truth=beauty?
It is often argued that beauty is entirely subjective because different cultures have different ideas of what is beautiful. My cousin brought this up to me at a dinner party a few years ago. I chewed on this (and the food) for a little while and then it came to me that maybe almost everything around us is beautiful and different people see different groups of this all-beautiful collection. The question goes deeper than this
though. Platonists from the beginning thought circles were perfect and that the "heavens" must therefore move in circles, otherwise everything would be irrational. In the Middle Ages, Aquinas turned from Plato and raised Aristotle unto the altar of the church and society. Nobody has tried harder to argue for God than Aquinas (see: https://aquinasonline.com/aquinas-on-knowing-gods-existence/) His "fourth way" argues for an ontological requirement for perfection at the highest levels of metaphysical reality.
However, he also argues in the Summa Theologica that despite the Trinity being a perfection of the divine nature, it cannot be proven from reason (Aquinas relied on the Bible for this). So my point is that even with a rigorously defended principle that "what is best must exist" (at least in divine realms), this principle for Aquinas had its limitations. So what I want to point out is that it's hard to say "if its beautiful,
it's likely true". Beauty and truth seem to have nothing in common. Yet in another sense the feeling of truth in the mind when we think logically and rationally (using understanding) feels much like the sense of beauty we get from outside ourselves. If truth is primarily (or solely) found in minds, is it simply the beautiful coming to reside in our intellects? Maybe, but this is a sticky question. I find Kant's
philosophical scheme (first two Critiques but especially the third on "judgment") to be very beautiful, but it is rather limiting at the same time. Newton and Plato thought geometry was superior to arithmetic, while Descartes and Hume thought numbering-mathematics was better than spatial mathematics. SO, in conclusion, if there is no criteria for deciding between IDEAS in terms of beauty (i.e. whether one theorem is more beautiful than another), than is the idea that truth and beauty are convertible terms completely useless?? Thanks
though. Platonists from the beginning thought circles were perfect and that the "heavens" must therefore move in circles, otherwise everything would be irrational. In the Middle Ages, Aquinas turned from Plato and raised Aristotle unto the altar of the church and society. Nobody has tried harder to argue for God than Aquinas (see: https://aquinasonline.com/aquinas-on-knowing-gods-existence/) His "fourth way" argues for an ontological requirement for perfection at the highest levels of metaphysical reality.
However, he also argues in the Summa Theologica that despite the Trinity being a perfection of the divine nature, it cannot be proven from reason (Aquinas relied on the Bible for this). So my point is that even with a rigorously defended principle that "what is best must exist" (at least in divine realms), this principle for Aquinas had its limitations. So what I want to point out is that it's hard to say "if its beautiful,
it's likely true". Beauty and truth seem to have nothing in common. Yet in another sense the feeling of truth in the mind when we think logically and rationally (using understanding) feels much like the sense of beauty we get from outside ourselves. If truth is primarily (or solely) found in minds, is it simply the beautiful coming to reside in our intellects? Maybe, but this is a sticky question. I find Kant's
philosophical scheme (first two Critiques but especially the third on "judgment") to be very beautiful, but it is rather limiting at the same time. Newton and Plato thought geometry was superior to arithmetic, while Descartes and Hume thought numbering-mathematics was better than spatial mathematics. SO, in conclusion, if there is no criteria for deciding between IDEAS in terms of beauty (i.e. whether one theorem is more beautiful than another), than is the idea that truth and beauty are convertible terms completely useless?? Thanks
Comments (35)
How can we distinguish these two from each other? I say to do so based on function.
The function of the truth is to bring about conflict. In order for us to disagree or to otherwise engage each other in any way, we must agree first that there is a truth. We bring together our desires and personal experiences and share them in an emotionally rich way. It is the truth which makes this possible. For this reason, the truth must exist independently of the self; only through it can we show that we actually exist.
The function of beauty is to engage our desire. It is a quality of appearance which is not universal. Instead, it is itself artistic, and contains within itself abundant diversity and no maximum. It does not have its own independent existence; it is really the result of our concepts of of objects being activated and our own awareness of our desires being engaged by what we cognize. In fact, beauty is the source of our own inter-subjective recognition of differences between people.
Since these two are so completely and utterly different, I must now consider in which cases your equation can be true. What kind of thing can be both true and beautiful? In order for it to be true, it must have the potential to cause conflict. And in order for it to be beautiful it must be desired, meaning I capture the truth in my concept. What else is this but knowledge of the world?
