Mark A. McIntosh

Beautiful Ideas: The Visibility of Truth

As her family were attempting to find a way out of Vichy France, the young Jewish intellectual Simone Weil was struggling to make sense of the grotesque disjunction between true beauty and the brutalising glamour of the collaborationist propaganda, and that of its powerful German sponsor: ‘In ancient times the love of the beauty of the world had a very important place in men’s thoughts and surrounded the whole of life with a marvellous poetry … Today one might think that the white races had almost lost all feeling for the beauty of the world, and that they had taken upon them the task of making it disappear from all the continents where they have penetrated with their armies, their trade and their religion.’1 As she analysed the enigma, she viewed the pitiless divorce between authentic beauty and genuine truthfulness as a symptom of humanity’s longing for power and possession: ‘The love of power amounts to a desire to establish order among the men and things around oneself … the question is one of forcing a certain circle into a pattern suggestive of universal beauty.’2