Season One: On beauty
Episode four: Beauty and goodness
The third step in Diotima’s ladder asks us to see the beauty of goodness. But what kind of beauty is this? And how can we think of beauty as having to do with the good when - so often - it seems to also be embroiled in evil?
In this episode, Dalia and Simon consider an essay by the twentieth-century French philosopher, Simone Weil - who was described by Albert Camus as the only great spirit of our time. Weil’s thinking was imbued with moral and ethical questions. For Weil, beauty and morality go hand in hand because the desire for goodness is an expression of beauty. Does this mean that the hunger for the good, even in its absence, is an expression of beauty?
The essay is called “Love of the Order of the World”. Simone Weil’s book, Waiting for God, contains this essay.
Simone Weil in March 1943, while she was working for the French Resistance. Photo was taken about five months before she died. Dalia and Simon discuss Weil’s essay “Love of the Order of the World,” written about one year earlier.
Source: Wikicommons