of beauty and the judgment of the “esprit de finesse” (fr. 670): the contrariety, namely, between irrational compulsion or impenetrability (singularity) and a demand to logic and demonstration (universality). Beauty, that is, is something hybrid, partaking of force and science. 18 Second, beauty’s topological identity with charity points to something more: the aesthetic order, between the two others, is a worldly analogon (or “figure”) of the “supernatural” order of charity. 19 Thus we are already entering into Kant’s territory, with a Pascalian prefiguration of the paradox of “reflecting judgment” (subjective universality); while still moving in the theological-metaphysical lineage of Augustine (on the force of grace), which Kant’s definition of beauty, like Stendhal’s, unwittingly inherited. In the Pensées, the most important fragments on aesthetic experience and judgment theorize the “modèle d’agrément et de beauté” (fr. 486) and ordres une radicale discontinuité”: Ferreyrolles, Pascal et la raison du politique 156. 17 See fr. 92, which, elaborating upon the division of force and agrément (fr. 91), confirms the near or total synonymy of agrément and beauty, in fr. 91 and fr. 486: “Et le fort et le beau se battent sottement à qui sera le maître l’un de l’autre, car leur maîtrise est de divers genre” (fr. 92). 18 See n. 16, supra. There are arguably other such hybrids in the Pensées, e.g., “la machine” or “automate” (fr. 661), “le cœur,” “la coutume,” and “l’imagination” (fr. 78). 19 Compare “devoir d’amour à l’agrément” (fr. 91) to fr. 182: “Votre devoir est de l’aimer [i.e., Dieu] de tout votre cœur. […] Si on vous unit à Dieu, c’est par grâce, non par nature.” Grace and Beauty : On Mystical-Erotic-Aesthetic Experience PFSCL XLVII, 92 (2020) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2020-0002 35 the “esprit de finesse” (fr. 669-71). The first reveals the impossibility of locating beauty purely at either the subjective or objective side of a “rapport” (fr. 486): “Il y a un certain modèle d’agrément et de beauté qui consiste en un certain rapport entre notre nature, faible ou forte, telle qu’elle est, et la chose qui nous plaît.” 20 As Louis Marin observes, the “model” is thus no original being or “essence” of which beautiful objects or images would be mere copies (as in Platonic mimesis, say), and its transparency to the mind of the individual it concerns is doubtful: the “model” is “un rapport sub-objectif […] une structure d’agrément individuelle et singulière qui reste inconsciente” (“Réflexions” 91). While we can get a sense of the “model” by transposing it, in imagination, between different things standing in the same secret “rapport” to us - and between which there is “un rapport parfait” 21 -, the concept of beauty relies on the very inscrutability of the “model” or “rapport” it establishes between the individual and the object. The reason why “on dit beauté poétique,” and not “beauté géométrique et beauté médicinale” is that, in the latter cases, we understand the nature of the end or “object” of these practices (proofs and healing). For poetry, this is not the case: “on ne sait pas en quoi consiste l’agrément, qui est l’objet de la poésie. On ne sait ce que c’est que ce modèle naturel qu’il faut imiter” (fr. 486). This lack of knowledge, the abyssal ground of beauty, allows the modish installation of “jargon” in its empty place, and relates to the diversity and instability of aesthetic experience across individuals and even with respect to one and the same person. 22 In the framework of Pascal’s theological anthropology, fallen human nature is in a relation of “disproportion” - an unstable relation, a near non-rapport - to other beings in an infinite universe, and to itself. 23 Judgment is inconstant; its “assiette naturelle” is hardly “ferme et stable” (fr. 454). Beauty is a shifting rapport between things and a mutable subject lacking ontological or rational foundation. But this experience is not exhausted by the bare factum or force of beauty or agrément, an aesthetic-erotic event whose causes are inscrutable 20 Pascal’s use of “rapport” is distinct from Descartes’s and Nicole’s: see Becq 99-103. 21 On this transposition via the imagination, see Ferreryolles, Les reines du monde 218-31. 22 See fr. 95: “Comme le mode fait l’agrément aussi fait-elle la justice.” Cf. fr. 15, 78, 94, 454, 463. 