Beauty, knowledge, and terror: A phenomenological-syllogistic exploration of the aesthetics of the educative moment

摘要

In this text, I outline the relationship between beauty, knowledge, and terror through a syllogism and an exploration of each term individually. Before undertaking a full analysis of the interrelationships between beauty, knowledge, and terror, I would provide two illustrations: a visual representation of the proposed syllogism, and a description of a moment that seems to recur in more or less the same form year after year in my classroom; it is not illustrative in itself, but through careful analysis of the different phenomena which add up to create the moment, and which further extend from the moment, I explore the interaction of the three major elements at work here. The movement from beauty to knowledge to terror is explored in the context of the educative moment, which is important as this is largely a meditation on teaching. I conclude with the idea that the postmodern instructor needs to be consistently aware of the relationship between these to educate effectively, because the terror that arises with the possibility of new knowledge can prevent students from opening themselves to that knowledge, maintaining a ground for developing terror.