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Plato's world, that is to say the Western world, is primarily a world for knowledge. The ability of knowledge to reproduce in the mind what beings are in reality is called truth. Therefore truth is that which is closest to being, whereof it reproduces the traits as faithfully as the image of an object in a mirror. [...] The certainty that this integration of partial truths can always be carried further is the secret of the amazing development of Western science. Yet, admirable as it is, man's science of the universe adds nothing to its reality. [...] What such a philosophy finds difficult to understand, and even admit, is that anything new should be produced at all. There is indeed an intelligible beauty, and it is the highest of all on account of its very intelligibility. The point is that the splendor of truth is specifically different from the beauty of art.
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At the beginning and before everything else there is being. The next best after being is truth, without which being would be for us as if it were not. On the other hand, since being is best, truth already implies the good, the love of which is the love of being. Beauty is added to the other transcendentals as a supererogatory grace, which is like the flowering of being.
The Arts of the Beautiful, Etienne Gilson
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It is by virtue of the beautiful that we are able to acquire a lasting remembrance of the true world. This is the way of philosophy. Plato describes the beautiful as that which shines forth most clearly and draws us to itself, as the very visibility of the ideal. In the beautiful presented in nature and art, we experience this convincing illumination of truth and harmony, which compels the admission: "This is true." The important message that this story [i.e Phaedrus] has to teach is that the essence of the beautiful does not lie in some realm simply opposed to reality. On the contrary, we learn that however unexpected our encounter with beauty may be, it gives us an assurance that the truth does not lie far off and inaccessible to us, but can be encountered in the disorder of reality with all its imperfections, evils, errors, extremes, and fateful confusions. The ontological function of the beautiful is to bridge the chasm between the ideal and the real.
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We could say that the work of art signifies an increase in being.
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Art is only encountered in a form that resists pure conceptualization. Great art shakes us because we are always unprepared and defenseless when exposed to the overpowering impact of a compelling work. Thus the essence of the symbolic lies precisely in the fact that it is not related to an ultimate meaning that could be recuperated in intellectual terms. The symbol preserves its meaning within itself.
The Relevance of the Beautiful, Hans-Georg Gadamer
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[W]ithin the narrative of Western philosophy, with its myth of independent reason and the power of mind to transcend the limits of language and determine the limits of possible knowledge by the agency of unaided reason, metaphysical speculation (as a purely deductive enterprise of rational reflection) proves finally to be a contradiction in terms of that narrative. [...] To put the matter differently, the unity of metaphysics is a convenient fiction, a way to exclude voices, other ways of naming the difference of being from beings or the relation of the one to the many. [...] Theology is not an art that abstracts from history toward eternity, from facts toward principles, but one that -- under pressure of the history it is called upon to interpret -- finds the sphere of its narrative expanding into ever greater dimensions of the revealed, crossing the line between the creaturely and the divine (and so that between the ontic and the ontological) because that line is already crossed, not symbolically but in fact, in the concrete person and history of Jesus.
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The Christian understanding of beauty is analogical, in two senses: in the simple analytic sense, that whatever "beauty" means is grasped only by analogy, by constant exposure to countless instances of its advent, and through constant and continuous revision; and in the more radically ontological sense, that beauty is not some property discretely inherent in particular objects, but indwells the analogical relationship with all things, each to the other, as a measure of the dynamism of their involvement with one another. The Christian use of the word "beauty" refers most properly to a relationship of donation and transfiguration, a handing over and return of the riches of being.
The Beauty of the Infinite, David Bentley Hart
In response to a recent informal discussion concerning the famous "
Ode on a Grecian Urn," I post these thoughts as a prompt for thinking about the nature of poetry and its response to the world. That is, can we equate truth and beauty?
21 Comments:
Can we equate the air and breathing?
Ah. An essentially metaphorical response. Leaning a little toward Gadamer?
Well, I think he's inescapable. But...
