The beautiful, the good and the ugly: Gaza and the Epstein affair

Today the world's greatest problem is not aesthetics; it is aestheticization. Everything has turned into spectacle. Pain, war, children's corpses, court rulings. There is image, there is rhythm, there is narrative. But truth? That is mostly lost on the editing table.

At exactly this point, Hans-Georg Gadamer's book Güzele Dair* (On the Beautiful), newly published by Vadi Yayınları and parts of which I translated and published in Tezkire Magazine beginning in 2000, offers a shattering reminder: The beautiful is not what is pleasant. The beautiful is a meaning that demands an answer from us.

GADAMER'S ON THE BEAUTIFUL

Since Immanuel Kant, modern aesthetics has largely linked beauty with "subjective taste." The beautiful was a universal judgment of liking. Gadamer, however, makes a radical move: The beautiful is not something that is liked; it is the manifestation of meaning. That is, the beautiful is an experience in which truth finds an echo in us. We do not consume it; we participate in it.

This difference is vital today. Because the culture we live in has largely identified art with the entertainment industry. Film, music, visual arts are mostly reduced to "content." And the viewer is a customer. But for Gadamer art neither merely gives pleasure nor merely serves as diversion. The work of art does not stand before us as a passive object; it speaks. It demands seriousness from us.

Three concepts stand out in Gadamer's aesthetic thought: play, symbol and festival. Art is a "play," but not a light play. Play has its own rules, its own flow. This is what he means when he says "We do not play the game; the game plays us." When we truly participate in a work of art, the subject-object distinction is suspended. Neither do we alone interpret the work, nor does the work alone determine us. A "fusion of horizons" takes place between the two.

At this point Gadamer's kinship with Martin Heidegger's thought is clear. Heidegger's idea that "the work of art establishes a world" gains a hermeneutic dimension in Gadamer: Art opens a world and invites us into that world. But this invitation is not one-directional; as we participate, we are transformed. Art is a mode not of knowing the world but of being-in-the-world.

In Gaza there is a "genocide" named by the conscience of humanity. Israel, in all its ugliness, its vileness and its shamelessness, keeps spinning the phrases "self-defense" and "fight against terror." The debate, both in the field of law and in humanity's conscience, is not abstract. The International Court of Justice issued binding provisional measures on the protection of Palestinians. The International Criminal Court advanced the process with grave allegations in the context of war crimes. These are not diplomatic footnotes; they are records entered into the history of humanity.

THE BANALIZATION OF UGLINESS.

But there is something else happening on our screens and increasingly in our lives: The banalization of ugliness. Images of bombardment stream by, and a few hours later another agenda begins. Destruction becomes "content." Human suffering is adapted to the tempo of the algorithm. We might also read Gadamer's objection as beginning here. Earlier, in Truth and Method, he had said this: Truth cannot be captured by a technical method. Understanding is an encounter. What we encounter changes us, or we participate in what we understand.

He says the same of art: The work of art is not an object; it is an event. It asks participation of us.

The crisis we live in today is this: We watch without participating. We look on without bearing witness. And spectatorship turns into a zone of moral comfort.

In Gaza, ugliness is not merely the destruction itself; it is the speed at which the world gets used to it. When the deaths of hundreds of children become "statistics," what dies is not aesthetic sensitivity but conscience. Ugliness is not only the color of blood; it is the indifference of man.

And what has been spilled out into the open with the Epstein case. Pedophilia crimes, elite networks, prestigious circles… And the relations that some of these circles built with the art world. Art galleries, charity gala nights, cultural events. An aesthetic showcase can veil moral darkness. A glittering salon can render a grave crime invisible.

The issue here is not art's complicity in crime. The issue is this: If aesthetics is severed from truth, it can turn into an instrument of legitimation. Not everything that looks beautiful is good. And not everything that is good has to look pleasant.

Gadamer's conception of the "beautiful" becomes radical precisely here. The beautiful may not be what comforts but what disturbs. The beautiful is truth becoming perceptible. Before a work of art, it is not enough to say "How pleasant." The real question is: "What is this saying to me? What does it ask of me?"

In the context of Gaza too the question is this: What do these images tell us? Do they merely confirm our political positions? Or do they dislodge us from our place?

And another hard question: Can we speak of the beauty of resistance?

Yes, but of course always with care. Not by romanticizing destruction. Least of all by unconditionally aestheticizing violence. But there is a beauty in the insistence of the human being to remain human even in the midst of rubble, there is no doubt about that either. There is a beauty in the demand for justice of a mother who has lost her child. There is a beauty in a people's will to say "we will not get used to it." In a person's saying "hasbunallah wa ni'ma al-wakil" despite all the destruction, all the calamity that has befallen him, in his proclaiming the consciousness that what he lives through is ultimately in God's control, there is a magnificent beauty. Because this stance, met with patience in the control and will of God, who is the absolute Beautiful, and with rejection and resistance against the enemies of God, is beauty itself.

THIS BEAUTY IS NOT OF THE KIND OFFERED BY THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY.

It does not comfort. It unsettles us. Because it wants us to take sides. It wants us not to remain silent. It wants us, at least to a human measure, to stand with truth.

Gadamer explains the experience of art with the concept of "play." But this is not a light play. Play has its own rules and draws us into itself. Today a game is also being played on the world stage. But the danger here is this: We choose to remain spectators. Without participating in the game, we merely watch on a screen. Yet real art does not leave the spectator a spectator. It turns him into a participant.

Today ugliness grows not only with bombs but with the distortion of language. "Collateral damage," "operation," "unavoidable loss"… Words turn into an aesthetic curtain covering over reality. As language is aestheticized, pain becomes sterile. Precisely here we need the beautiful's claim to truth.

THE BEAUTIFUL IS NOT AN ORNAMENT. THE BEAUTIFUL IS A CALL.

What is the beautiful against the ugliness in Gaza? A painting? A poem? Yes, but not only that. The beautiful is man's fidelity to truth. It is the courage to say that a child's life is worth more than political calculations. It is the will to stand with the human being, not with power.

Because today we cannot tell art from entertainment, we also confuse the beautiful with the pleasant. The entertainment industry makes us feel good. Real art transforms us. Entertainment makes us forget pain. Art makes pain visible.

This is precisely Gadamer's call: The beautiful may still be defending us. But if we do not defend it, ugliness becomes the norm.

Let us ask the question harshly: Is it a luxury to speak of the beautiful in this age? No. The real luxury is to turn one's back on truth.

Today, as we look at the destruction in Gaza, at the darkness of elite networks, at moral collapses polished with aesthetics, what we need is not more images but a deeper encounter.

The beautiful asks this of us. And perhaps for the first time this loudly.

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* Hans-Georg Gadamer, Güzele Dair, Sanat Üzerine Yazılar, İstanbul: Vadi Yayınları.