Plato, Phaedrus, 250d [R. Hackford, Plato's Phaedrus, Library of the Liberal Arts, 1952, p.93
The relation of truth and beauty remained central to Plato and his philosophical descendants. The basic idea is that the philosopher, by dint of reason and the purificatory ascent to truth, has a sublime vision of truth.
But modernity is generally dismissive of Platonism. From the modern perspective, Platonism and classical philosophy generally seem to posit an unchanging truth ike the symetrical pillars you still see at the front of neoclassical buildings. Carved in stone, as the saying has it. Modernity has long since rejected that.
Ironically, the physicist and philosopher of science Sabine Hossenfelder now says that mathematical physics is too impressed with the beauty of mathematical ideas, particularly string theory. IN fact her book on it is titled Lost in Math - How Beauty Leads Physics Astray.
Platonism lives on! Except now we demand a standard of truth which Platonism would never be prepared to meet, namely, that of empirical validation.
I would say in argument against your point of view that truth can also be ugly. Here, I am speaking of realities such as poverty, injustice and suffering. Here, we could say that many wish to turn away from and neglect these aspects of life, but they are real and true for many people on a daily living reality.
Meh. The physicist believes that the best theories are those that are the best tested. Quantum electrodynamics is considered quite ugly, particularly because of renormalization, which Feynman admitted is just a trick. Ultimately, it doesn't matter how beautiful it is, is it right, i.e. does it pass a large number of tests? The notion that theories like QED are dismissed for their ugliness is false.
It's certainly true that "beautiful" theories excite scientists. Typically, a beautiful theory is one that has a) a small number of postulates, b) has uncontroversial (i.e. empirical) postulates, and c) is mathematically or logically elegant, i.e. simple, with small numbers of parameters.
The special theory of relativity, the theory of natural selection, and the thermodynamics are three examples of theories that meet these criteria. Quantum mechanics is an example of one that does not. Nonetheless, while thermodynamics remains useful at a higher level, it is completely derivable from quantum mechanics via statistical mechanics. It's beauty is no barrier to its usurpation.
Be wary of science philosophers pushing interpretations that don't seem to match the facts. As for the slowdown in scientific progress, that's a) overstated and b) misleading. Before modern electromagnetic theory, physics was thought of as basically complete: not much was going on. There then came a flurry of activity that yielded Maxwell's equations, relativity and quantum mechanics. Other philosophers of science have noted that this adheres to a pattern in the progress of physics.
This might answer the puzzle a bit.
[i]Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
/.../
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."[/i]
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn
Secondly, if evolution is true, men who appreciate or are attracted to a woman's curvaceous body should have been selected for and the lineage of men who weren't so inclined would've died out.
Truth tends to be complex, it's hardly ever the straight lines, sharp-cornered polygons we expect and perhaps hope it to be and are more commonly smooth and sinuous i.e. truth is womanish in a manner of speaking. Truth is beautiful, yes, for truth is a woman.
You know what else is sinuous? Tapeworms. Eh.
Mimicry at its best!
Aquinas has an article in the Summa Theologica saying (rather dogmatically) that he knows the sense (out of the 5) which can give a human, in his optimal state, the greatest enjoyment is the eyes (through seeing beauty). One problem I think with saying beauty is objective is that everyone goes around trying to say what is more beautiful than other things. The Middle Ages may have just lacked beautiful music, or at least music that reached the levels of beauty that latter centuries discovered. If we are to say that beauty is objective, maybe that is all we are to say, and not try to delineate "this" or "that" as more or most sublime. Kant thought that beauty was objective but that something (a painting, ect.) could not be proven to be beautiful by any categories. I find Spinoza's views to be sublime (although Hume called them "monstrous"), and yet pantheism would have to be wrong if there is anything truly evil and ugly in the world: if God is all, those things would make God evil and ugly as well as being good (although someone might take up such a position nonetheless). There are so many aesthetics out there, it's hard not to get decision paralysis as we grasp for them (retched humans).
Jordan Peterson has taken a very Western view of tragedy, archetypes, and beauty in saying that Christianity is "true" because the story of Jesus is (allegedly) the "best story that can be told" and since it accords with the harmony of all our archetypes, it must be SO true that it is a "meta-truth" (his word), more true than the reality of the universe. Sam Harris couldn't get Peterson to admit this is "just your opinion man". Anyway, historians like Leopold von Ranke believed that we are confined to judging cultures purely in terms of their own standards. Culture carves us up more deeply than we realize.
I just want to add this quotation here, although (I'm sorry) I do not know who wrote it:
"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth."
