René Magritte. The Double Secret (1927)

"ln so far as possible, I make a point of making only paintings that give rise to mystery with the precision and enchantment necessary to the life of ideas." (Magritte)

I was once asked the question: what do you find beautiful? Since it occurred to me that my response may resonate with others, I thought I would share it with you here:

What I find beautiful is the (idea of the) ‘life-world’ or, as I call it, the ‘life-world system’: a conceptual engineering combining the phenomenological concept of the life-world with the international relations concept of the world-system. The life-world-system is a ‘hyper-object’ – an entity ‘massively distributed in time and space relative to (individual) humans’ – coupling the (collective) subjectivity of sentient minds and the institutions that structure civilisation. It can be thought of as everyone and everything that exists as an emergent whole; capturing every thought and action, every experience and procedure, every organisation and technology. It is the ultimate object of analysis containing every subject (‘moral patient’) and structure in existence.

Even if it sounds fairly new-age-like, I find this ‘systems philosophy’ beautiful as it attempts to understand the world as a totality that is ‘greater than us’ and that ‘we are all a part of’ (‘a whole that is more than the sum of its parts’) ; a reframing that I think is necessary to understand what the world is and what we (all) are within it.  Further, I think it presents a more enlightened lens with which to conceive of the relationship between ‘structure’ (‘the system’) and ‘agency’. Whilst ‘the system’ is often talked about in an alienated way as if it is a mechanistic object with its own independent logic, under the reframing of the ‘life-world-system’, the recognition is that ‘the system’ is continually (re)constructed through ‘subject-object interaction’ (the ‘mind-world relation’) and the conscious exercise of ‘human agency’.

What I find beautiful is the realisation that right now there are effectively* countless instantiations of consciousness ‘lit up’ across the world each with its own subjective experience (*at least a scope the human mind is not by default sensitive to). Inside each and every single mind there are thoughts and feelings – hopes and fears, desires and frustrations, loves and hates, dreams and nightmares, pleasures and pains – that are hidden from view (‘trapped beneath the skin’ as Skinner puts it), only revealed through outward expression (in language; verbal, written and body), but that are nonetheless inter-acting and inter-affecting each other in a dynamic process and multi-agent, complex adaptive system extended across all of time and place (history and geography).