Let me ask you, then, what you mean by "truth" and by "beauty." To me to ask the question about their relationship seems nearly nonsensical. Beauty is true, and the truth is often beautiful, but they concern themselves with entirely different questions, in my experience. Unless we assign them some sort of moral value that neither actually possess. But then we're no longer talking about either, really.
I don't believe they are entirely different questions. Gilson is right in stating that the question of being determines all questions of truth and beauty. The philosophical tradition that culminates in Kant favored discourse that discussed being in terms of truth. After Nietzsche's "knowledge is power," philosophy slowly began to realize that a definitive grasp of the truth is not the same thing as a definitive grasp of being itself. To make a theological example, Christ cannot be reduced to the Creed. According to Gadamer, our perception of the truth is always situated in a particular context. As human beings in the world we cannot overcome this fact, but we can do much to expand our horizons.
It is often beauty alone that makes this expansion occur. Gadamer likes the example of the Eucharist. Understood as the real presence of Christ, the symbol carries its own reality that cannot be grasped simply as an intellectual concept. It isn't a geometric proof. It is a manifestation of the beautiful, a bridge from the ideal to the real.
However, as your first post implies, it is very difficult to think of one without the other. And in the end, I think we agree that these distinctions largely collapse as we approach Being itself.
But I am curious whether you think Keats is being merely romantic.
No, I don't think we do agree. Probably because I don't think Gilson has any good reason to say what he's saying (he certainly doesn't give one that I can see), even if his magnificent imprecision would make things so much easier. An issue of unexamined warrants, I'd say. Let me explain.
I wouldn't say that "being" and "truth" and "beauty" are asking the same questions -- and they are primarily a mode of questions, not answers. They are not even inherently related questions, so they can't collapse into each other.
Also, I think in citing Plato you might be referring to something that he did not differentiate, but that needs to be usefully differentiated for this kind of discourse, i.e. the reaction to beauty differs from the experience of the sublime; and the sublime is not some kind of hyper-experience of beauty, even if something that is beautiful can be sublime. It's a different question altogether, just with a lot of intersects in our experience (the standards of which we tend to trap in the popular misapprehension of Kant).
Along those lines, I think the Eucharistic example is misleading in talking about beauty. It is not "a manifestation of the beautiful" because the beautiful does not exist beyond that which is beautiful (note: I'm not a Platonist). It is not, to circumvent the next logical step, a manifestation of the truth either, because likewise the Truth does not exist beyond that which is true. Truth and beauty cannot "manifest" themselves because there is no "beyond" in that sense of the word. (Note that I don't say there isn't something spiritual and true; I just don't think it's beyond the azure blue; I think it's here.) In the end, either a thing is beautiful, or it is not. Either a thing is true, or it is not.
(I realize we don't like hearing that said, but I don't mean it rhetorically, like we're used to hearing it. I don't moralize any of those things, by the way, nor do I ethicize them, nor do I assign them inherent value, nor do I ignore that our interpretations of our conclusions about them are skewed by our experience and the refinement, or not, of our apprehensive skills, so the predictable knee-jerk reaction pointing at subjectivity or at shades of gray is not a useful observation here. Confusion is no vindicator. Beauty, for instance, is frequently apprehended by comparison, unlike the sublime, and truth is frequently inferred by its absence, whereas beauty cannot be, and so on -- so, as I said, they do not ask similar questions and do not work, as vehicles of inquiry and apprehension, in similar ways or for that matter towards similar ends.)
Moreover, transcendence means a state that is always and that is total and that is now, not one that by its nature can only occasionally be glimpsed (even if we may only occasionally glimpse it ourselves, but then the insufficiency lies with us). The spiritual and the physical are not separate; there need not be a bridge from the real to the ideal because either both are true, in which case they are nearly one and the same, inextricably fused, or the ideal (which, by the way, has no real existence outside that which already exists here, in reality) is maybe a nice thought, but false or incomplete and certainly not in any sense of the word, true. The same goes for "Being Itself". No such thing, or only insofar as it's a tangent in our limited (self-)perception.
