Beauty and Truth

[billcu1]

I believe that Beauty of whatever. Be it for example a member of the opposite sex. Is an outward expression of inner truth. Is this backed up by the philosophers? People seem to confuse beauty and sex by sexualizing everything.

Make any sense?

Bill

 

[bisco]

why isn’t everything beautiful, is it my attitude?

 

[billcu1]

why isn’t everything beautiful, is it my attitude?

Perhaps. Perhaps we’re just blind. I don’t believe in “ugliness”. Just lack of beauty. Beauty is developing. I haven’t been able to find any really good sources of aesthetics.

Bill

 

[bobballen_18]

I’m not a philosopher…I’m just chiming in because I think this is interesting and I might want to follow along.

I don’t even know how to define beauty. When I think of beauty I think of the beauty of God’s creation. So off the top of my head I would say that attitude and one’s state in life do have something to do with recognizing beauty. I can’t say “everything” off the top of my head, but I would say that “mostly every” created thing that we can see has in it some degree of beauty, in the sense that it reflects the order of God’s creation. So whether or not we recognize beauty in something very well may be affected by our attitude or our beliefs.

I have always heard that Truth, Goodness, and Beauty are the three transcendentals - if so, then Beauty is objective, and as we see our society’s view of Truth (that there is not really any truth, it’s subjective), many have the same view towards Beauty. In other words, similar to how some people today are not aware of Truth due to their ignorance/attitude/whatever, the same applies to Beauty.

 

[billcu1]

I’m not a philosopher…I’m just chiming in because I think this is interesting and I might want to follow along.

I don’t even know how to define beauty. When I think of beauty I think of the beauty of God’s creation. So off the top of my head I would say that attitude and one’s state in life do have something to do with recognizing beauty. I can’t say “everything” off the top of my head, but I would say that “mostly every” created thing that we can see has in it some degree of beauty, in the sense that it reflects the order of God’s creation. So whether or not we recognize beauty in something very well may be affected by our attitude or our beliefs.

I have always heard that Truth, Goodness, and Beauty are the three transcendentals - if so, then Beauty is objective, and as we see our society’s view of Truth (that there is not really any truth, it’s subjective), many have the same view towards Beauty. In other words, similar to how some people today are not aware of Truth due to their ignorance/attitude/whatever, the same applies to Beauty.

God’s creation I would think would be intended to be beautiful. But then man’s corrupted view of things.

Bill

 

[tonyrey]

I believe that Beauty of whatever. Be it for example a member of the opposite sex. Is an outward expression of inner truth. Is this backed up by the philosophers? People seem to confuse beauty and sex by sexualizing everything.

Make any sense?

Bill

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

Those are the last lines of the famous Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats. There has been much debate about what he meant but he had a premonition he was going to die young. Both his mother and brother had suffered from tuberculosis for which there was no known remedy at the beginning of the 19th century. During his apprenticeship to a surgeon he had seen the harsh side of life with its operations without anaesthetics and very high mortality rate. The screams of the men, women and children on the operating table must have rung in his ears…

His true vocation was poetry which for him was a source of hope and consolation. He regarded sex without love as bestial, respected the teaching of Christ and declared that “love is my religion”. During the last months of his life in Rome he wrote:

Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.

Poor Keats suffered not only from his illness but also by being separated from the woman he loved. It made him see even more clearly this life in its true perspective. His believed the world is “a vale of soul-making” He wrote “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the Truth of Imagination.**” **In other words Keats put the quest for truth, beauty and love before everything else because he was well aware of the transience of all earthly things:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness.

His final words showed concern for his friend who had nursed him unselfishly - and gratitude rather than bitterness, even though he knew that in this world he would never see Fanny again:

“Severn-I–lift me up–I am dying–I shall die easy–don’t be frightened–be firm, and thank God it has come!”

Severn made a fine sketch of him a few weeks before he died:

englishhistory.net/keats/death.html

In the end he had transcended doubt and despair…

 

[Charlemagne_III]

I challenge anyone to find anything ugly in nature. Even a desert is beautiful. All oceans are magnificent. The deep reaches of out space as well. Any waterfall, or forest, or mountain, or valley, or river, or meadow satisfies. God is the perfect artist. Only man can muck things up. Only man can make things ugly. Only man can lie, and by his lies make life in any way repulsive to behold. But when man tells the truth, he too is an artist, telling everything like it is and reveling in the beauty of it all. Men are most godlike when they tell the truth and paint the world as it truly is, not some perverse and diabolical version of it.

 

[petra22]

I challenge anyone to find anything ugly in nature. Even a desert is beautiful. All oceans are magnificent. The deep reaches of out space as well. Any waterfall, or forest, or mountain, or valley, or river, or meadow satisfies. God is the perfect artist. Only man can muck things up. Only man can make things ugly. Only man can lie, and by his lies make life in any way repulsive to behold. But when man tells the truth, he too is an artist, telling everything like it is and reveling in the beauty of it all. Men are most godlike when they tell the truth and paint the world as it truly is, not some perverse and diabolical version of it.

YES!