Does this your own view? Or is it just an idea you wanted to express?
It’s never made sense to me. I understand the attraction of oppositions such as beauty vs truth (or, more traditionally, good vs evil), but in the end they don’t do much for me. Maybe it’s because of my New Thought upbringing (and later Gnostic studies) that taught me to see beyond apparent oppositions. As ‘A Course In Miracles’ teaches, “The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.”
I adapted that lesson to my ideal of ‘truth’. Partial truths can have partial opposites, but the value of truth can have no opposite. Any seeming opposite to truth merely increases the range of truth. If beauty excludes or attempts to exclude truth, then it is by default a false and deceptive beauty. However, if it is true beauty, then it is an entirely different matter.
One might question this. Doesn’t true and false merely create another opposition? If all beauty is true and all truth is beautiful, there can’t be a false and deceptive beauty. All beauty is true even if we don’t understand or want the truth it offers. Something may seem false or otherwise opposed to truth, but this is just seeming. Truth is just what is. Truth includes the apparent but isn’t limited to it.
That is how I think about it. But I suppose you probably had other things in mind when writing this post.
It wasn’t ‘Truth’ I was referring to, that’s why I wrote ‘truths’. I meant the multiple prescriptions of life, how life is supposed to be lived, what it is all about e.t.c, you catch my drift, right? I was going to continue with something like this:
“He who said God is Life was very discerning. Not in the sense that God provides life or how the Christians take it, rather, that God is entire life, life not limited to human life.”
What I was condensing was that the individual truths although individually invalid as universal principles do apply in certain cases and then, do coalesce somewhere. Taken altogether is the coalescence and that is God or Life as the ‘God is Life’ quote says. So it isn’t that the truths here are false, they are just principles given too much importance; principles working somewhere but not another. They have their value but when over-spotlighted, they are devalued – this relates to human life and universal life. They work in life, as life, but they can’t be above it.
But, I posted another, didn’t you read it, ‘Inverted Vision VI’?
Yes, ‘Truth’ and ‘truths’ can be a helpful distinction. ‘Truth’ is essentially an impulse, a sense of value, what motivates one to look through the mud of ‘truths’ in the hope of finding a nugget of insight or wisdom.
Small ‘t’ ‘truths’ must be evaluated according to context and situation. If over-generalized, ‘truths’ become mistaken for ‘Truth’ and one can become blindered to the larger vision, stuck in a reality tunnel. The first lesson to be learned is the limit of knowing with certainty any given ‘truth’.
Have I read ‘Inverted Vision VI’? I don’t know if I saw it before, but I just checked it out now.
“The wont of man is to make the successful God”
Does the “wont of man” relate to ‘truths’? And does the “successful God” relate to ‘Truth’? Is that the connection to what your talking about here?
What do you think about the view that, if you persist in delving deeply enough into any significant ‘truth’, you will eventually find ‘Truth’? Even a seemingly wrong ‘truth’ can offer up some greater vision.
Only when truth is extended to beauty does beauty experience a sense of termination. But, if you distinguish between beauty as something in itself from beauty as an agreeable feeling towards something experienced by an individual, then you find that even in a lie we can have an agreeable feeling, we can experience agreeable feeling even to lies, but only with our feelings. But, if beauty is something more than that feeling, something divine, metaphysical or something transcendent, well then you invoke truth, you stimulate it, you encourage it to break those agreeable feelings you have towards an object. Agreeable feelings towards an object need to theory, justification or explanation, they just need to be. A feeling is too often independent from truths, except for the truth of their being there, the truth of you experiencing them as an individual and subject of experience. So, the feeling of beauty, the feeling of agreeableness towards an object, and beauty itself are two different things. (And agreeableness is nothing but a positive stance, what we normally call feeling good and its variations, an affirmative stance and experience towards an object.)
Let’s get this clear. Is beauty an agreeable feeling or is the agreeable feeling admiration that results from beauty perceived? I think it can’t be designated as the former at all because beauty then travels from the perceptual domain into the emotive one. I think it’s a misapprehension of the entire process and thus a misappropriation of terms – they are intermingled and very indistinguishable in the process but beauty precedes the feeling and they are different.
“But, if beauty is something more than that feeling, something divine metaphysical or something transcendent, well then you invoke truth, you stimulate it, you encourage it to break those agreeable feelings you have towards an object”
You’re getting what I was saying there, but this truth that beauty has as crux is just fullness, the fullness of life. Truths or truisms or principles can be really true only insofar as they circle around life fully but this is improbable (I didn’t say impossible) simply because of the infinite regress and neither empiricism nor idealism can solve this.
You’ve really brought this out well, prenormative; today, I shake your hand 🙂 . Beauty is Truth (or life as it is, life exactly). But, I said that already, you did copywork 🙂 . And, it does involve (for me)
1. Gazing upon life’s real face which is beautiful
2. An agreeable feeling towards this reality
It’s impossible to separate beauty from the feeling without truth entering the picture. Take two people with the same object or event and one person will find it ugly, whilst the other beautiful: why? There is merely difference in stance towards the object, difference in the subjects of experience, difference in the people experiencing. There is no beautiful as such, no beautiful in itself. So beauty isn’t caused by an object, but rather the object and subject relate in such a way as for the subject to experience a feeling and stance towards the object, an agreeable feeling, they then designate as beautiful. There is no beauty, only beautiful objects for subjects. Beauty doesn’t precede the feeling because there is no such thing as the beautiful as such, the feeling and beauty are the same thing, we call objects beautiful because we feel something towards them.
So, no, I didn’t say the above that you thought I brought out. Beauty is not truth, nor life as it is, neither life exactly. Beauty is an agreeable feeling towards an object in experience for a subject. This is truth’s critique of beauty, but one need not invoke the critique if they have the feeling: the judgment “that is beautiful” is a matter of taste that can end with the judgment itself, no more need be said or invoked. If you try to go beyond that into extreme judgments relevant and relating to everyone: like the real is the beautiful, or life is the beautiful, this is just nonsense and truth enters in order to critique it. Nobody can deny that you find something beautiful, everyone can deny that beauty is something in itself indepedent of you, they can deny that they have to see it as beautiful too. Just because we all experience beautiful things, it doesn’t thereby mean that there is a beautiful in-itself. There are only beautiful things for certain people. The abstraction from the latter to former is an illusion fostered by reason and our tendency to conceptualize everything, our tendency to make everything real or true or distributable to everyone. This an unnecessary tendency and it breeds an unnecessary illusion, but one we indulge in because, without saying too much, we’re weird like that.
I meant rather “Beauty is Truth, here”. I left ‘here’ out and it changed the meaning. You and Ben are concentrating too much on the ‘beauty’ aspect. Or, you wanted me to say “the life of life is terminated by such things/concepts as truths”? That’s easy for me to understand but it’s nonsense. Or, simply, “life is ruined by such things as truths”.
Well, you didn’t say it but I saw it by you 😉 .
I don’t mean to make a beauty-in-itself, I just want to attempt a broken down and more comprehensible exposition of the experience, ‘beauty’ – when one experiences ‘beauty’, one perceives and an agreeable feeling to it comes up but they are so intertwined that they are simultaneous so that the entire experience can only be called ‘beauty’, that’s all. You get me better? Is that what you say? I want to make it that we distinguish the perceptual from the emotive.
The point is that beauty and truth cannot be intertwined because they are different types of things. The only thing true about beauty is that you experience certain things which make you feel a certain way and those things you can beautiful. This is all I can understand, the rest doesn’t make sense to me.