23 As Pierre Magnard argues, we should thus be wary of aligning Pascal with “honnêteté” or a “classical” aesthetics of “proportions” or determinate criteria and models: Magnard 3-5. “Plutôt que d’être adepte des ‘classiques’, Pascal dénoncerait leur idéal comme chimérique” (4). For the “classical” cannon of beauty, centered on perfection, proportion, and clarity, see Groulier and Brugère 164. Chad A. Córdova PFSCL XLVII, 92 (2020) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2020-0002 36 yet whose effects are keenly felt. Beauty’s force sets the mind into a unique sort of play. This can be clarified by analogy to the movements peculiar to other “orders”: force imposes itself and becomes law and the imagination’s theater of power: the non-rational becomes reasonable and violence is transmuted into signs” (fr. 94; fr. 78 24 ); science’s order of reasons seems lucid, and homogenous, but its foundations lie in the impenetrable sentiments or principles of the heart (fr. 142; fr. 455). Beauty’s phenomenology makes it similar yet different from these orders: beauty imposes itself without becoming reasonable laws or forceful reasons, despite a desire for this and the idea that a logic of beauty is possible. The force of beauty provokes imaginative reasoning or reasoning imagination; but this dialectic remains in flux. 25 The fragment on the “esprit de finesse” (fr. 670) thus offers the idea of a logic of aesthetic judgment, while discounting its realization. Having described the principles of geometry as fully visible (“on voit les principes à plein”), Pascal first writes similarly of the principles of the “esprit de finesse”: “ils sont […] devant les yeux de tout le monde.” But this identity in visibility is then undone, as the principles of finesse become opaque, moving from the mind towards the order of the heart (“[o]n les voit à peine, on les sent plutôt qu’on ne les voit”): Mais ce qui fait que des géomètres ne sont pas fins, c’est qu’ils ne voient pas ce qui est devant eux et qu’étant accoutumés aux principes nets et grossiers de géométrie, et à ne raisonner qu’après avoir bien vu et manié leurs principes, ils se perdent dans les choses de finesse, où les principes ne se laissent pas ainsi manier. On les voit à peine, on les sent plutôt qu’on ne les voit ; on a des peines infinies à les faire sentir à ceux qui ne les sentent pas d’eux-mêmes. Ce sont choses tellement délicates, et si nombreuses, qu’il faut un sens bien délicat et bien net pour les sentir, et juger droit et juste selon ce sentiment, sans pouvoir le plus souvent le démontrer par ordre comme en géométrie, parce qu’on n’en possède pas ainsi les principes, et que ce serait une chose infinie de l’entreprendre. Il faut tout d’un coup voir la chose d’un seul regard, et non pas par progrès de raisonnement, au moins jusqu’à un certain degré. […] [L]es géomètres veulent traiter géomé- 24 On this, see Marin, “Pour une théorie baroque de l’action politique” 19-22; Ferreyrolles, Pascal et la raison du politique 110 et seq. 25 One might see rules for judging and producing art, like the “jargon” Pascal cites, to be groping (and, from a Pascalian angle, vain) attempts at objective criteria of beauty, which improperly collapse the distinction of the orders. Cf. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A21/ B35-6; Critique of the Power of Judgment §§46-7. On rules, categories, and their institution by the 1648 Académie, see Groulier and Brugère 166. Grace and Beauty : On Mystical-Erotic-Aesthetic Experience PFSCL XLVII, 92 (2020) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2020-0002 37 triquement les choses fines, et se rendent ridicules, voulant commencer par les définitions, et ensuite par les principes : ce qui n’est pas la manière d’agir en cette sorte de raisonnement. Ce n’est pas que l’esprit ne le fasse, mais il le fait tacitement, naturellement et sans art, car l’expression en passe tous les hommes, et le sentiment n’en appartient qu’à peu d’hommes. (fr. 670) While the structural distinction of instant (“tout d’un coup”) and “progress” recalls Augustine’s shape of grace, which interrupts the order (and narrative) of reasons, the recalcitrance of aesthetic principles to be handled like those of geometry (“il ne se laissent pas ainsi manier”) evokes Pascal’s distinction between justice and force: “la force ne se laisse pas manier comme on veut” (fr. 119). What