It's been two weeks?
Goodness, truth and beauty; three things that are valuable in and of themselves. I've been in a lot of dialogue with various persons regarding the value of experiences and community, and how these relate to discovering the truth and living a good life.
And, in case this wasn't already obvious, I'm beginning to lean towards filing these experiences, like the actual being in a situation or knowing a person in a way that can't be expressed in propositions, pretty much all knowledge by acquaintance, as being included in the heading of beauty.
Part of the difficulty comes in the fact that these things are not propositions and are as such neither true nor false. Applying truth concepts to all of this content, which is often subjective, muddy and maybe even unanalyzable, seems to be a blatant category fallacy. To say that "your experience of frustration/love/joy/sadness is false," would be not only arrogant and ignorant, but just plain out silly. So it can't be true or false, but it isn't just something that can be discarded out of hand; there's a genuine value here.
Part of what solidified this idea for me was taking in a Dodgers game with some friends this evening. I thoroughly enjoyed the time with the friends, and know that I intrinsically valued this time spent together. Yet the time itself isn't good in any objective sense, even if good things were achieved or obtained during the time. And to say that this was truth would be incorrect. As I searched for the right words to describe the time spent together watching the ball game, joking in the car, looking at the LA city lights, or eating ice cream, "beautiful" kept coming to mind, not just about something that we saw, but about the entire time together.
So I want to say that the subjective content of our experience is what falls under the heading of beauty. My alternative is to look at the radically different ways in which people ascribe to things or experiences the property of "beauty", and think that humanity's method of perceiving beauty is seriously damaged. Damaged more thoroughly than the ability to recognize truth (we have means for ferreting out the truth) or goodness (we still possess moral instincts and intuitions about what is virtuous) to such a point that there is next to nothing left of our ability to perceive beauty so that it becomes amazing that we even know what the word means.
My idea is that all of our experiences, positive and negative, carry beauty in them. Even when we experience horrible things, there is a connection to the things that are good and true (even if by violation of what is good and true), and the value of the experience is because it reflects these things and is beautiful on its own. Beauty is the source of the (undeniable) value for the experience that we accrue moment by moment, even when we are toorepulsed by the content of the experience to see the connection to truth and goodness to learn and appreciate the beauty in our lives.
I hope I revisit this in the near future....
And, in case this wasn't already obvious, I'm beginning to lean towards filing these experiences, like the actual being in a situation or knowing a person in a way that can't be expressed in propositions, pretty much all knowledge by acquaintance, as being included in the heading of beauty.
Part of the difficulty comes in the fact that these things are not propositions and are as such neither true nor false. Applying truth concepts to all of this content, which is often subjective, muddy and maybe even unanalyzable, seems to be a blatant category fallacy. To say that "your experience of frustration/love/joy/sadness is false," would be not only arrogant and ignorant, but just plain out silly. So it can't be true or false, but it isn't just something that can be discarded out of hand; there's a genuine value here.
Part of what solidified this idea for me was taking in a Dodgers game with some friends this evening. I thoroughly enjoyed the time with the friends, and know that I intrinsically valued this time spent together. Yet the time itself isn't good in any objective sense, even if good things were achieved or obtained during the time. And to say that this was truth would be incorrect. As I searched for the right words to describe the time spent together watching the ball game, joking in the car, looking at the LA city lights, or eating ice cream, "beautiful" kept coming to mind, not just about something that we saw, but about the entire time together.
So I want to say that the subjective content of our experience is what falls under the heading of beauty. My alternative is to look at the radically different ways in which people ascribe to things or experiences the property of "beauty", and think that humanity's method of perceiving beauty is seriously damaged. Damaged more thoroughly than the ability to recognize truth (we have means for ferreting out the truth) or goodness (we still possess moral instincts and intuitions about what is virtuous) to such a point that there is next to nothing left of our ability to perceive beauty so that it becomes amazing that we even know what the word means.
My idea is that all of our experiences, positive and negative, carry beauty in them. Even when we experience horrible things, there is a connection to the things that are good and true (even if by violation of what is good and true), and the value of the experience is because it reflects these things and is beautiful on its own. Beauty is the source of the (undeniable) value for the experience that we accrue moment by moment, even when we are toorepulsed by the content of the experience to see the connection to truth and goodness to learn and appreciate the beauty in our lives.
I hope I revisit this in the near future....
posted by illation at 11:11 PM
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