Perhaps what you want to say is that truths make you feel a certain way and this feeling ruins or take over other feelings. So, it’s not beauty that is ruined, but a feeling towards life, an agreeable feeling towards life, say some beautiful aspects of life are ruined by some truths.
I have a vague hint of what you aim to say, but I think beauty is not the right word for it here. Maybe try and example.
Let’s say you have a scene or a piece of wood, you see it, right? – you perceive it. It might evoke beauty/ugliness or not. Should it be beauty, surely one has to admit a perceptual quality to beauty because there is a perception there to which an agreeable feeling is directed. There are features which are described as beautiful. Shouldn’t those features be part of the person’s experience of beauty – can it be beauty without the perception? If beauty requires perception, beauty cannot be just the agreeable feeling but the entire experience – the perception and the feeling so that beauty has a perceptual component and an emotive component. Get me now? That’s the crucial part – perception and emotion.
Nobody denies that you perceive characteristics and you thereby feel that some if not all the characteristics of your perception are the cause of your feelings — you can rationalize it like that, you can say: “the red in that painting makes the whole picture beautiful”, or “that woman’s fair skin and smile makes her beautiful” etc. What anybody would deny is that those characteristics you highlight can make everyone feel the same thing. What’s denied is a continuity in feelings between one person and the next given the same perception, not a continuity in perception and characteristics. You can say we all experience things, perceptions and characteristics, but what stances we have towards those things differ. What we perceive may be the same, how perceive it, is different. No matter how much you push for the line of thought that grounds experience on the object of experience, or even a unity between object and subject that’s continuous across all individuals, you will always come back to the same conclusion: it must be my feeling, not the perception that makes me say it is beautiful, or makes me bestow a value of sorts on something. Unless of course you wish to deny the truthfulness of other people’s feelings when they are expressed to you. You could want that, but that gets you or us nowhere, and signals a desire to withdraw from communication.
“Unless of course you wish to deny the truthfulness of other people’s feelings when they are expressed to you. You could want that, but that gets you or us nowhere, and signals a desire to withdraw from communication”
Oh, yes, yes, I agree. But, I cannot think of doing something like that, everyone’s experience of beauty is his genuine and unique experience. I just want to look at what is called ‘beauty’ not beautiful scenes, not at all.
I’m saying that I don’t think what makes you call ‘beautiful’ shouldn’t be described as a feeling but rather an experience because I feel that it is the entirety that produces the call, ‘beautiful’, not just the feeling – what I mean here is that: in the subject, there has to be a percept of beauty or an image for his external sense of an object to produce a subjective. Not that it has to already be programmed there but that the perception in him is what he feels for and that due to these being enwrapped so completely, the entire experience – perception and feeling – is what is ‘beautiful’.
I don’t see how we disagree here. What you described is similar to what I said, just expressed differently. I only go a little further than you in limiting the expression of beauty, of what we call beautiful, I limit the rational classification of beauty. I limit what we ground beauty on, and I say that what explains the difference between people in finding something beautiful is based on the person and the feeling, not the object, the object is the same. Think of a game of football, everyone is playing on the same pitch and everyone chasing the same ball, but each person is on a different position relative to the ball and on the pitch, the game of football is the same, the position is different. This is what I am trying to say. By parity of reason, the experience can be different because of the difference in the person and feeling, not the object of experience — the object is the same for everyone, how a person relates to that object differs, and people relate to objects in terms of feelings towards it. This is all I am saying. It isn’t different to what you’re saying, you just hide the differences and what they amount to behind the notion of experience which encapsulates subject, object and feeling.
You sentence: the precept is value as beauty makes no sense posed just like that. What does it mean to value something? How does valuing work? What causes value? The object, the subject or the relation between object and subject manifest in a feeling? These are the only options.
The disagreement was only in the name you ascribed to beauty ie. a feeling. I don’t disagree or hide at all, I’m only exploring the experience of beauty in any one person. I’m not looking at ‘what is beautiful’, rather, how beauty works – the process of beauty, the blueprint behind beauty (wow, effortless alliteration) – not anyone’s particular orientation to the object.
Go back and re-read this entire conversation. And you’ll see that the point of it was lost because you’re trying to merge truth with beauty and I am trying to keep them apart.
My friend, go back and re-read yourself and you’ll see that you’re seeing things. You cannot tell what I’m trying to do, only what you see which is simply what you see – I suppose you won’t get this but doesn’t matter
Your post says that the beauty of life is killed by truths, I show you how truth and beauty are fundamentally distinct and so only when truth tries to flow into the realm of beauty is beauty killed, now you try to defend the view that there is a truth to beauty, so in a sense you are doing that which you are stating — you’re negating your own idea, you’re making it live, you’re giving your own thought life. Now, maybe you enjoy killing the beauty of life with truths — so, I can’t really say anything against that, but at the very least be aware of it and affirm it or deny it.
Your thoughts in response are negating your own idea — if you desire this, fair enough, but I’d thought I’d bring it to your attention because you’d rather not labour for yourself, you’d rather have somebody else do it for you.
And, you can say “this is logic, this is sense, this is what you want to say, do re mi…do” and you stay there, I stay here, each unwilling to listen to the other – that’s one meaning or manifestation of “me as me, he as he”. But, I suppose you won’t get this too so I guess I just vaporize before your eyes (ah! a rhyme. nice!)
Ben, you said,
“I adapted that lesson to my ideal of ‘truth’”
What is truth? Or, more simply, for you, what is truth?
Early in my blogs life, I attempted to look behind it, I saw nothing. What really happened was it evoked some images in my mind but damn, they were volatile and I’ve postponed till now, in the mind that it will come. I just have a feeling I’ve been saying it all this while and just haven’t taken notice cos it seems the shadows of the images are there and they blink quite ephemerally in some cases or talks by me and there’s an old man saying “they’ve been here” while pointing at them
I may have fully answered your question in my previous comment above. I could try to explain further, but it’s a tough nut to crack.
There are several parts to what ‘Truth’ represents to me.
There is a basic sense of being tired of all the lies and self-delusions, all the propaganda, rhetoric and spin. I just want the honest straightforward truth. But behind this is a more basic desire for authenticity.
If I go a bit deeper, this desire blooms into a bloody wound of longing. But longing for what? It’s hard to describe. A longing to know, to feel, to see. I sense something is there… often just barely out of reach… and at other times so far beyond me that I lose all hope. I sense there is something true, something maybe even good about the world. I’ve even on a rare occasion had a sense of actual ‘Knowingness’, a sense of ‘This Is It’… whatever ‘It’ may be.
I waste my time in the muck of ‘truths’ because even the most seemingly worthless or wrongtheaded ‘truth’ implies the possibility of a greater ‘Truth’. See a flicker of light in a piece of broken glass and I know that there must be a source to this light.
Ultimately, it just comes down to a feeling. Maybe it’s just my Fi acting up again.