does not allow itself to be handled by us is that by which we are handled or possessed: what grabs and takes hold of us, without the mediation or progress of reason. The logic of aesthetic judgment remains an idea whose realization, were we even able to begin such a task, stands off on the horizon of infinity (“ce serait une chose infinie”). The experience or sentiment transgresses the order of mind it also seems to put into play. Like the heart, whose “order” it seems to most proximately resemble, beauty “a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point” (fr. 680). Thus its intimacy with the infamous je-ne-sais-quoi, occult “cause” of love and its striking, potentially world-historical “effects” (fr. 32). 26 The experience or feeling of beauty or agrément provokes philosophical reason and demonstrates the failure of its claims to universal application or lucidity. 27 In this, aesthetic-erotic experience is a condensation of both the crossing and division of the “orders.” But beauty offers, too, an intimation or “figure” (fr. 296, 301), disclosed through the affect of love, of a resolution or unification, which the order of charity would bring about by the force of grace. 28 Our desire to reconcile “reason” with the “heart” is at once gratified, frustrated, and revealed in aesthetic experience. Beauty becomes a “figure” of the desire for the Other and an awareness that its object can only be given by the Other, in grace: “l’autre [la foi] est un don de Dieu” (fr. 41): 26 In this link between Pascal on beauty and the je-ne-sais-quoi, I depart (nominally, at least) from Richard Scholar’s excellent reading of fr. 32: Scholar 162-73. 27 See fr. 142: “Cette impuissance [de “prouver par raison” ce qu’on sait par le cœur] ne doit servir qu’à humilier la raison qui voudrait juger de tout […].” Reason, that is, is tyrannical (cf. fr. 91). Its failure to penetrate the logic of finesse is also at stake in De l’esprit géométrique. 28 See fr. 348: “Qu’il est beau de voir par les yeux de la foi” (cf. fr. 737). History itself would become beautiful, the shining forth of a secret cause or sense luminous within events. See Ferreyrolles, Pascal et la raison du politique 256-7, 275, on this “plaisir esthétique.” Chad A. Córdova PFSCL XLVII, 92 (2020) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2020-0002 38 “C’est le cœur qui sent Dieu, et non la raison : voilà ce que c’est que la foi” (fr. 680). Beauty’s way of promising or being a sign for this “bonheur,” which Pierre Magnard read in Pascal’s aesthetics, derives from fallen nature’s ontological lack and cosmic disproportion (Magnard 5-6) - conditions that beauty seems, for a moment, to overcome. Deception follows: despite the feeling of transcendence, beauty occurs to a fallen self and perhaps cannot avoid being subsumed, like the arts, into the debased category of what never provides what it promises: “divertissement” (Grasset 361-5). Yet debasement, for Pascal, is also a chance. Along with the vanity of its promise, so too, for self-critical thought, might something else emerge. In the depth of deception, thought takes the measure of the fall and the correlative desire for “redemption” (Magnard 11). By a sort of negative Platonism often discernable in Augustinian discourse, Pascal would admit of only relative beauties and fleeting happiness. There is no stepwise, dialectical passage from here to the otherworldly beauty in itself (Symposium 210e-211c), but only, at most, the affective and potentially reflexive disclosure of its absence, and of the need, for any rapport to arise, for its spontaneous self-bestowal. 29 Beauty or agrément, and the love it inspires, consists in the establishment of “un certain rapport entre notre nature, faible ou forte, telle qu’elle est, et la chose qui nous plaît” (fr. 486). This inscrutable “rapport” is already something of a gift to a fallen subject out of joint with the world and itself. But the Other is more other, more disproportionate, still: “S’il y a un Dieu, il est infiniment incompréhensible, puisque, n’ayant ni parties ni bornes, il n’a nul rapport à nous” (fr. 680). At best, then, the “certain rapport” (beauty) could be the “figure” of an impossible “rapport” (with the Other). Beauty might seem like a marginal concern in the Pensées; but it can also be seen as a crux of the fallen world. Like Aristotle’s “wonder,” Descartes’s “admiration,” or Heidegger’s “attunement,” beauty is something of a primitive “sub-objectif” relation: a mysterious attunement between what is out of tune - and the promise of an impossible rapport with what is beyond every moment and every rapport. 