I would say most of the times falseness, fakeness, invented theories or invented stories are much more beautiful than the truth.
It is demonstrated for example that fake news spread 6 times faster than truth within social networks.
Fiction is a very successful gendre in art expression (including cinema). Even when a movie tries to tell the truth it is always only based on a true story but not 100% true.
So, taking into account that as Grarth says above ...
Quoting Garth
it looks like beauty doesn't love truth very much.
Beauty is an awareness of harmony between the structures of experience and understanding.
The question is: which structure should adjust in order to achieve this? Kant’s overall view is that understanding, not human experience, is the final arbiter. But he also demonstrated that relational structures of experience have contributed to our rational structures of human understanding (eg. synthetic a priori knowledge).
Kant recognised that human understanding lacked an element of truth in relation to the transcendent nature of human experience - but he saw rational structure as a necessary aspect of human reason, and therefore failed to acknowledge the possibility for relational experience of the sublime to adjust the structures of human understanding, and broaden our perspective of beauty.
Beauty is an experience of the truth we understand, or an understanding of the truth we experience. But it can also be a form of ignorance, isolation or exclusion of the truth we don’t understand, or have yet to experience.
It is generally more useful to look at a specific example of something - a proposition about the world, say or an artwork, for instance and then ponder whether this is true or not, or beautiful or not respectively. For me, truth and beauty are just words which don't have anything more to them except, associations, traditions and usage. The idea of an 'eternal truth' seems to me to be vague and suggests a remnant of Greek philosophy and not something I accept as useful. I totally reject any intrinsic connection between truth and beauty, that's a bit of old fashioned romanticism right there. But I do think being told the truth at the right time can be a beautiful thing
Augustine argued that because we can (so he says) know eternal truth, we must have an immortal soul
Heidegger allegedly responded to this by saying because we know we are mortal we know we cannot know eternal truth
However, the latter thinker did not simply stay in the playground of epistemology but instead reached for the shore of ontology. Kinda like Gulliver's Travels, he stayed on the shore and longed for home. That too is beautiful
Those two quotes from Augustine and Heidegger describe Jordan Peterson's entire project. What they don't do is identify if there is substance behind any transcendent notions of truth or beauty, they are mere claims.
Merely his irrefutable errors.[/quote]
... fictions, fantasies, idols, art(ifact)s ...
:smirk:
Seems to me "beauty" and "truth" are equivalent only (or primarily) as types of symmetry / strange attractor properties:
• the Beautiful property indicates ^attention-symmetry
• the Truth property indicates translation-symmetry
and just to complete the so-called 'transcendental' trinity
• the Good property indicates ^intention-symmetry.
These symmetries, I suspect, function as ideational, or abstract, strange attractors that, perhaps, ready (by filtering-out noise from the signal) the contemplative mind for practical action in one of the (broad) domains of ^aesthetics, logic or ^ethics, respectively. Just a red-eyed guess ...
edit:
^Witty deemed these 'ineffable' (TLP) but I think (scientifically) noncognitive is more apt.
Your trinity seems very Kantian. Good is practical intention, beauty is in rest's attention. Truth is in movement and translation between states. So truth is purely negative in the Hegelian sense. Only the whole, as combining the trinity in movement with stability, is reality
Walt Whitmann and Nietzsche both said "if contradict myself, then so be it". If they had to fit into a religious structure, they probably would have been home in ancient Mongolian worship of animals. There is something human about being at home in "contradiction" because it's better to trust oneself than to listen to "the They" (Heidegger).
"The triad is the form of the completion of all things". Nichomachus of Gerasa (c,100, Greek neo-Pythagorean philosopher and mathematician.)
"The Triad has a special beauty and fairness beyond all numbers, primarily because it is the very first to make actual the potentialities of the Monad." Iamblichus (c. 250-c. 330, Greek Neoplatonic philosopher.)
I don't think these opinions are objective though
A poet especially tries to see the ugly under the perspective of the beautiful. I was wondering if the experience of truth when going logically from A to B is the same experience as recognizing beauty. Hume spoke of reason as an agitation in the mind, but thinking can be fun and it feels good when you find the truth. Is this "finding the truth" a form of feeling beauty? There's been a lot of proposals in this thread about that but I'm still not sure
It does
Talk to you latter
I like poetry when it relates to philosophy. Maybe you can make some connections for us between your poetry and what we discuss on this forum
I like poetry that is about time and space\location
. Truth always leads to beauty, but beauty does not lead necessarily to truth ...
. See, attentively this insight from Lau Tsu -
"True words are rarely elaborate.
