The operating mystery is what truth is all about
Even people who don’t read much poetry tend to be familiar with the lines that conclude Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn”:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
I suspect most readers think of this as poetic hyperbole, charming enough in its way, but hardly to be taken seriously as a philosophical proposition. After all, what it is proposing is that beauty and truth are convertible, and while it may be that what is beautiful is necessarily also true, it seems a stretch to suggest that what is true is necessarily beautiful. But I think this is because we tend to confuse fact with truth.
It is a fact that the Civil War took place. But to call that war an example of truth seems somehow inappropriate. And when something purported to be a fact turns out not to be one, the falsification that has taken place is itself true
In other words, just because something is true doesn’t mean that it can be taken as representing truth. Truth, fundamentally, refers to some bedrock sense underlying and encompassing things. One reason the fact of the Civil War cannot be equated with truth in this sense is the sheer, overwhelming ugliness of it all, the utter absence of beauty. To be sure, things took place during the war, as in every war — acts of heroism and sacrifice — that can be thought of as beautiful. But not the war itself.
Beauty itself, of course, isn’t always pretty, either. Laocoön is among the greatest of sculptures, but what it depicts is horrifying. The Greek tragedies are among the most beautiful works of literature. But they remain tragedies. Nothing pretty about Oedipus’ gouged-out eyes.
What Keats was getting at, I think, was something akin to what physicists mean when they talk of equations or hypotheses as being “elegant.” Rationalists insist that reason is the primary and decisive factor in arriving at truth. But this has long seemed to me to be slightly dotty, if only because it runs counter to experience. You can have all the known facts down in place as a sound basis for well-crafted arguments, and yet … you don’t feel quite convinced. You have a gnawing suspicion that something has been left out, or overlooked, or misunderstood. These suspicions prompt you to take a fresh look at the problem and, lo and behold, everything suddenly falls into place and you just know you’ve got it at last — and it isn’t as you had reasoned it to be. That falling into place happens because you have grasped the aesthetic component.
To doubt reason’s primacy is not by any means to advocate irrationalism. Reason is an essential tool of human life. But precisely because it is a tool, it can only be used for certain things — a wide range of things, to be sure, but nonetheless distinctly limited in number. Reason understands things solely in terms of itself. It factors out large swaths of life as we actually experience it, namely, emotion and sensation. Oh, it takes them into account for sure, may even grant them a degree of importance, but dismisses out of hand any notion that they play a significant role in understanding.
Reason does not feel. It sees nothing, hears nothing, touches nothing, paints no pictures, tells no tales, sings no songs, though it does play a part in the construction of such things. Emotion and sensation are, in their way, just as limited as reason. By themselves these faculties can only apprehend a part of truth. Each offers only a single dimension of it, and from one particular angle.
The faculty of human consciousness that enables us to put them together is imagination. Thomas Aquinas listed three primary qualities for beauty: integrity, proportion, and clarity. Reason, sensation and emotion in consort, choreographed by the imagination, enable us to know things and persons — not merely figure them out — in terms of their integrity, proportion, and clarity. This is to encounter what Aquinas calls splendor formae, radiance of form, form in this case meaning, as Jacques Maritain puts it, “the principle which constitutes the proper perfection of all that is, which constitutes and achieves things in their essences and qualities, which is, finally, if one may so put it, the ontological secret that they bear within them, their spiritual being, their operating mystery.”
That operating mystery is what truth is all about.
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I am reminded of Ralph Ebner’s lovely little book titled “God Present As Mystery,” It’s one of the best evocations and descriptions of the Mystery, which is beyond what reason can understand. It gives me a sense of what God really is, along with Meister Eckhart’s sayings, and I actually take some solace in the lack of our ability to encompass or limit Mystery. There are mysteries that abound in daily life, and some of them seem miraculous in context. None of the traditional or classical images of God work for me; I left that behind a long time ago. But Mystery is something I can relate to.
An elegant essay, Frank.
I very much like (and I think Keats would also like) your well-drawn distinction between that which is true and that which is truth. Like you, I wonder if we can ever fully apprehend that which is truth (and beauty) in the here and now, or do we now have only the slightest occasional glimpses that are limited by our earth-bound perceptions (unless we are given the gift common to mystics). And so we wait until it is perhaps fully revealed–someday.
Well done!