I think what inspires us to seek the kind of transcendence that seems implied by the argument you seem to be outlining is NOT the absence of the transcendent in the "normal" real, but rather our choice not to encounter it, or our inability to encounter it, or, mostly, both.
So no, I don't think those distinctions can possibly collapse.
As to the second question, I'm not sure what you mean by Keats being "merely Romantic". I'd really like to understand what you're getting at. Would you please specify?
OK. Let me back up and state a couple of my presuppositions:
The question of being or existence is the central concern of the contemplative life.
This question has been historically understood in terms of the true, the good, and the beautiful. All of these modes of inquiry are after what simply is in some way or another.
In terms of truth, the question looks something like: What is x?
In terms of the good: what ought to be my response to x?
In terms of the beautiful: How can I fully manifest x to human experience?
Now I am less certain about this, but it seems that when one is certain that all that is emanates from God, one produces things like Michelangelo's Pieta; when one is uncertain of nearly everything, one produces things like Rothko's paintings.
But what is striking about both the Pieta and Rothko is that the works have their own reality. They can be interpreted on their own terms, just as any experience in life. This is what I think that Gadamer means when he claims that "It is by virtue of the beautiful that we are able to acquire a lasting remembrance of the true world." The work of art, the symbol as symbol, gives us a limited but significant access to being itself that cannot be reproduced in any other terms, especially not intellectual or linguistic terms. The Pieta is not simply "devotion;" and any Rothko is not simply "existentialism."
Moreover, in stark contrast to Plato's understanding of being, which was something essentially abstracted and separate from the world we inhabit, the work of art celebrates being as we find it in the world. When that celebration is done well (i.e. clearly tied to being in important ways) we call it beautiful.
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Having said that, I'll try to respond to your questions directly on the morrow. Hope you're doing well.
Thanks for that. It clarifies the difference in our positions, I think, and I hope that in spite of them we might have a fruitful conversation.
Here is the fundamental difference, probably:
You say, In terms of truth, the question looks something like: What is x?
I say, In terms of truth, the question looks something like this: Is this x?
You say, In terms of the good: what ought to be my response to x?
I say, In terms of the good: Is this x? ("What ought to be..." is a question of ethics, which has nothing to do with the good per se).
You say, In terms of the beautiful: How can I fully manifest x to human experience?
I say, In terms of the beautiful: Is this x?
You say, The question of being or existence is the central concern of the contemplative life.
I say, we are and we know we are, thus the question of being or existence is only the concern of contemplative life if we're infatuated with semantics -- whereas the concern with beauty is not, because we do not know whether we are beautiful.
Also, I'd love to hear you give your rationale for making this claim: "This question has been historically understood in terms of the true, the good, and the beautiful." Because I think that would be nice, but it's not actually true, historically.
Moreover, I think we might differ in that your thinking seems to me to imply a search/assumption for/about a certain coherence/teleology whereas I think mine suggests an interplay that may or may not be devoid of purpose. Beauty, for instance, does not inherently imply meaning beyond beauty itself.
This is exciting.
First, I don't see how our statements we are and we know we are and the question of being or existence is the central concern of the contemplative life are incompatible. Temporally, yours certainly comes first and is in some fundamental sense primary. All I mean by my statement is this: in knowing that fact, the fact that i am, what is my response? I am taking philosophy at its etymological root here. What is the love of wisdom?
Investigations of the true, the good, and the beautiful should all be in service of this one end, and throughout much of classical and medieval philosophy they were. It is only after the modern turn, when the scholastic tradition is dismissed, that philosophy begins to lose sight of these things. Seeking mathematical certainty, the central questions become largely epistemological.
I want also to distinguish the sublime from the beautiful. The experience of the numinous in the Bible is nearly always an awful experience of terror. However, an artful depiction of these experiences are often strikingly beautiful. (At least for now) I follow Gadamer in saying that my experience of the beautiful opens me up to the absolute reality of such an experience in a way that is invaluable and irreplaceable. That is, giving an account, a logos, of experience does not adequately encompass the being of that experience. This is precisely the failing of most of modern philosophy. In an effort to give a definitive account of how one comes to truth, they have lost the real world of day to day experience. Reading Kant is like shutting oneself away in a classroom to do proofs on a blackboard.