Elaborate words are rarely truthful.
Good words are rarely eloquent.
Eloquent words are rarely good.
He who knows is rarely learned.
He who is learned rarely knows.
The wise do not hoard wisdom."
. Milarepa, a poet is not in search of truth. His search is for beauty, and through the search for beauty nobody has ever become enlightened. One can become a great poet, a great painter, a great singer, a great dancer; but on the path of beauty, enlightenment is not possible.
. The seeker of truth, and only the seeker of truth, attains to enlightenment. And this is the miracle of enlightenment that once you have discovered truth, then beauty, the good, and all that is valuable simply become available to you.
. Beauty cannot lead to enlightenment, but enlightenment opens your eyes to all dimensions and all directions.
. Rabindranath was very close to enlightenment, but his search was not for enlightenment – he was searching for the beautiful. And the search for the beautiful, deep down is the search for expressing beauty – in words, in music, in dance, in any kind of creativity. The seeker of beauty is really seeking a vision which he can reproduce in his poetry, in his song, in his painting. Always the search is inner, but the goal is somewhere outside. And that’s the problem for all great creative people: they come to know, but then expression becomes difficult; they come to experience beauty, but how to share it? You may see a rose flower and be suddenly overwhelmed by its beauty, but how to share it? How to express it?
. The concern of the artist is expression; the concern of the seeker is experience. Neither of them is able to express, but because the seeker of truth is totally concerned with experiencing, he comes to enlightenment, and he can die with a smile on his face, with fulfillment, whether he has been able to say something about it or not – that is not his concern, that is not his angst, his anxiety.
. The artist also comes to know what he is seeking, but his problem is that basically, his interest in seeking beauty is for expression – and expression is almost impossible. At the most you can stutter a little bit – all your songs are stutterings of great poets. They look beautiful to you, immensely meaningful and significant, but to the poet… he knows he has failed.
. All artists, either in the East or in the West, have felt an immense failure. They have tried their best, and they have produced great pieces of art – for us they are great pieces of art, but for them they are faraway echoes of their experience. Hence, they die either mad….
. Almost seventy percent of painters, dancers, poets have gone mad. They have made too much effort. They have put too much tension into their being, so that it brought a breakdown, a nervous breakdown. And many of the artists have even committed suicide. The wound of failure became unbearable: to live any longer and to carry the same wound, and feeling again and again… became too difficult, and it was better to destroy oneself. And those who have not gone mad or committed suicide, they have also not died in a blissful way.
. In the East, we have defined the ultimate values as three: satyam, shivam, sundaram. Satyam means truth – that is the highest. The seeker, the mystic follows that path. Then comes shivam: goodness, virtue. The moralist, the saint, the sage – they follow that path. And sundaram means beauty. The poets, the singers, the musicians – they follow that path.
. Those who attain to truth automatically come to know what is good and what is beauty. Those who follow good, neither come to know what is true, nor do they come to know what is beauty. The followers of good – the moralists, the puritans – also never achieve enlightenment. All that they achieve is a repressed personality – very beautiful on the surface, but deep inside very ugly. They have great reputation, honor, respect, but inside they are hollow.
. The people who follow sundaram, beauty, are inside fulfilled, utterly fulfilled, but their misery is that, that is not their aim: just to be fulfilled. They want all that they have experienced to be brought into language, into paintings, into sculpture, into architecture. Hence, even though they have experienced beautiful spaces they remain anxiety-ridden.
. The people who follow beauty are most often not very respectable – not in the same sense as the saints are. They are very natural people, very loving and very lovable, but they don’t have any ego, any idea of holier-than-thou; they remain just simple and ordinary.
. So the people who have become enlightened have never painted, have never made beautiful statues, have never composed music; they have never danced. They have never followed the dictates of the society, they have never followed the conventions of the society; hence most of them have been crucified, poisoned, killed – because people want you to be a puritan, a moralist. In people’s eyes morality is a social value, truth is not. Beauty is for entertainment; they don’t take it seriously.
Great post. In the West the German romantic poets, inspired by Rousseau, were the ones who started saying "follow the heart and beauty and don't worry about all the questions of the head". I feel like in the face of criticism members of religions tend to say the same thing, but that is another topic
I dont know if this is completely accurate, but some people have a more artistic side and often leads to mental illness. People who are too analytical and only seek truth often become mentally ill too. So we have to be careful against generalizations. The middle way is usually preferable, but everyone has to follow their own conscience. My conscience may tell me to do something you think is immoral, but I do not care, because it's my conscience, my business. That's the essence of Western culture