David Bentley Hart on Music, Art, Beauty, Sublimity, Icons, Consciousness, and AI

Описание: I want to express gratitude for David Bentley Hart's writings. Both the Atheist Delusions and The Experience of God: Beauty Consciousness, Bliss, made atheism so patently absurd that it saved my faith. The Doors of the Sea is the best meditation upon theodicy I've ever read, and Beauty of the Infinite is the most important theological text addressing postmodernism that's been written.

In this episode of The Pursuit of Beauty (Pursuit of Beauty Episode 30), we begin with a conversation about Hart's writings on music, some of which have introduced me to music that I was previously unfamiliar with. We agree that Bach is undoubtedly the greatest composer of all time, that Messiaen is fantastic, but also there is no clear second composer next to Bach (although Hart is deferential to Mozart).

We move on to talk about aesthetics and beauty as such. Should the dichotomy of beauty/sublimity even be a part of a Christian aesthetics? Hart, after reflecting upon the true meaning of sublimity found in Burke and Kant, meditates upon the Cross of Christ, a prime example of how beauty and sublimity are found juxtaposed in Christianity's most sacred image. We discuss the interplay of the. beautiful and sublime in music such as Beethoven and the composers of the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern).

It is our joint conviction that the avant garde should not be off-handedly rejected, but that by no means infers that there are not substantial issues within modern art and music, including commodification (he invokes Walter Benjamin) and the postmodern attempt to wrap all art in multiple levels of irony. We then discuss the structural issue of postmodernism: that it is founded upon an ontology of violence, and therefore, it necessitates a destruction of beauty.

We delve into the questions of Orthodox polemics concerning western art, the problem of slavish copying, exciting new Orthodox artists (like Fr. Silouan Justiniano, Seraphim O'Keefe and Solrunn Nes), the Kroug/Ouspensky tradition, and the tension of preserving tradition while not eschewing innovation. I bring up two definitions: love as the reconciliation of multiplicity and unity, and beauty as "fittedness." While not outright rejecting the first definition, he riffs upon "fittedness" to include a discussion of Thomistic aesthetics and revisit the problem of beauty/sublimity.

I ask him about the postmodern suspicion of hierarchies as such and ask whether or not he sees the same anti-hierarchical trajectory within the history of Western classical music, which leads into a discussion of the music theorist Schenker. We move finally onto the question of AI and consciousness. Hart expresses some concern against esoterica when mentioning the consciousness of cities/principalities, but nonetheless provides helpful insights into functionalism, AGI, distributed consciousness, and the state of our modern world.

David Bentley Hart's substack: https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com/

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Chapters:
00:00 – Opening/ Intro
03:17 – David Bentley Hart & The Beauty of the Infinite
08:59 – Twentieth-century sacred music, Rubbra, and tonal modernism
11:53 – Bach and Messiaen
15:37 – the question of ugliness in modern art
17:22 – Walter Benjamin and mechanical reproduction
19:45 – Authenticity, and the copy
21:40 – the avant-garde
25:50 – Iconography: imitation, lineage, and true creativity
29:10 – contemporary iconographers
32:28 – Byzantine vs. Western sacred aesthetics
33:46 – Anglican choral heritage and Orthodox liturgical music
39:22 – Convert zeal and aesthetic polemics in Orthodoxy
40:20 – Sacred architecture
42:50 – Gothic and Byzantine beauty; on kitsch and authenticity
44:57 – Kant and Burke on the sublime
45:25 – The transcendentals
53:56 – Beauty as fittedness; innovation through love of tradition
57:02 – Aquinas revisited: beauty beyond proportion
59:59 – Debussy and Crumb: the limits of formal harmony
1:00:16 – Teleology, openness, and musical longing
1:01:39 – Wagner, Berg, and unresolved transcendence
1:33:57 – Hierarchy, Schenker, and postmodern suspicion of order
1:35:26 – Music of the spheres, monody, and the Reformation’s impact
1:36:24 – Schoenberg and serialism
1:37:18 – Glenn Gould
1:38:33 – Modernism, war, and the disintegration of tonality
1:40:08 – Schenkerian analysis and the logic of tonal hierarchy
1:41:25 – Background and foreground in music; Furtwängler and conductors
1:50:42 – AI pivot: Skynet, functionalism, and large-language models
1:53:44 – AGI? Hart’s skepticism
1:55:17 – Consciousness, principalities, and panpsychism
2:03:17 – References to Schenker and Piston; gratitude and sign-off