"The beauty of the world so heavy": Reginald Dwayne Betts, Seyla Benhabib, and Hannah Arendt in "The New York Review of Books"

The 24 February 2022 issue of The New York Review of Books juxtaposes Reginald Dwayne Betts's poem "White Peonies" and Seyla Benhabib's review of books by and about Hannah Arendt. Betts writes that "peonies are so / Beautiful they frighten me" and then asks a question: "The beauty of the world so heavy we fear the world / Cannot stand it?" Benhabib discusses Arendt's reading of Kant's "Critique of Judgment" on the same page: "Aesthetic judgments are [...] political because they aim at persuading others by taking their standpoint into account." Betts's aesthetic fear leads him to seek a political "we" grounded in his aesthetic judgment of beauty and the sublime. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 13 February 2022)