29 Cf. fr. 182: “Donc s’il voit quelque chose dans les ténèbres où il est et s’il trouve quelque sujet d’amour parmi les choses de la terre, pourquoi, si Dieu lui découvre quelques rayons de son essence, ne sera-t-il pas capable de le connaître et de l’aimer en la manière qu’il lui plaira de se communiquer à nous? ” Grace and Beauty : On Mystical-Erotic-Aesthetic Experience PFSCL XLVII, 92 (2020) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2020-0002 39 III. Bouhours: A Curious Concept While theologically at odds with Pascal, in the fifth of his Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène (1671), Dominique Bouhours also focuses on something of a mysterious “sub-objectif” rapport. As Richard Scholar writes, for Bouhours “the je-ne-sais-quoi is the sign of a relation between two parties. […] The term refers here not to the two parties affected, but to the subtle link that operates between them, the inexplicable force of nescioquiddity itself” (Scholar 51; cf. Becq 106). Historically, the fifth Entretien bears witness to the je-ne-sais-quoi’s “sedimentation,” as a semantic “family of phrases” and grammatical forms, congealed into a voguish noun over the preceding century, becomes a “topic around which an entire discourse can be organized” (Scholar 22-3, 33 59). But this highpoint is also the onset of a “decadence”: the term, increasingly evacuated of all but its cultural function as a sign of belonging to an elite group, becomes a target of derision (ibid. 182-222). If Bouhours named “grace” as a supernatural analogue of worldly versions of the je-ne-sais-quoi, the scandal this caused derived, I would argue, not only from the proximity of theological to worldly concerns - after all, for Pascal, nothing resembles “charité” more than “cupidité” (fr. 508) -, but from the failure to also mark the dissemblance, disproportion, and contrariety across the orders in which one can invoke the je-ne-sais-quoi. 30 Responding to his Jansenist critics via changes to subsequent editions, Bouhours’s strategy was ingenious: he went straight to Augustine, spiritual father of the rigorist camp, and cited from texts (like the Confessions) in which Augustine writes lyrically of a divine nescio quid (Bouhours 293-7). In other words, otherworldly grace shapes the je-ne-sais-quoi even if, in Bouhours, the term verges on being a mere sign of social quality and a trendy way to bring the otherworldly down to earth. 31 But my aim is not to dissect this conflict or to discern what the Pensées reveal about its precise content, but to analyze resonances across the divide between Jesuit and moraliste positions. One has been mentioned: like Pascal, Bouhours theorizes his object as not really an object at all, but a 30 Fr. 508: “Figuratif. / Rien n’est si semblable à la charité que la cupidité, et rien n’y est si contraire.” On the “analogical” and “dialectical” nature of the Pascalian “figure,” see Ferreyrolles, Pascal et la raison du politique 281. 31 For “the semantic connection” of grace (as charis, venustas, or gratia) and the jene-sais-quoi, see Scholar 27-8, 37-8. In his discussion of grace and the scandal Bouhours created (63-70), Scholar notes that “the relation between the je-ne-saisquoi and divine grace would merit further study” (n. 127, 68). On this, see Jam 517-29; Becq 95-114. Chad A. Córdova PFSCL XLVII, 92 (2020) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2020-0002 40 “sub-objectif” relation. Another concerns the problematic status of the je-nesais-quoi as a concept. Pascal’s analysis of the experience of beauty and of the “esprit de finesse” displays a paradoxical dualism between personal compulsion (singularity) and a desire, even conviction, of an underlying logic that would allow for demonstration (universality). Bouhours’s je-nesais-quoi shows a similar structure. Both relate back to grace. The fifth Entretien begins with the mystery of “une étrange sympathie” between two friends, which protects their love from the ennui that usually results from repeated, habitual interaction and conversation between people (Bouhours 279-80). This sympathy is a vital intimacy that