For me, my ideas are my value, yes, I also have a value even if I can put it off anytime I desire. I particularly dislike it when anyone (god or human) says “this is what you’re trying to say” when it is they who understand it that way. For me, ideas are my wealth and however I express it doesn’t matter so long as the idea is got, whether logically, metaphorically, in picture form, or whatever. Don’t tell me ‘A’ is what I’m trying to say, it is rather “what you are saying looks like this” which questions me as “is that what you are trying to say?”. Don’t tell me what I’m trying to say because you don’t know what I’m trying to say, only what I say. If one looks in terms of psychology, one’ll realize it’s a reality that those two ideas differ. And even, what the other understands, making three ideas then
And, I only say the above because assumptions and presumptions tend to be the basis of conflict, from mere misunderstanding in interlocution to full-blown wars
Non-sense. If you can’t express yourself adequately and then grow annoyed at the fact another person cannot understand you, then that’s a fault in your expression. I showed you in this interlocution that you do that very easily. You do it because you have no interest in communicating with people, you only have an interest in being right and having your thoughts affirmed. I know this because you give up when people do to understand you — and you give up either because you yourself do not know what you’re trying to say or because you can’t place it into words yet. In this post, I affirmed your thought and even helped you expand it in order to make it stronger, but all you saw is that I denied it in some way — nonsense. If you read it carefully, I am fully in line with your thought, and your the one who backs away from it in order to maintain your individuality, your distance, your ego, your subjectivity — you have no interest in communicating. So, if it’s not that you can’t express it, it must be that you don’t want to — or simply don’t know what you’re talking about.
I would say: let go of your subjectivity and open your eyes, we are all trying to find a common ground and understand each other — some of us feel stronger about how the world appears to us than others, and those people will defend their view more, by which point it is up to you to help them see where their view of the world is tainted and faulty — this is what logic and truth aim at. If you don’t aimt to do this, then you have no interest in communication. I know you won’t even try and understand this, but it serves you having to hear it anyway — discussions are for sharing ideas, not for stating them. In order to share, you must be willing to take from a person when they give to you, not steal from them and then say it is your own… think this analogy over a little. Yes I read your post and gave you my idea about it, just as you do with my posts, by which point it is up to you to let me know if I came close to what you were trying to say — we continued talking and I realized we were saying the same thing, but you kept insisting that we weren’t, by which point I gave up and realized that we’d gone so far as to negate the very thing you were trying to express. We lapsed into nonsense.
There is no conflict or war here, there is only a struggle to understand one another. Anyway, I am done with this conversation anyway, it’s gone too far and I’ve said all I had to say.
But it should be known that I do not wish to be right because unlike you I do not presume anybody like I know everything. My basic plan is even to eliminate all ‘rights’ including myself.
And, no idea belongs to anyone. Other people can claim them but my stealing them is because I am basically a thief, stealing from the outside world because they evoke certain images within me.
Someone dislikes you trying to tell his mind and even that one, you have to be right. I have simply mirrored you here, you with your ego. Think about it and be aware of the many intentions I, as a different animal can have, all working concurrently too. Impossible? You think so
And, well, it’s all good – you still think you saw correctly and you still think you can tell my mind. Ok, I am wrong, like everybody else you interact with. It’s good, I congratulate you, no one can bully you cos you will be doing that part
You thought I wouldn’t think about what you said and come back on it? Shows that your view of me is tainted. I have thought similar of you before but you did return
I don’t get why we always appear to disagree when we are in agreement. I didn’t mean we were at war, I only said that as an observation of the significance of such fundamental misunderstandings and for emotional effect
For meaningful discussion, we will have to come to terms with each others means of expression so that trivial misconstruals are avoided. I have identified one model in your expression – logic, you have identified one of mine – poetic. We both use the others but in greatly lesser degrees – by my knowledge of personality, we are different personalities. We will just have to come to terms with them but hopefully, through all the struggle, everyone will go home painted with new colors ie. influenced in thought models, ideas, that’s a good thing
Well, I agree that “discussions are not for stating ideas” and also not for “stealing ideas”. If that was the case, how would the word be related to ‘decussation’ which is crossing. Hope you understand that as it’s an image to me and easily comprehensible
I think you will appreciate these because “you care about how the world appears”. I share the “helping others see different” part.
And, you have to stop guessing my motives as you’re mostly wrong, as I am about you
It reads as “..to make the successful, God” ie. making God of the successful. It relates to making one truth far more important, applicable and presiding than it really is – like losing sight of the bigger reality.
I go with that view that going far into a certain ‘truth’ can lead to Truth. But, for that to happen, one must proceed with what you call ‘intellectual humility’ or my ‘honesty.. to the questions’. I do not know what Truth is but, to me, it’s beyond ‘truths’ and even if one is 1 centimetre beyond, it is more Truthful than mere ‘truths’. Camus said something like this “always go too far, that’s where you’ll find it”. I go with the saying but seems to oppose “everything in moderation” :). But when Camus’ is applied to it, you go too far into “everything in moderation” 🙂
I want to return to the original posted statement:
“The beauty of life is terminated by such things as truths”
I do struggle with understanding of the actual or desired relationship between beauty and truth, whether as ‘truths’ or as ‘Truth’. I sympathize with Plato’s desire to kick the poets out of his perfect society. There is a close tie between poetry and rhetoric. Both serve to persuade. Neither upholds simple straightforward truth above all else.
Too often beauty is used in service of relative or deceiving ‘truths’. I have great respect for beauty. I have a strong sense of aesthetics and I have artistic talent, Also, as you know, I love stories. I think art is the most powerful tool humans possess. In fact, I would argue that art is what lends its power to religion. It’s because art is so powerful that it is so dangerous. People follow stories to their death and to the death of others. Give someone a beautiful vision and they will do anything.
In the US, right-wingers, fundies and neocons have been so successful because they’ve controlled the political narrative. For several decades, we’ve been living out their story. And, damn, it’s a powerful story. It’s not just people being stupid, rather stories can cloud even the minds of the most intelligent.
I might even go so far as to say we never escape stories. We are always clouded and occluded by one vision or another, often many at the same time. If you dissect the stories, they don’t usually make rational sense according to logic and fact… but that doesn’t matter. The greater the lie, the greater it’s persuasion.
It’s not that stories, poetry, beauty is ‘Evil’ or anything. It’s simply amoral, at least at it’s most basic level. On the other hand, it’s beauty that when used for a higher purpose can raise the mind to a higher ‘Truth’.
The doubts I have come from personal experience. I’ve been forced to confront the greatest truths when forced to confront the greatest ugliness. It’s easy to get lost in superficial beauty. Still, I have at times glimpsed a deeper beauty glimmering in dark caverns, but that glimmering can only be seen after having entered and become lost in that darkness. Beauty may be one path to Truth, but even so ugliness is the path to true beauty.
Or something like that. I’m sure you get my general drift.
So logic and fact become the deciders in any case? If that’s it then we are doomed, the lawyer is doomed, the child facing insurmountable odds is doomed, we continue to live in the past as well.
I wouldn’t say ‘true beauty’ but ‘greater beauty’ – prenormative shows that truth shouldn’t flow into beauty. Thing is, truths tend to preside over how one sees, a truth becomes one’s lens and he sees nothing else through it. ‘Truth’, on the other hand goes beyond ‘truths’ and doesn’t allow any to come to rule, it tends to be less exclusive. If one truth contradicts another then neither can be truly true or True.
Take for example, a realist versus a Romantic poet, each upholds a different ‘truth or principle’ as ‘beauty’ or ‘beauty’ as ‘truth or principle’ leaving them excluded from Beauty. What beauty can be created from a mingling of the two, none will ever see or appreciate for them to know.
Those greater ‘Beauty’ and ‘Truth’ tend to get more indescribable the more we leave fact and particular people (I think prenormative talked about some metaphysical beauty) – but those are likely to be called abstractions
Nope. I don’t limit truth or the relevance of beauty to such things as logic and fact. They aren’t the deciders in all cases. They just can be extremely helpful sometimes, but of course utterly useless at other times.
