Universal appreciation of beauty signals resignation and empties beauty itself

Evidence

In a phase when the subject is capitulating before the alienated predominance of things, his readiness to discover value or beauty everywhere shows the resignation both of his critical faculties and of the interpreting imagination inseparable from them. Those who find everything beautiful are now in danger of finding nothing beautiful. The universality of beauty can communicate itself to the subject in no other way than in obsession with the particular. No gaze attains beauty that is not accompanied by indifference, indeed almost by contempt, for all that lies outside the object contemplated. And it is only infatuation, the unjust disregard for the claims of every existing thing, that does justice to what exists. In so far as the existent is accepted, in its one-sidedness, for what it is, its one-sidedness is comprehended as its being, and reconciled. The eyes that lose themselves to the one and only beauty are sabbath eyes. They save in their object something of the calm of its day of creation. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 87

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The argument that finding everything beautiful means finding nothing beautiful, and that justice to existence requires unjust infatuation, is a dense dialectical reversal worth sitting with.
• APHORISMS: ‘No gaze attains beauty that is not accompanied by indifference, indeed almost by contempt, for all that lies outside the object contemplated’ reads as durable counsel on attention and focus.
• SEED: Essay angle: today’s ‘gratitude culture’ and forced positivity as the contemporary form of the resignation Adorno diagnoses in universal aesthetic appreciation.
• XREF: connects to: Mechanical reproduction of beauty destroys the unconscious idolatry that made beauty vital; Beauty’s powerlessness becomes the negative image of redemptive hope — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 250; Labeling things beautiful destroys their perceived beauty — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 506 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Beauty’s powerlessness becomes the negative image of redemptive hope #expands (0.82) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 250