never dries out; a pleasurable freshness that, inexplicably, endures. The text’s opening thus offers structural signatures of the je-ne-sais-quoi: it is an enduring newness and a gap in our usual network of concepts and ways of being. But is it a concept? What, if any, are the rules of its use? The text is hardly forthcoming. Here is Ariste, who first uses the curious term when describing the remarkable “effets d’une grande sympathie”: et de ces inclinations secrètes qui nous font sentir pour une personne je ne sais quoi […]. De la manière dont vous parlez, répliqua Eugène, vous avez la mine de connaître aussi bien la nature de ce je ne sais quoi, que vous en ressentez les effets. Il est bien plus aisé de le sentir que de le connaître, répartit Ariste. Ce ne serait plus un je ne sais quoi si l’on savait ce que c’est ; sa nature est d’être incompréhensible. (280) Beyond the divide between sentir and connaître, the circularity of cause and effect, and the specification of je-ne-sais-quoi’s “nature” (the term’s comprehension) as what is incomprehensible, this passage displays some of the text’s logico-grammatical shifts: the movement between “le” (in the text’s title), “ces,” “ce,” and “un” bears witness to an indetermination, an ambivalence between normativity and relativism, universality and singularity; and to the plurality of domains in which the term can be used (its extension). But there do seem to be some putative rules or patterns of its use, which delineate, however indeterminately, the term’s comprehension: it must be invoked only in excess to, or as the abyssal, unammeable ground of, everything one might possibly determinately name, or enumerate as a predicate - everything that might be considered a cause of affects and other effects (280-3). This “rule” leads, in the text, to ni, ni structures recalling the via negativa of apophatic theology (282), and to statements that discount every possible totality of the sayable and knowable: “Mais en disant tout cela, & mille autre choses encore, on ne dit rien” (281). The je-ne-sais- Grace and Beauty : On Mystical-Erotic-Aesthetic Experience PFSCL XLVII, 92 (2020) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2020-0002 41 quoi imposes itself with the force of what escapes language and reason; 32 it is, as Marin writes, “la tache aveugle du savoir et du sens” (“Le sublime” 192). But if it traces language’s end, thus does it also draw forth language without end. Faced with this limit that is also its own (and language’s) vital principle, the Entretien can only come to a close without closure, in a proto- Wittgensteinain vow to “admiration” in “silence” (295-6; Wittgenstein 6.522-7). This is related to another “rule”: the je-ne-sais-quoi is an anti-philosophical term of (non)art, which enjoys remarking those phenomena that philosophical reason gropes after in vain, or fudges in its attempts, via explanation, to assure its mastery. The causes of love and their relation to what can be known, is the archetype: “il faut démentir les Philosophes qui ont soutenu de tout temps que la connaissance précède l’amour ; que la volonté n’aime rien qui ne soit connu de l’entendement” (284). 33 But this pattern of use, too, can be transposed into a theological domain: the inversion of the apparently more rational order of love and knowledge, of understanding and will, is most paradigmatic in the case of a love that must take precedence, for it is the basis of a rapport with the Unknowable per se. 34 Bouhours seems to arrive at grace only after passage through examples from the domain of worldly experiences and natural phenomena (293-7). But this arrival, we see, was prepared well in advance. 35 The profanation of grace, from the Jesuit’s refusal to decisively cleave between analogous orders, follows the illumination of worldly things. In the Entretien, the je-ne-sais-quoi flits between singularity and universality, and flirts with a normativity that contradicts a radical subjectivism the text also suggests. Baring its tendency to become an elitist shibboleth, the je-ne-sais-quoi thus emerges as something of a pseudo-concept: while it does have a stable point of reference in love and desire for (or as) the Unknowable per se, it is also a limitrophe on the margins of language and knowledge, ever-shifting in relation to these mutating domains and the discursive-conceptual efforts it sets into play. But this excluded excess is also everywhere immanent, as an animating principle, a force, that exceeds what it enlivens (282-4). Even if we cannot know and name its nature or causes, or divide subject from object in its experience, the relation itself is indubitable: its existence consists precisely in this affective-erotic rapport 32 Force is evoked by terms like “frappe,” “touche,” “amorce,” “pointe” (282). 