Greater beauty? Yeah, maybe. However, even the most beautiful vision sometimes has to be let go in order to see beyond. I’ve always been drawn to the Hindu tradition where the image of a god initially attracts the worshipper, but the spiritual aspirant must let go of the beautiful vision in order to know the divine ‘Truth’ (the archetypal essence or whatever). Beauty can light the way and it can blind one to where the path is leading. It’s a double-edged sword.
Contradicting truths? I understand the judgment of contradicting truths, but seeming contradiction doesn’t always implies falseness. One truth might be relatively more true and I wouldn’t dismiss relative truth. Also, some seeming contradictions aren’t in reality contradictory. A deeper truth could reveal they are just two views or aspects of the same thing or two results of the same cause. This is relevant for beauty because often it takes beauty for one to be able to see beyond mere appearances of contradiction. The power of story, when used well, can show or imply deeper truths even amidst parts that don’t logically cohere.
“Take for example, a realist versus a Romantic poet, each upholds a different ‘truth or principle’ as ‘beauty’ or ‘beauty’ as ‘truth or principle’ leaving them excluded from Beauty. What beauty can be created from a mingling of the two, none will ever see or appreciate for them to know.”
I’m a bit confused by what you wrote in that paragraph. Are you saying that realism and romanticism are contradictory impulses that can never be resolved? Even if so, can’t they both exist in the same person. Don’t all humans inherently hold immense contradictions? Many poets have written about the contradictory nature of humans, some even praising it as a noble trait to be embraced.
In your last comments, are you criticizing abstractions? I always consider abstractions to be kissing cousins of archetypes. The reason I think this way is because it’s impossible to communicate archetypal experience without abstractions. All of language is built on abstractions. To write ‘shoe’, I’m invoking an abstract notion of ‘shoeness’. There is no such thing as ‘shoe’ in reality.
For me, ‘Truth’ isn’t a mere abstraction. I think I’ve mentioned to you before my interest in the goddess Saraswati, right? I have a pendant of her that I wear around my neck at all times for years and I have a picture of her in my wallet. I often recite various mantras using her seed sound. She is ‘Truth’. She is the ‘Word’, the Creatrix of reality through the power of sound and language, she is the creative source of art and story, the artist’s muse.
‘Truth’ is a visceral reality and a vision of something beyond that emanates and pulses. As I write this, I can pause and feel the sense of what I’m trying to communicate. It’s right here. It’s just what it is. It’s not a matter of ‘belief’. Is Saraswati ‘real’? I don’t know. The question itself doesn’t seem relevant or meaningful. The experience, the feeling is real.
I am drawn to how people read. I seem to say certain things but it seems people don’t see. I didn’t say that contradictory truths are not true, I meant that they aren’t absolute is what is implied by the contradiction. They might apply somewhere, to and/or for someone but they aren’t absolute. The deeper truth is what I meant by Truth.
I’m not criticizing abstractions, no, it’s just that they tend to be remote and ineffable especially the ones listed, Beauty and Truth. At that level, they can actually flow into each other.
The Romantic and realist example is a real example where they thought they were opposed. Actually, it was Romantics vs classicists, not realists. I am not the one saying that, it is they who thought so. That’s why I said that if they would not see a higher beauty because they invariably exalt and enthrone their respective prescriptions of beauty while excluding the other, the Romantic beauty vs the classic beauty. For me, they don’t oppose, for me, I don’t even get why they oppose – I can resolve them quite easily, I even do that often
We seem to be saying something similar. Yep, contradiction implying truths in question aren’t absolute. Yep, remote and ineffable abstractions tending to flow into each other. Maybe yep to the last as well, but I don’t have any deep insights or strong opinions about the Romanticists vs Classicists.
I’m going to have to change my expressive style. I’m already on it. People can’t understand me, I’ve lived on the abstract for so long.. Dear God (shake my head in anticipation of the toil and considerable remorse at my obstinacy in the past – thinking idea is all that matters), but gotta do it
Change it if you want, but don’t do so on my account. I usually understand you fine. It took me a while to grasp your style of communication, but it’s true I still get confused at times by how you phrase something. It’s not a big problem since I understand fine once you explain.
I could see, however, that it might get annoying for you to have to explain yourself when what you were trying to communicate was perfectly clear to you. Communicating well is always a good thing and does require much practice.
I’m not sure that abstraction is the main problem in my misunderstanding you. I think it’s the abstraction combined with the poetic style combined with various cultural differences. Any single factor wouldn’t be problematic, but combined together they add up to a very ‘unique’ style.
For me, I always sense that culture might be the biggest factor. An American using an American abstract-poetic style probably wouldn’t throw me. But your personal abstract-poetic style isn’t American. Not that there is a reason it should be.
I guess you have to consider your audience. Most the people I interact with tend to be either North American or European (especially British). So, most of the people I interact with are from my culture, most speak English as their first language and most speak a dialect similar to my own. If I’m dealing with a British or Canadian person online, I wouldn’t even be able to tell I wasn’t dealing with an American.
As such, I usually don’t have to worry about my audience understanding me. Even someone like you from a different culture is still very familiar with my culture and my language style (more than I’m familiar with yours).
That’s very trenchant, I do have a strong familiarity with your culture.
There’s another issue with Africa, being similar to the Orient in the degree to which primitivism has been maintained, we can have quite a high level of intuition in our interactive tools ie. our communicative vehicles. Ideophones, ideograms that words just don’t do justice to. Being an introverted intuitive myself, this just further strengthens it and makes me more remote. For example, the yodel of the highlanders (not the Scots) or so in the US has a meaning that can only be shown by the yodel itself, it suggests a feeling of contentment, fraternity/sorority and general goodwill, a wish to spread the feel-good of the yodeller. It’s a sound I’ve loved since I heard it in my youth, watching cartoon network and ‘The Sound of Music’ (I think).
I’ve read that most communication is non-verbal. However, it’s a different world online, in particular with a discussion like this in a blog. If we were talking in person, there would be far fewer miscommunications as many non-verbal cues are more universal.
Your coming from a different culture can does offer a possible advantage. You have a more outside perspective on the English language. When reading North American and European writing, you don’t necessarily have the same assumptions and biases as the writers which can allow you the opportunity to be more aware of those assumptions and biases.
I used to data a poet. She, like many poets, was in love with the sound of language by itself. She occasionally would just say something in sound not using actual words. The sounds were her way of intentionally expressing something non-verbally. I was just now recalling that my childhood friend and I would sometimes in the past have ‘conversations’ that involved no words, just us making sounds back in forth.
Here is something you’ll find interesting. It’s a song being sung in fake English. There are no words being spoken, but if you don’t listen closely it sounds like words.
Life In Every Breath 
Does this your own view? Or is it just an idea you wanted to express?
It’s never made sense to me. I understand the attraction of oppositions such as beauty vs truth (or, more traditionally, good vs evil), but in the end they don’t do much for me. Maybe it’s because of my New Thought upbringing (and later Gnostic studies) that taught me to see beyond apparent oppositions. As ‘A Course In Miracles’ teaches, “The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.”
I adapted that lesson to my ideal of ‘truth’. Partial truths can have partial opposites, but the value of truth can have no opposite. Any seeming opposite to truth merely increases the range of truth. If beauty excludes or attempts to exclude truth, then it is by default a false and deceptive beauty. However, if it is true beauty, then it is an entirely different matter.