Now I agree that the beautiful does not exist beyond what is beautiful (I am no Platonist either). But I am saying that understanding why something is beautiful is a very important philosophical task because, like the impulse to give an account, it is inherently a response to what is. The comprehensive example might be epic poetry. By presenting a cosmos, the poet is showing us something about the world. When we respond that is so beautiful it seems we are also saying that is true.
As you suggested, I am approaching this question from a strong teleological point of view. I believe that the world is a whole. That is the theological significance of the doctrine of creation. It says that everything in the world was made for some end. It also implies that we can make sense of much of it.
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This is exciting for me too. I apologize for my delay. Melody and I ran several errands yesterday.
We are homeowners now. And that's both true and beautiful. Also expensive.
I concur. Congratulations.
Good discussion. I don't feel quite adequate to the task of fully entering the fray, but I will throw a few points in that I think worth considering.
I would argue that beauty does in fact have a 'beyond,' or otherwise there would be no need for either Michaelangelo or Rothko. Images themselves point to something else, but in the best art this pointing also points beyond the thing pointed at (otherwise, why create images at all? - everything is already there). I think this might be how we distinguish those artists who are truly beautiful from those who have simply mastered a technique but who put no soul into their creations. Those on the first hand are able to express something beyond the physical, while those on the second hand lock the viewer in to the limitations of their own consciousness. The beautiful is expansive in the sense that our soul is enlarged for having encountered it; and the non-beautiful lacks this dimension.
What I'm trying to say (I think) is that 'beyond the azure blue' is of course a very small way of saying something true: that the Eucharist is beautiful in the sense that it contains the presence of something beyond (God) that wasn't present before. The beautiful is momentary: an intersection of the timeless with time (Eliot, Augustine, and Dante all know about this - it is the 'point,' Dante's 'punto' at which things begin to move and the infinite flows into the finite). In the Roman Catholic Easter Vigil Service they speak of the 'night when heaven meets earth' - whether we want to call it the ideal or heaven or the beyond, we are still talking about something that is not 'here' in that it is always attainable, always available to us. That's why we have liturgies: the are the creation of ritual space and time that invites us into that 'beyond.' That beyond is the source of the beautiful, the good and the true - which is why though they have different questions attached to them they are all ultimately concerned with being.
I hope this is not to rambling and unconnected (and feel free to say, "Yes it is" and ask for clarification). I'll leave off with an example from the Metaphysics that I wrote about recently: on the very last page of the work Aristotle is concerned with the Pythagorean claim that numbers are the sources and causes, the 'substance' of everything. In contesting this claim he says that the Pythagoreans, though they are wrong about numbers as the sources, do notice something true, which is, goodness does belong to number, and the properties of number that entrance the Pythagoreans (the squares and solids and other types of number and ratio, which astounded the ancients with their order and harmony) belong 'in the column of the beautiful' (the old Oxford UP translation). That is, these objects are both beautiful and good - in Greek, 'kalon' as Everett has explicated in a previous post. It seems to me that these two things are interconnected in some way, and that truth is a recognition of their presence in reality.
I'm sorry I haven't been more thorough in getting back to this. There's a lot of "ought" that's entered this conversation even though the use of beauty and beauty itself are not the same thing (the first falls into the domain of rhetoric) and, with Kelly's comment, sentimetality (which makes a nice example for my earlier point, really, about semantics and about emotional value being confused with beauty -- but I have the feeling Kelly would find that patronizing), and now, with Taylor, a lot of theological thinking that goes into theories of performativity and, once again, the rhetorical uses of beauty and some major hermeneutical issues, and I'm trying to come up with a way to talk about this without it being a three thousand word essay.
Give me another day or two.
I do find it patronizing, but have only just read it. Consider me as having been mad for several days.
Thought so. Sorry. Feel free to matronize me back...
