Panel: THINKING IN OPPOSITES: BEYOND POLARISATION



667.7 - FAITH IN FITTING OPPOSITES: THE AESTHETIC NAVIGATION OF BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS

AUTHORS:
Despain B. (Australian Catholic University ~ Melbourne ~ Australia)
Text:
This paper examines the role of faith in the ways we aesthetically navigate the opposition between beginnings and endings. Following Paul Roubiczek's discussion on the epistemic incommensurability of our external and internal realities, the paper maps our experiences of beginnings and endings onto the interconnected opposites in our knowledge of both external reality, through cause and effect, and internal reality, through means and ends, in order to examine the ways we transform internal ends into external causes. It will be shown that this transformation confuses the division between our external and internal realities and conceals the aesthetic function of faith in our internal navigation of beginnings and endings. Drawing on conceptual resonances between Roubiczek's work and Gillian Rose's notion of the broken middle, I suggest that by reexamining the opposition between beginnings and endings, we may be able to establish a new way of thinking about the place of faith in experiencing the unity of, what Roubiczek calls, primal reality, or, as he alternatively describes it at the end of Thinking in Opposites, the "personal will of God."