One might question this. Doesn’t true and false merely create another opposition? If all beauty is true and all truth is beautiful, there can’t be a false and deceptive beauty. All beauty is true even if we don’t understand or want the truth it offers. Something may seem false or otherwise opposed to truth, but this is just seeming. Truth is just what is. Truth includes the apparent but isn’t limited to it.
That is how I think about it. But I suppose you probably had other things in mind when writing this post.
It wasn’t ‘Truth’ I was referring to, that’s why I wrote ‘truths’. I meant the multiple prescriptions of life, how life is supposed to be lived, what it is all about e.t.c, you catch my drift, right? I was going to continue with something like this:
“He who said God is Life was very discerning. Not in the sense that God provides life or how the Christians take it, rather, that God is entire life, life not limited to human life.”
What I was condensing was that the individual truths although individually invalid as universal principles do apply in certain cases and then, do coalesce somewhere. Taken altogether is the coalescence and that is God or Life as the ‘God is Life’ quote says. So it isn’t that the truths here are false, they are just principles given too much importance; principles working somewhere but not another. They have their value but when over-spotlighted, they are devalued – this relates to human life and universal life. They work in life, as life, but they can’t be above it.
But, I posted another, didn’t you read it, ‘Inverted Vision VI’?
And, it was an idea I was trying to express
Yes, ‘Truth’ and ‘truths’ can be a helpful distinction. ‘Truth’ is essentially an impulse, a sense of value, what motivates one to look through the mud of ‘truths’ in the hope of finding a nugget of insight or wisdom.
Small ‘t’ ‘truths’ must be evaluated according to context and situation. If over-generalized, ‘truths’ become mistaken for ‘Truth’ and one can become blindered to the larger vision, stuck in a reality tunnel. The first lesson to be learned is the limit of knowing with certainty any given ‘truth’.
Have I read ‘Inverted Vision VI’? I don’t know if I saw it before, but I just checked it out now.
“The wont of man is to make the successful God”
Does the “wont of man” relate to ‘truths’? And does the “successful God” relate to ‘Truth’? Is that the connection to what your talking about here?
What do you think about the view that, if you persist in delving deeply enough into any significant ‘truth’, you will eventually find ‘Truth’? Even a seemingly wrong ‘truth’ can offer up some greater vision.
Only when truth is extended to beauty does beauty experience a sense of termination. But, if you distinguish between beauty as something in itself from beauty as an agreeable feeling towards something experienced by an individual, then you find that even in a lie we can have an agreeable feeling, we can experience agreeable feeling even to lies, but only with our feelings. But, if beauty is something more than that feeling, something divine, metaphysical or something transcendent, well then you invoke truth, you stimulate it, you encourage it to break those agreeable feelings you have towards an object. Agreeable feelings towards an object need to theory, justification or explanation, they just need to be. A feeling is too often independent from truths, except for the truth of their being there, the truth of you experiencing them as an individual and subject of experience. So, the feeling of beauty, the feeling of agreeableness towards an object, and beauty itself are two different things. (And agreeableness is nothing but a positive stance, what we normally call feeling good and its variations, an affirmative stance and experience towards an object.)
Correction: agreeable feelings towards an object need no* theory. 🙂
Let’s get this clear. Is beauty an agreeable feeling or is the agreeable feeling admiration that results from beauty perceived? I think it can’t be designated as the former at all because beauty then travels from the perceptual domain into the emotive one. I think it’s a misapprehension of the entire process and thus a misappropriation of terms – they are intermingled and very indistinguishable in the process but beauty precedes the feeling and they are different.
Ignore what I posted just now, you have made the distinction. I should have read till the end. In the initial parts, you were just suggesting it so..
“But, if beauty is something more than that feeling, something divine metaphysical or something transcendent, well then you invoke truth, you stimulate it, you encourage it to break those agreeable feelings you have towards an object”
You’re getting what I was saying there, but this truth that beauty has as crux is just fullness, the fullness of life. Truths or truisms or principles can be really true only insofar as they circle around life fully but this is improbable (I didn’t say impossible) simply because of the infinite regress and neither empiricism nor idealism can solve this.
You’ve really brought this out well, prenormative; today, I shake your hand 🙂 . Beauty is Truth (or life as it is, life exactly). But, I said that already, you did copywork 🙂 . And, it does involve (for me)
1. Gazing upon life’s real face which is beautiful
2. An agreeable feeling towards this reality
It’s impossible to separate beauty from the feeling without truth entering the picture. Take two people with the same object or event and one person will find it ugly, whilst the other beautiful: why? There is merely difference in stance towards the object, difference in the subjects of experience, difference in the people experiencing. There is no beautiful as such, no beautiful in itself. So beauty isn’t caused by an object, but rather the object and subject relate in such a way as for the subject to experience a feeling and stance towards the object, an agreeable feeling, they then designate as beautiful. There is no beauty, only beautiful objects for subjects. Beauty doesn’t precede the feeling because there is no such thing as the beautiful as such, the feeling and beauty are the same thing, we call objects beautiful because we feel something towards them.
So, no, I didn’t say the above that you thought I brought out. Beauty is not truth, nor life as it is, neither life exactly. Beauty is an agreeable feeling towards an object in experience for a subject. This is truth’s critique of beauty, but one need not invoke the critique if they have the feeling: the judgment “that is beautiful” is a matter of taste that can end with the judgment itself, no more need be said or invoked. If you try to go beyond that into extreme judgments relevant and relating to everyone: like the real is the beautiful, or life is the beautiful, this is just nonsense and truth enters in order to critique it. Nobody can deny that you find something beautiful, everyone can deny that beauty is something in itself indepedent of you, they can deny that they have to see it as beautiful too. Just because we all experience beautiful things, it doesn’t thereby mean that there is a beautiful in-itself. There are only beautiful things for certain people. The abstraction from the latter to former is an illusion fostered by reason and our tendency to conceptualize everything, our tendency to make everything real or true or distributable to everyone. This an unnecessary tendency and it breeds an unnecessary illusion, but one we indulge in because, without saying too much, we’re weird like that.
I meant rather “Beauty is Truth, here”. I left ‘here’ out and it changed the meaning. You and Ben are concentrating too much on the ‘beauty’ aspect. Or, you wanted me to say “the life of life is terminated by such things/concepts as truths”? That’s easy for me to understand but it’s nonsense. Or, simply, “life is ruined by such things as truths”.
Well, you didn’t say it but I saw it by you 😉 .
I don’t mean to make a beauty-in-itself, I just want to attempt a broken down and more comprehensible exposition of the experience, ‘beauty’ – when one experiences ‘beauty’, one perceives and an agreeable feeling to it comes up but they are so intertwined that they are simultaneous so that the entire experience can only be called ‘beauty’, that’s all. You get me better? Is that what you say? I want to make it that we distinguish the perceptual from the emotive.
Naa, they are simultaneous. The way I put it up there, just now, still implies a lag
The point is that beauty and truth cannot be intertwined because they are different types of things. The only thing true about beauty is that you experience certain things which make you feel a certain way and those things you can beautiful. This is all I can understand, the rest doesn’t make sense to me.
Perhaps what you want to say is that truths make you feel a certain way and this feeling ruins or take over other feelings. So, it’s not beauty that is ruined, but a feeling towards life, an agreeable feeling towards life, say some beautiful aspects of life are ruined by some truths.