I'd rather patronize you back in person. It seems to me that this type of conversation (particularly Everett and Jonathan's parts of it) would work best face to face. How about in New Hampshire, say, September 8?
Ok, I've been quite busy planning a wedding and I haven't had much time for anything else, but I'll jump in to the fray.
1: I wrote a paper about this once for my Visual Aesthetics class. My thoughts have changed considerably since, but the main idea of my paper was that a piece of art has performed it's duty if it deepens my understanding of truth and beauty. I have since come to believe that beauty is subjective, so the revised idea would be that art has done its job if it helps me understand truth.
2: I believe that the grotesque can be as powerful an illuminator as beauty when it comes to revealing truth. Ex. "A Streetcar named Desire" : Stanley and Stella have a screwed up grotesque relationship, this illuminates the truth that proper love can't be self-serving.
3: Necessarily I don't have a full realization of what truth is because if I did I wouldn't need it to be revealed to me.
4. It is possible that I might think that truth has been illuminated only to find out later that it was in fact a false truth.
Ex. At one point in my life I thought it was a truth that non C of C people weren't Christians and were going to hell.
Those are just a few of my thoughts.
One more thing: Everett, I believe that Rothko's paintings and Michelangelo's Pieta are the same (not all of Michelangelo's works ar e the same). Rothko was "uncertain of nearly everything" and I believe that Mary was "uncertain of nearly everything" at the point in time the Pieta represents. Her first born son, whom she possibly believed was the son of G-d, who was supposed to be King, had succumbed to death. Her whole life at that momemnt had to seem pretty uncertain. I guess I'm saying that instead of having their own realities they have very similar realities.
Now that I've started in on this discussion I'm getting back into "I used to want to be an art critic as career" mode. It seems that Everett and Taylor are expressing a Neo-Platonic aesthetic of the Ideal in conjunction with the Christian notion that what G-d made is good and beautiful. This is a view (that I think has considerable merit even though I don't completely agree with it) that was quite popular in the medieval Church. It is a view of Transcendental Beauty that perhaps was most fully realized by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in his work "The Divine Names" where he states:
"But the Superessential Beautiful is called 'Beauty' because of that quality which It imparts to all things severally according to their nature, and because It is the cause of the harmony and splendour in all things, flashing forth upon them all, like light, the beautifying communication of Its originating ray: and because It summons all things to fare unto Itself (from whence It hath the name of 'Fairness'), and because It draws all things together in a state of mutual interpenetration." (translator and edition provided on request)
I think that you both would be quite fascinated (if you haven't already read it") by Umberto Eco's scholarly work "Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages"
I think that Jonathan (I could be way off base about Jonathan) and I perhaps take more of our cues from Heidegger's concept of art, truth, and being. I, for one, agree with the following statement by Heidegger concerning art and truth from his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art.”
“In the work [of art], the happening of truth is at work and, indeed, at work according to the manner of a work. Accordingly the nature of art was defined to begin with as the setting-into-work of truth. Yet this definition is intentionally ambiguous. It says on the one hand: art is the fixing in place of a self-establishing truth in the figure. This happens in creation as the bringing forth of the unconcealedness of what is. Setting-into-work, however, also means: the bringing of work-being into movement and happening. This happens as preservation. Thus art is: the creative preserving of truth in the work. Art then is the becoming and happening of truth. Does truth, then, arise out of nothing? It does indeed if by nothing is meant the mere not of that which is, and if we here think of that which is as an object present in the ordinary way, which thereafter comes to light and is challenged by the existence of the work as only presumptively a true being. Rather, the opening up of the Open, and the clearing of what is, happens only as the openness is projected, sketched out, that makes its advent in thrownness (Geworfenheit).”
Wikipedia has an okay overview of the essay, but I imagine those of you with access to online journals and articles could scrounge up a copy fairly quickly (provided you’re not too busy). Let me know what you guys think.
p.s. I've always thought that Gadamer took more cues from Plato and Aristotle than from his teacher Heidegger. Of course I could be wrong.
