The Compass of Beauty: A Search for the Middle
At the very center of ontology lies a part-whole puzzle traversed by the problem of connection, transcendence, and transition. Materialism, in its traditional form of determinism and emergence, has left ontology alone with this metaphysical void by failing to express the simultaneous internal and external existences of things and their interactions, that is, the continuity of existence. However, when existence is understood based on beauty, the kaleidoscopic continuity of existence suddenly becomes visible. Beauty, by making transcendence and mentality the inherent quality of existence, reconfigures all things as a continuous aesthetic flow built on and oriented towards beauty, while ontology and aesthetics become mirror images of each other: “beauty allows parts to be visible and accessible for other wholes without isolating them from their relationships with neighboring parts.” Here, Lars Spuybroek, reading names like Plato, Kant, and Burke, as well as Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, and William Hogarth together, presents his own diagram that reveals the aesthetic continuity of the arena of existence as an alternative to Heidegger’s four-layered static Being.
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