I have a vague hint of what you aim to say, but I think beauty is not the right word for it here. Maybe try and example.
correction: call* (man, my grammar and spelling stinks these days… pppfffttt)
Let’s say you have a scene or a piece of wood, you see it, right? – you perceive it. It might evoke beauty/ugliness or not. Should it be beauty, surely one has to admit a perceptual quality to beauty because there is a perception there to which an agreeable feeling is directed. There are features which are described as beautiful. Shouldn’t those features be part of the person’s experience of beauty – can it be beauty without the perception? If beauty requires perception, beauty cannot be just the agreeable feeling but the entire experience – the perception and the feeling so that beauty has a perceptual component and an emotive component. Get me now? That’s the crucial part – perception and emotion.
Nobody denies that you perceive characteristics and you thereby feel that some if not all the characteristics of your perception are the cause of your feelings — you can rationalize it like that, you can say: “the red in that painting makes the whole picture beautiful”, or “that woman’s fair skin and smile makes her beautiful” etc. What anybody would deny is that those characteristics you highlight can make everyone feel the same thing. What’s denied is a continuity in feelings between one person and the next given the same perception, not a continuity in perception and characteristics. You can say we all experience things, perceptions and characteristics, but what stances we have towards those things differ. What we perceive may be the same, how perceive it, is different. No matter how much you push for the line of thought that grounds experience on the object of experience, or even a unity between object and subject that’s continuous across all individuals, you will always come back to the same conclusion: it must be my feeling, not the perception that makes me say it is beautiful, or makes me bestow a value of sorts on something. Unless of course you wish to deny the truthfulness of other people’s feelings when they are expressed to you. You could want that, but that gets you or us nowhere, and signals a desire to withdraw from communication.
“Unless of course you wish to deny the truthfulness of other people’s feelings when they are expressed to you. You could want that, but that gets you or us nowhere, and signals a desire to withdraw from communication”
Oh, yes, yes, I agree. But, I cannot think of doing something like that, everyone’s experience of beauty is his genuine and unique experience. I just want to look at what is called ‘beauty’ not beautiful scenes, not at all.
I’m saying that I don’t think what makes you call ‘beautiful’ shouldn’t be described as a feeling but rather an experience because I feel that it is the entirety that produces the call, ‘beautiful’, not just the feeling – what I mean here is that: in the subject, there has to be a percept of beauty or an image for his external sense of an object to produce a subjective. Not that it has to already be programmed there but that the perception in him is what he feels for and that due to these being enwrapped so completely, the entire experience – perception and feeling – is what is ‘beautiful’.
Let me put it this way:
The percept is valued as beauty.
I don’t see how we disagree here. What you described is similar to what I said, just expressed differently. I only go a little further than you in limiting the expression of beauty, of what we call beautiful, I limit the rational classification of beauty. I limit what we ground beauty on, and I say that what explains the difference between people in finding something beautiful is based on the person and the feeling, not the object, the object is the same. Think of a game of football, everyone is playing on the same pitch and everyone chasing the same ball, but each person is on a different position relative to the ball and on the pitch, the game of football is the same, the position is different. This is what I am trying to say. By parity of reason, the experience can be different because of the difference in the person and feeling, not the object of experience — the object is the same for everyone, how a person relates to that object differs, and people relate to objects in terms of feelings towards it. This is all I am saying. It isn’t different to what you’re saying, you just hide the differences and what they amount to behind the notion of experience which encapsulates subject, object and feeling.
You sentence: the precept is value as beauty makes no sense posed just like that. What does it mean to value something? How does valuing work? What causes value? The object, the subject or the relation between object and subject manifest in a feeling? These are the only options.
The disagreement was only in the name you ascribed to beauty ie. a feeling. I don’t disagree or hide at all, I’m only exploring the experience of beauty in any one person. I’m not looking at ‘what is beautiful’, rather, how beauty works – the process of beauty, the blueprint behind beauty (wow, effortless alliteration) – not anyone’s particular orientation to the object.
“finding something beautiful is based on the person and the feeling”
That’s what I’ve been saying to show how beauty works. There is a universal pattern there and that’s what I’m attempting to show out.
What is this universal pattern and process of beauty other than what was highlighted above?
I don’t think we’ll get anywhere with this discussion – the difference in expression militates against any mutual comprehension.
Not only that but way of thinking too. Sorry
Go back and re-read this entire conversation. And you’ll see that the point of it was lost because you’re trying to merge truth with beauty and I am trying to keep them apart.
My friend, go back and re-read yourself and you’ll see that you’re seeing things. You cannot tell what I’m trying to do, only what you see which is simply what you see – I suppose you won’t get this but doesn’t matter
Your post says that the beauty of life is killed by truths, I show you how truth and beauty are fundamentally distinct and so only when truth tries to flow into the realm of beauty is beauty killed, now you try to defend the view that there is a truth to beauty, so in a sense you are doing that which you are stating — you’re negating your own idea, you’re making it live, you’re giving your own thought life. Now, maybe you enjoy killing the beauty of life with truths — so, I can’t really say anything against that, but at the very least be aware of it and affirm it or deny it.
Your thoughts in response are negating your own idea — if you desire this, fair enough, but I’d thought I’d bring it to your attention because you’d rather not labour for yourself, you’d rather have somebody else do it for you.
See what you want to see. I have nothing to defend and nothing to labor for. But, I suppose you won’t get this too.
And, you can say “this is logic, this is sense, this is what you want to say, do re mi…do” and you stay there, I stay here, each unwilling to listen to the other – that’s one meaning or manifestation of “me as me, he as he”. But, I suppose you won’t get this too so I guess I just vaporize before your eyes (ah! a rhyme. nice!)
Ben, you said,
“I adapted that lesson to my ideal of ‘truth’”
What is truth? Or, more simply, for you, what is truth?
Early in my blogs life, I attempted to look behind it, I saw nothing. What really happened was it evoked some images in my mind but damn, they were volatile and I’ve postponed till now, in the mind that it will come. I just have a feeling I’ve been saying it all this while and just haven’t taken notice cos it seems the shadows of the images are there and they blink quite ephemerally in some cases or talks by me and there’s an old man saying “they’ve been here” while pointing at them
I may have fully answered your question in my previous comment above. I could try to explain further, but it’s a tough nut to crack.
There are several parts to what ‘Truth’ represents to me.
There is a basic sense of being tired of all the lies and self-delusions, all the propaganda, rhetoric and spin. I just want the honest straightforward truth. But behind this is a more basic desire for authenticity.
If I go a bit deeper, this desire blooms into a bloody wound of longing. But longing for what? It’s hard to describe. A longing to know, to feel, to see. I sense something is there… often just barely out of reach… and at other times so far beyond me that I lose all hope. I sense there is something true, something maybe even good about the world. I’ve even on a rare occasion had a sense of actual ‘Knowingness’, a sense of ‘This Is It’… whatever ‘It’ may be.
I waste my time in the muck of ‘truths’ because even the most seemingly worthless or wrongtheaded ‘truth’ implies the possibility of a greater ‘Truth’. See a flicker of light in a piece of broken glass and I know that there must be a source to this light.
Ultimately, it just comes down to a feeling. Maybe it’s just my Fi acting up again.