I'd never heard of David Bentley Hart, but he looks to be quite an interesting person. Once Taylor is baptized I fully expect him to have the sorts of connections in the Eastern church he currently has in the c of c, so perhaps Taylor could get Hart to comment on our blog.
As for Gilson, I read "G-d and Philosophy" and "The Arts of the Beautiful" but Thomism is soooo 1250. Just kidding. If you can work through it Eco's "The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas" is quite good.
One more thing: I would be interested in knowing where we individually fall on the T - F spectrum of the Meyer Briggs Personality test. I've never put much trust in personality tests but I know that the Meyer Briggs test sure pegged me. I'm an INTP and I lean really hard to the T side. I think that some of our differences regarding the experience of art can probably be traced to personality differences more than anything else.
Kelly, only my dad gets to patronize me... sorry.
I do think Steven's point about personalities may have some merit... I test as an INTJ, which is pretty accurate. I'm pretty sure you guys, Everett, Taylor, and Kelly, are all Fs. I wouldn't overvalue that kind of thing, but it probably is an indication why with you two, Everett and Taylor, the emphasis seems to be on (if not necessarily divine) revelation and with Kelly on experience-as-intuited-feeling (which is another cypher for revelation), whereas I think Steven and I come down more on the side of creation and of experience-as-dialogue. It seems to me that "Feelers" tend to concentrate more on the act of reception and its meaning (thus Kant is such an obstacle to them) and "Thinkers" tend to concentrate more on the fact of reception and its consequences (which is why we tend to exclude the discussion about the sentimental aspects of the experience, except as consequences).
That's my first thought for the day.
OK, let’s start this second thought with a bit of a recap.
Everett, apart from the proto-Cartesian point in the first paragraph, about awareness and being, which I heartily reject, I question the assumptions you make when you say, “What is the love of wisdom? Investigations of the true, the good, and the beautiful should all be in service of this one end.” Whither this ought? Since sophia here quickly and quite intentionally becomes hagia, that line of inquiry reduces investigations of the true, the good, and the beautiful to subsets of morality, which they are decidedly not. They have neither a deductive nor an inductive relationship to each other – not as a whole, and not as parts.
In and of themselves, truth, goodness, and beauty are amoral, at least in the sense that we currently perceive morality. The only two things that lend them the currently prevalent sense of morality is a) either intent or its use for ethics, which is not concerned with truth, goodness, or beauty, but rather with the negotiation between life and one’s conscience; and b) that which issues from the Divine. But just because truth, goodness, or beauty issue from the divine in the sense that everything in some way issues from the divine, it is inaccurate to assume that they are particularly privileged as portals to the divine. In any way that we can meaningfully apprehend, God is neither true, nor good, nor beautiful, nor moral – those categories do not apply to Him, at least not in the ideal sense that you seem to allude to, or at least not more than any other categories do.
To privilege this troika as wise over other categories is to not give reality its due, where falsehood, evil, and ugliness are just as much windows into the mind of God as their perceived opposites, and indeed Satan himself can be both the most beautiful of creatures and false. Morality can be beautiful, as can goodness, and as can truth, but beauty does not have to be good or truthful. It would behoove us not to attach cosmogonies of the Fall to discussions that are not particularly concerned with (or for that matter, the subject of) that particular narrative. Morality and meaning are not co-inherent. Co-incidence does not demand shared essences, to use that brittle trope. Consequently, just because beauty is not inherently morally meaningful does not mean that it is not meaningful at all.
Nor do I find the characterization of modern thought as primarily a turn towards mathematical certainty fair, particularly as it applies to aesthetics. The epistemological question and a desire for mathematical certainty have little in common, particularly after Hume – certain Cambridge logicians aside – and most certainly not since Wittgenstein.