33 The editors evoke Aquinas (n.14, 284). One might also think of Descartes: see Scholar 137-41. 34 Cf. Pascal fr. 617; Marion, Au lieu de soi 205 et seq; Marion, “De connaître à aimer” 17-28. 35 The text thus appears to invert the theological genealogy of its subject. Chad A. Córdova PFSCL XLVII, 92 (2020) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2020-0002 42 that rips a hole in language. After Pascal, Bouhours delineates the peculiar conceptual structure of a certain something we can only grasp as a (dis)pleasurable feeling of relation, something unspeakable that provokes speech, something subjective we like to share, and discuss, with others. Conclusion: Kant and the “Promesse de Bonheur” Our historiographies of aesthetics tend to grant Kant the status he himself hoped to claim: of making a clean break with the past. As one recent account puts it: Le passage de pulchritudo […] à Schönheit, au sens que lui donne Kant, constitue une rupture fondamentale avec toutes les conceptions antérieures du beau, celles des métaphysiques du beau comme celles des théories de l’art. […] Chez Kant, l’usage de Schönheit a pour condition le rejet principiel de pulchritudo et de toutes les implications philosophiques de ce mot. (Groulier and Brugère 169) 36 It is as if the babel of impure aesthetic idioms, with their archaic indeterminacy and entanglements with what, following Kant, would now become simply other discourses (erotic, natural, metaphysical, theological) - it is as if the old excrescences were now pruned away to allow the pure, formal flower of beauty to emerge. But this narrative of “rupture” (and Enlightenment) grants Kant the determinate negation and sublation (Hegel) or repression (Freud) of the weeds or roots of beauty, without paying attention to returns, hauntings, and remainders, which dynamics of determinate negation, sublation, and repression entail. The aim of my fragmentary itinerary is to discern impurities in the Kantian break, and to hear the muted voices of other discourses and experiences, especially theological and erotic, within the abstract sanctum of modern aesthetics. 37 I will merely touch on some of the results so far; pursuing them further will require a separate study. Like the je-ne-sais-quoi, Kantian “reflecting judgment” appears to correspond to a concept; but, of this concept, we only have a form without content - it is indeterminate, and the judgment’s universality, subjective. Beauty is irreducible to any determinate attribute of the object; what we can name or point to, the predicates by which we know an object or describe its utility: all this is never quite it (Critique of the Power of Judgment 36 For related historiographical issues, see Scholar 9-12. 37 As Kate E. Tunstall notes, French writers are often neglected in histories of aesthetics, which itself emerged in 18 th -c. Germany “in opposition to the French”: “Enlightenment Aesthetic Thought” 257. Grace and Beauty : On Mystical-Erotic-Aesthetic Experience PFSCL XLVII, 92 (2020) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2020-0002 43 §§1-22). As in Pascal, beauty is a felt, “sub-objectif” rapport that imposes itself without concept, in excess of reason and logic, setting concepts and language in motion. Its experience partakes only somewhat of the impenetrability of force (the order of corps): for this force seems to appeal to understanding (the order of esprits), though this possibility remains a (regulative) idea - a lack vainly supplemented by the rules and criteria offered by philosophers, theoreticians, and institutions. Beauty is a feeling of the interplay of the orders (or, Kant will say, faculties), and a felt correspondence, a “certain rapport,” between subject and object that brings forth language and that forms discursive communities (cf. ibid. §41). But what of “disinterestedness” and “impersonality,” targets of Nietzsche’s moraliste critique? 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