Prenormative, attend carefully,
For me, my ideas are my value, yes, I also have a value even if I can put it off anytime I desire. I particularly dislike it when anyone (god or human) says “this is what you’re trying to say” when it is they who understand it that way. For me, ideas are my wealth and however I express it doesn’t matter so long as the idea is got, whether logically, metaphorically, in picture form, or whatever. Don’t tell me ‘A’ is what I’m trying to say, it is rather “what you are saying looks like this” which questions me as “is that what you are trying to say?”. Don’t tell me what I’m trying to say because you don’t know what I’m trying to say, only what I say. If one looks in terms of psychology, one’ll realize it’s a reality that those two ideas differ. And even, what the other understands, making three ideas then
And, I only say the above because assumptions and presumptions tend to be the basis of conflict, from mere misunderstanding in interlocution to full-blown wars
Non-sense. If you can’t express yourself adequately and then grow annoyed at the fact another person cannot understand you, then that’s a fault in your expression. I showed you in this interlocution that you do that very easily. You do it because you have no interest in communicating with people, you only have an interest in being right and having your thoughts affirmed. I know this because you give up when people do to understand you — and you give up either because you yourself do not know what you’re trying to say or because you can’t place it into words yet. In this post, I affirmed your thought and even helped you expand it in order to make it stronger, but all you saw is that I denied it in some way — nonsense. If you read it carefully, I am fully in line with your thought, and your the one who backs away from it in order to maintain your individuality, your distance, your ego, your subjectivity — you have no interest in communicating. So, if it’s not that you can’t express it, it must be that you don’t want to — or simply don’t know what you’re talking about.
I would say: let go of your subjectivity and open your eyes, we are all trying to find a common ground and understand each other — some of us feel stronger about how the world appears to us than others, and those people will defend their view more, by which point it is up to you to help them see where their view of the world is tainted and faulty — this is what logic and truth aim at. If you don’t aimt to do this, then you have no interest in communication. I know you won’t even try and understand this, but it serves you having to hear it anyway — discussions are for sharing ideas, not for stating them. In order to share, you must be willing to take from a person when they give to you, not steal from them and then say it is your own… think this analogy over a little. Yes I read your post and gave you my idea about it, just as you do with my posts, by which point it is up to you to let me know if I came close to what you were trying to say — we continued talking and I realized we were saying the same thing, but you kept insisting that we weren’t, by which point I gave up and realized that we’d gone so far as to negate the very thing you were trying to express. We lapsed into nonsense.
There is no conflict or war here, there is only a struggle to understand one another. Anyway, I am done with this conversation anyway, it’s gone too far and I’ve said all I had to say.
Alright. I was getting tired anyway.
But it should be known that I do not wish to be right because unlike you I do not presume anybody like I know everything. My basic plan is even to eliminate all ‘rights’ including myself.
And, no idea belongs to anyone. Other people can claim them but my stealing them is because I am basically a thief, stealing from the outside world because they evoke certain images within me.
Someone dislikes you trying to tell his mind and even that one, you have to be right. I have simply mirrored you here, you with your ego. Think about it and be aware of the many intentions I, as a different animal can have, all working concurrently too. Impossible? You think so
And, well, it’s all good – you still think you saw correctly and you still think you can tell my mind. Ok, I am wrong, like everybody else you interact with. It’s good, I congratulate you, no one can bully you cos you will be doing that part
You thought I wouldn’t think about what you said and come back on it? Shows that your view of me is tainted. I have thought similar of you before but you did return
I don’t get why we always appear to disagree when we are in agreement. I didn’t mean we were at war, I only said that as an observation of the significance of such fundamental misunderstandings and for emotional effect
For meaningful discussion, we will have to come to terms with each others means of expression so that trivial misconstruals are avoided. I have identified one model in your expression – logic, you have identified one of mine – poetic. We both use the others but in greatly lesser degrees – by my knowledge of personality, we are different personalities. We will just have to come to terms with them but hopefully, through all the struggle, everyone will go home painted with new colors ie. influenced in thought models, ideas, that’s a good thing
Well, I agree that “discussions are not for stating ideas” and also not for “stealing ideas”. If that was the case, how would the word be related to ‘decussation’ which is crossing. Hope you understand that as it’s an image to me and easily comprehensible
I think you will appreciate these because “you care about how the world appears”. I share the “helping others see different” part.
And, you have to stop guessing my motives as you’re mostly wrong, as I am about you
“I don’t get why we always appear to disagree when we are in agreement. I didn’t mean we were at war”
After the fullstop, there should be this: ‘we just misunderstand each other’
It reads as “..to make the successful, God” ie. making God of the successful. It relates to making one truth far more important, applicable and presiding than it really is – like losing sight of the bigger reality.
I go with that view that going far into a certain ‘truth’ can lead to Truth. But, for that to happen, one must proceed with what you call ‘intellectual humility’ or my ‘honesty.. to the questions’. I do not know what Truth is but, to me, it’s beyond ‘truths’ and even if one is 1 centimetre beyond, it is more Truthful than mere ‘truths’. Camus said something like this “always go too far, that’s where you’ll find it”. I go with the saying but seems to oppose “everything in moderation” :). But when Camus’ is applied to it, you go too far into “everything in moderation” 🙂
I want to return to the original posted statement:
“The beauty of life is terminated by such things as truths”
I do struggle with understanding of the actual or desired relationship between beauty and truth, whether as ‘truths’ or as ‘Truth’. I sympathize with Plato’s desire to kick the poets out of his perfect society. There is a close tie between poetry and rhetoric. Both serve to persuade. Neither upholds simple straightforward truth above all else.
Too often beauty is used in service of relative or deceiving ‘truths’. I have great respect for beauty. I have a strong sense of aesthetics and I have artistic talent, Also, as you know, I love stories. I think art is the most powerful tool humans possess. In fact, I would argue that art is what lends its power to religion. It’s because art is so powerful that it is so dangerous. People follow stories to their death and to the death of others. Give someone a beautiful vision and they will do anything.
In the US, right-wingers, fundies and neocons have been so successful because they’ve controlled the political narrative. For several decades, we’ve been living out their story. And, damn, it’s a powerful story. It’s not just people being stupid, rather stories can cloud even the minds of the most intelligent.
I might even go so far as to say we never escape stories. We are always clouded and occluded by one vision or another, often many at the same time. If you dissect the stories, they don’t usually make rational sense according to logic and fact… but that doesn’t matter. The greater the lie, the greater it’s persuasion.
It’s not that stories, poetry, beauty is ‘Evil’ or anything. It’s simply amoral, at least at it’s most basic level. On the other hand, it’s beauty that when used for a higher purpose can raise the mind to a higher ‘Truth’.
The doubts I have come from personal experience. I’ve been forced to confront the greatest truths when forced to confront the greatest ugliness. It’s easy to get lost in superficial beauty. Still, I have at times glimpsed a deeper beauty glimmering in dark caverns, but that glimmering can only be seen after having entered and become lost in that darkness. Beauty may be one path to Truth, but even so ugliness is the path to true beauty.
Or something like that. I’m sure you get my general drift.
So logic and fact become the deciders in any case? If that’s it then we are doomed, the lawyer is doomed, the child facing insurmountable odds is doomed, we continue to live in the past as well.
I wouldn’t say ‘true beauty’ but ‘greater beauty’ – prenormative shows that truth shouldn’t flow into beauty. Thing is, truths tend to preside over how one sees, a truth becomes one’s lens and he sees nothing else through it. ‘Truth’, on the other hand goes beyond ‘truths’ and doesn’t allow any to come to rule, it tends to be less exclusive. If one truth contradicts another then neither can be truly true or True.
Take for example, a realist versus a Romantic poet, each upholds a different ‘truth or principle’ as ‘beauty’ or ‘beauty’ as ‘truth or principle’ leaving them excluded from Beauty. What beauty can be created from a mingling of the two, none will ever see or appreciate for them to know.