When you say that “I follow Gadamer in saying that my experience of the beautiful opens me up to the absolute reality of such an experience in a way that is invaluable and irreplaceable,” I have to logically follow up with a request for an example. What is this absolute reality, other than our experience of something that surpasses our capacities of apprehension and articulation? How, except in the interplay of our desires and our imagination, does that reality differ from other experiences that similar surpass our capacities – like, say certain parts of the light spectrum that bees can see but we cannot? Moreover, in how many cases are these experiences not reduceable to sentimental preferences for a particular emotion that we have come to associate with the experience – as, for example, the romantic sense we indulge in when we experience a sunset or a striking insight into someone we love, and whom we in that moment label beautiful, by which we mean pleasurable? Yet, these things, which we describe as beautiful in common usage, are not necessarily beautiful – they are, actually, merely pleasant, even if we would like to make them more authoritative in our experience by assigning them more significance than that – a falsifying, if useful, and thus often ultimately “good”, impulse. And pleasure, likewise, has no necessary relationship to goodness, truth, or beauty.
Accordingly, as your example with the epic, “when we respond ‘that is so beautiful’ it seems we are also saying ‘that is true’” – indeed. But at the very least commingled with that response is also ‘I wish that were true’ and ‘I hope that is true’ because ‘It would be useful to me if that were true so that I can explain and justify myself to myself.’ Thus the heroic epics of the ancients and, say, the apocalyptic epics we find in certain Judeo-Christian texts serve primarily and quite deliberately as fantastic epic – not as an experience of truth, goodness, or beauty, but as rhetorically useful conveyors of identity, self-justification, and the sentiment of hope or inspiration, without even an attempt to correlate to the lived reality of the artist or of the audience. The epics’ relative merits as truthful, good, or beautiful merely become an envelope for that primary intent, an intent that then renders the envelope irrelevant, even if that envelope quite knowingly confuses packaging and content. There are no realms of gold dripping through the quill of the authors here – merely from them, as suspensions of disbelief, as ‘would that’ or ‘ought’ rather than ‘is.’
The same, Taylor, goes for icon-painters, no matter what their intent while they paint.
(I’ll skip the bit about the doctrine of creation, Everett, though I’d be curious how you arrived at your particular proclamation about its ends.)
I think Steven has sufficiently addressed Taylor’s point about Michelangelo and Rothko, though I’d like to interrogate the line “Images themselves point to something else, but in the best art this pointing also points beyond the thing pointed at (otherwise, why create images at all? - everything is already there).” That is possibly true, but it’s a reversal of question and conclusion. The warrant for that question is the inquiry, “Why create images at all?” The offered answer – that they must point beyond the thing pointed at – is just one of many possible answers to that question, and not necessarily the most obvious one.
And because I will insist on not metaphysicalizing this discussion unnecessarily, at least at my end, I think I can also skip the bits about the soul (what is that, by the by?) being enlargened (how so?) by an encounter with beauty. This strikes me as a pronounced giving in to the rhetorical intent of the Romantic narrative about the utility of beauty, and little more. I consider that description more likely to be an observation that beauty can cause exquisite pleasure, which we then tend to contextualize however we desire or are conditioned to desire. I’m not being cynical here, I’m merely noting that even atheists experience the great sense of beauty Taylor mentions, and their experience isn’t necessarily impoverished just because they contextualize it non-religiously.
Finally, as a staunch anti-Platonist and pre-metaphysician, I frankly and emphatically reject the division between the “here” and the “other” upon which Taylor pivots his discussion of the Eucharist – as does the Bible, by the way, especially the Hebrew parts, Jesus, and most of Paul. But that is a theological discussion, and better left for another time. I do point to my first responses to Everett, though, about its implications.
The mention of Aristotle is interesting, but in order to engage it fully, we’d have to give a go at the semantic restrictions of ‘kalon’. After all, we’re not bound by the Greek language entirely. But even so, I’d submit that what Aristotle observes about the symmetries and rhythms of numbers is not really a metaphysical observation. Like Taylor indicates, it’s an aesthetic judgment – one that the successful execution of patterns always triggers in humans: namely, what as a craftsman or as an observer of craftsmanship we would contemporarily evaluate as 'a well-executed piece,' and ‘good’ only in that regard, and not necessarily in any other.
Otherwise, I’m with Steven and Heidegger.
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