'Beauty' is a snare/trap

Weil’s metaphysic sheds light on her aesthetic philosophy, which is primarily Kantian and Platonic. For Weil beauty is a snare (à la Homer) set by God, trapping the soul so that God might enter it. Necessity presents itself not only in gravity, time, and affliction, but also in beauty. The contact of impersonal good with the faculty of sense is beauty; contact of evil with the faculty of sense is ugliness and suffering—both are contact with the real, necessary, and providential.

Because beauty is to be contemplated at a distance and in consent, not consumed through the greedy will, it trains the soul to be detached in the face of something irreducible, and in this sense it is similar to affliction. Both de-center the self and demand a posture of waiting (attente).

Contemplating beauty, then, means transcending the perspective of one’s own project. Because beauty, as external to self, is to be consented to, it implies both that one’s reality is limited and that one does not want to change the object of her/his mode of engagement. 

Furthermore, beauty has an element of the impersonal coming into contact with a person. Real interaction with beauty is decreative. True to this claim, Weil’s aesthetic commitments are reflected in her style: in her sharp prose she scrutinizes her own thought while tending to exclude her own voice and avoid personal references; thus she performs “the linguistic decreation of the self” (Dargan 1999: 7).

Weil is a realist in regard to aesthetics in that she uses the language of being gripped or grasped by beauty, which weaves, as it were, a link among mind, body, world, and universe. Woven through the world, but beyond relying simply on the individual’s mind or senses, beauty, in this linking, lures and engenders awareness of something outside of the self. In paradoxical terms, for Weil, following Kant, the aesthetic experience can be characterized as a disinterested interestedness; against Kant, her telos of such experience is Platonic, namely, to orient the soul to the contemplation of the good. Moreover, for Weil beauty is purposive only because it is derivative of the good, i.e., the order of the world is a function of God

 (i.e., in Kantian terms, beauty is regulative, not constitutive)  beauty serves as a “locus of incommensurability” (Winch 1989: 173) between the fragile contingency of time (change, becoming, death) and an eternal reality.