“Existence Without Existents”: On Levinas’s Concerns About Beauty as an Expression of the Sacred and Its Complex Relationship with the Holy

In a certain sense, the experience of beauty is objectless. Obviously, only in a certain sense: for the experience evidently makes some objects manifest—namely, the object found beautiful. Yet to find an object beautiful means finding that it somehow, given the juxtaposition of its material elements, expresses something beyond conception, which thus directs us towards something that could never be given as an object of experience. Kant thus claimed that beauty ultimately expresses the purportedly supersensible basis of all being, accounting for the sense of meaningfulness and repose engendered by the experience of beauty. Levinas, expanding on such ideas, calls this an expression of the sacred. Levinas, however, thus worries about our appreciation of beauty: for if the sacred, as he argues, discloses an ostensibly unmanifestable mystical or metaphysical absolute as if it were at one with the material forces that traverse and underlie beings, then beauty’s repose ultimately represents the moral complacency of a disclosure that all is right on some “deeper level.” By contrast, the holy, which reveals itself in the relation to another and which Levinas opposes to the sacred, represents a different unmanifestability—of the other as such and of the infinite responsibility to which the other’s appeal, by decentering one absolutely, subjects one thereby—but this encounter, instead of inviting complacency, thus incessantly challenges us. In the following, I clarify Levinas’s position by explicating his account of beauty and his claim that beauty manifests an unmanifestable sacred and then discussing Levinas’s distinction between the sacred and holy and explicating his worries about the sacred. I conclude by discussing the caution he believes we should exercise in appreciating beauty, but also the latter’s exigency, a consideration that can help resolve issues in Levinas scholarship as well as current debates on the moral value of art.