Those greater ‘Beauty’ and ‘Truth’ tend to get more indescribable the more we leave fact and particular people (I think prenormative talked about some metaphysical beauty) – but those are likely to be called abstractions
Nope. I don’t limit truth or the relevance of beauty to such things as logic and fact. They aren’t the deciders in all cases. They just can be extremely helpful sometimes, but of course utterly useless at other times.
Greater beauty? Yeah, maybe. However, even the most beautiful vision sometimes has to be let go in order to see beyond. I’ve always been drawn to the Hindu tradition where the image of a god initially attracts the worshipper, but the spiritual aspirant must let go of the beautiful vision in order to know the divine ‘Truth’ (the archetypal essence or whatever). Beauty can light the way and it can blind one to where the path is leading. It’s a double-edged sword.
Contradicting truths? I understand the judgment of contradicting truths, but seeming contradiction doesn’t always implies falseness. One truth might be relatively more true and I wouldn’t dismiss relative truth. Also, some seeming contradictions aren’t in reality contradictory. A deeper truth could reveal they are just two views or aspects of the same thing or two results of the same cause. This is relevant for beauty because often it takes beauty for one to be able to see beyond mere appearances of contradiction. The power of story, when used well, can show or imply deeper truths even amidst parts that don’t logically cohere.
“Take for example, a realist versus a Romantic poet, each upholds a different ‘truth or principle’ as ‘beauty’ or ‘beauty’ as ‘truth or principle’ leaving them excluded from Beauty. What beauty can be created from a mingling of the two, none will ever see or appreciate for them to know.”
I’m a bit confused by what you wrote in that paragraph. Are you saying that realism and romanticism are contradictory impulses that can never be resolved? Even if so, can’t they both exist in the same person. Don’t all humans inherently hold immense contradictions? Many poets have written about the contradictory nature of humans, some even praising it as a noble trait to be embraced.
In your last comments, are you criticizing abstractions? I always consider abstractions to be kissing cousins of archetypes. The reason I think this way is because it’s impossible to communicate archetypal experience without abstractions. All of language is built on abstractions. To write ‘shoe’, I’m invoking an abstract notion of ‘shoeness’. There is no such thing as ‘shoe’ in reality.
For me, ‘Truth’ isn’t a mere abstraction. I think I’ve mentioned to you before my interest in the goddess Saraswati, right? I have a pendant of her that I wear around my neck at all times for years and I have a picture of her in my wallet. I often recite various mantras using her seed sound. She is ‘Truth’. She is the ‘Word’, the Creatrix of reality through the power of sound and language, she is the creative source of art and story, the artist’s muse.
‘Truth’ is a visceral reality and a vision of something beyond that emanates and pulses. As I write this, I can pause and feel the sense of what I’m trying to communicate. It’s right here. It’s just what it is. It’s not a matter of ‘belief’. Is Saraswati ‘real’? I don’t know. The question itself doesn’t seem relevant or meaningful. The experience, the feeling is real.
I was trying to think of a particular quote about contradiction. Here it is:
“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).”
Walt Whitman
I came across some other nice quotes that also speak to my own views:
“Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.”
Blaise Pascal
“The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.”
Oscar Wilde
“People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be ”consistent.””
Oliver Wendell Holmes
I am drawn to how people read. I seem to say certain things but it seems people don’t see. I didn’t say that contradictory truths are not true, I meant that they aren’t absolute is what is implied by the contradiction. They might apply somewhere, to and/or for someone but they aren’t absolute. The deeper truth is what I meant by Truth.
I’m not criticizing abstractions, no, it’s just that they tend to be remote and ineffable especially the ones listed, Beauty and Truth. At that level, they can actually flow into each other.
The Romantic and realist example is a real example where they thought they were opposed. Actually, it was Romantics vs classicists, not realists. I am not the one saying that, it is they who thought so. That’s why I said that if they would not see a higher beauty because they invariably exalt and enthrone their respective prescriptions of beauty while excluding the other, the Romantic beauty vs the classic beauty. For me, they don’t oppose, for me, I don’t even get why they oppose – I can resolve them quite easily, I even do that often
Well, I see now. 🙂
We seem to be saying something similar. Yep, contradiction implying truths in question aren’t absolute. Yep, remote and ineffable abstractions tending to flow into each other. Maybe yep to the last as well, but I don’t have any deep insights or strong opinions about the Romanticists vs Classicists.
I always seemed to read differently than others.
Contradiction? I have a post that dramatizes it, I’ll be back, let me get it
Inverted Vision III: Number 12
Contradiction, human is thy name!
I’m going to have to change my expressive style. I’m already on it. People can’t understand me, I’ve lived on the abstract for so long.. Dear God (shake my head in anticipation of the toil and considerable remorse at my obstinacy in the past – thinking idea is all that matters), but gotta do it
Change it if you want, but don’t do so on my account. I usually understand you fine. It took me a while to grasp your style of communication, but it’s true I still get confused at times by how you phrase something. It’s not a big problem since I understand fine once you explain.
I could see, however, that it might get annoying for you to have to explain yourself when what you were trying to communicate was perfectly clear to you. Communicating well is always a good thing and does require much practice.
I’m not sure that abstraction is the main problem in my misunderstanding you. I think it’s the abstraction combined with the poetic style combined with various cultural differences. Any single factor wouldn’t be problematic, but combined together they add up to a very ‘unique’ style.
For me, I always sense that culture might be the biggest factor. An American using an American abstract-poetic style probably wouldn’t throw me. But your personal abstract-poetic style isn’t American. Not that there is a reason it should be.
I guess you have to consider your audience. Most the people I interact with tend to be either North American or European (especially British). So, most of the people I interact with are from my culture, most speak English as their first language and most speak a dialect similar to my own. If I’m dealing with a British or Canadian person online, I wouldn’t even be able to tell I wasn’t dealing with an American.
As such, I usually don’t have to worry about my audience understanding me. Even someone like you from a different culture is still very familiar with my culture and my language style (more than I’m familiar with yours).
That’s very trenchant, I do have a strong familiarity with your culture.
There’s another issue with Africa, being similar to the Orient in the degree to which primitivism has been maintained, we can have quite a high level of intuition in our interactive tools ie. our communicative vehicles. Ideophones, ideograms that words just don’t do justice to. Being an introverted intuitive myself, this just further strengthens it and makes me more remote. For example, the yodel of the highlanders (not the Scots) or so in the US has a meaning that can only be shown by the yodel itself, it suggests a feeling of contentment, fraternity/sorority and general goodwill, a wish to spread the feel-good of the yodeller. It’s a sound I’ve loved since I heard it in my youth, watching cartoon network and ‘The Sound of Music’ (I think).
I’ve read that most communication is non-verbal. However, it’s a different world online, in particular with a discussion like this in a blog. If we were talking in person, there would be far fewer miscommunications as many non-verbal cues are more universal.
Your coming from a different culture can does offer a possible advantage. You have a more outside perspective on the English language. When reading North American and European writing, you don’t necessarily have the same assumptions and biases as the writers which can allow you the opportunity to be more aware of those assumptions and biases.
I used to data a poet. She, like many poets, was in love with the sound of language by itself. She occasionally would just say something in sound not using actual words. The sounds were her way of intentionally expressing something non-verbally. I was just now recalling that my childhood friend and I would sometimes in the past have ‘conversations’ that involved no words, just us making sounds back in forth.
Here is something you’ll find interesting. It’s a song being sung in fake English. There are no words being spoken, but if you don’t listen closely it sounds like words.