Beauty is a kind of ambivalence with no absolute standard. Truth may be the same way in the sense that there is not a determinate algorithm for finding what is true in general.

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?

I think the equality of beauty and truth belongs very much to the Platonic idiom.

Now beauty [κάλλος], as we said, shone bright among those visions, and in this world below we apprehend it through the clearest of our senses, clear and resplendent. For sight is the keenest of the physical senses, though wisdom [φρόνησις] is not seen by it -- how passionate would be our desire for it, if such a clear image of wisdom were granted as would come through sight -- and the same is true of the other beloved objects; but beauty alone has this privilege [μοῖρα], to be most clearly seen and most lovely of them all.

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.

Whether pondering black holes or predicting discoveries at CERN, physicists believe the best theories are beautiful, natural, and elegant, and this standard separates popular theories from disposable ones. This is why, Sabine Hossenfelder argues, we have not seen a major breakthrough in the foundations of physics for more than four decades.

The belief in beauty has become so dogmatic that it now conflicts with scientific objectivity: observation has been unable to confirm mindboggling theories, like supersymmetry or grand unification, invented by physicists based on aesthetic criteria. Worse, these "too good to not be true" theories are actually untestable and they have left the field in a cul-de-sac. To escape, physicists must rethink their methods. Only by embracing reality as it is can science discover the truth.

Platonism lives on! Except now we demand a standard of truth which Platonism would never be prepared to meet, namely, that of empirical validation.

Beauty and truth are entirely based on the perspective of the one beholding them. My beauty and truth is different than those around me. Similarly, Heaven (if one accepts such as a concept) must also be individualized, as one's Heaven will be another's Hell.

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.

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.

Whether pondering black holes or predicting discoveries at CERN, physicists believe the best theories are beautiful, natural, and elegant, and this standard separates popular theories from disposable ones. This is why, Sabine Hossenfelder argues, we have not seen a major breakthrough in the foundations of physics for more than four decades. — Wayfarer

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.

Why did Keats' poem attain such a status in popular culture?
This might answer the puzzle a bit.


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."


https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn

Firstly, I find the notion of beauty to be a masculine perception of womanhood. Ancient cultures seem to identify beauty with the female form as is evidenced by the many "goddesses" of beauty.

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.

sinuous — TheMadFool

You know what else is sinuous? Tapeworms. Eh.

You know what else is sinuous? Tapeworms. Eh. — baker

Mimicry at its best!

"For sight is the keenest of the physical senses" Plato (thanks Wayfarer!)

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."

:up:

Let me put another perspective.
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 ...

Since these two are so completely and utterly different — Garth

it looks like beauty doesn't love truth very much.

In a biological sense, fitness = beauty.

I would argue that anything judged ‘not beautiful’ lacks an element of truth in the relation between our experience and our understanding of it - where we attribute this lack entirely to the ‘objects’ or ‘categories’ of our experience, and uphold the existing structures of our understanding, however limited.

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.

Beauty and truth are words we use to describe particular things. Discussing the words truth or beauty in isolation, (in themselves so to speak), is usually circular and vague and unrewarding. What is truth? Who knows? Beauty? Ditto. We have a range of theories, epistemologies and/or metaphysical views to choose from.

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.

What are man's truths ultimately?
Merely his irrefutable errors. — Nietzsche

... 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).

I found these interesting quotes today:

"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

Truth is a property of statements. Beauty isn't. They are different things.

Hey Gregory. As a poet I'm inclined to say that there's beauty in truth and truth in beauty. But take for example the Holocaust. The events of the Holocaust are truth, yet it's hard to describe them as beautiful. At the same time, some pathological liars can be described as physically attractive. Which makes them so incredibly dangerous. So I'd argue truth is not beauty

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

Well, as it happens I'm also a chess player. As a chess player you are taught not to go for beauty but for logic. Going logically from A to B in chess often produces a good result. We don't call that beauty nor truth. We call that skill. I'm speaking from my own experience because I don't know that much about classical philosophy. I hope this answer helps you

The

It does

great. Going to end the conversation for tonight. Nice talking to you

The

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

Sure. Can you be a little more specific?

I like poetry that is about time and space\location