To Beauty, with Love

Dear Beauty,

Maybe you never answer my letters because the address I have for you is wrong. That story the townspeople told about you riding off with the devil –- could it be they were lying? Since Goodness left, saying she can’t be herself in an armchair with books only, that she’s a doer, I haven’t heard from her either, though I’ve written to the poorhouse once a week. That’s where they said she went. And it’s not like her to ignore a letter –- you, I never know about; you always took strange fancies. But Goodness -– well, if I can’t trust her, where does that leave me?

So now I’m beginning to wonder whether this tower is the right place even for me. I dearly love these books. But they are coming to feel too small to hold me. Where are you?

Yours quizzically,
Truth

Theresa’s post on truth, beauty, devils, goodness, cookies, and Dangerous Liaisons raised all sorts of interesting questions for me, especially about beauty. If we are going to grant this classic triad of transcendent values (and for now, let’s, though that is a whole other interesting argument to have), then it seems one of the essential things about them is that each one is inherently valuable. Each is in itself worth pursuing, and needs no source outside itself to prove its value.

Another important thing about these three is that they are conceived of as a unity. In order to be ultimately good, something must be propositionally true, morally good, and perceptively beautiful. They are equal, and special, and unified, precisely because each to some extent requires the others. And so our thought-experiment, in splitting them into three persons with separate wills, is misrepresenting them a little from the get-go. Keats said truth is beauty; I’d say real truth must be beautiful, and real beauty must be true. And I’d extend this reciprocity to goodness.

There are all kinds of problems with the little missive I’ve given Truth above. For one, if she’s Truth, shouldn’t she know where Beauty is? My favorite problem, though, is the question of the trustworthiness of beauty. Can beauty lie to us? Can beauty be evil, or at least, can it be subverted and used to further ends that are evil?

This is a question that I have not heard raised in the same way with goodness and truth. Things can be made to look true, certainly, even though they are false; but this is a subversion, if anything, of reason, not a subversion of truth. No matter how it is presented or perceived, a statement is either true or it is a lie. In the same way, things can be made to look good even though they are evil, but this is hypocrisy or self-righteousness or, again, lying; it is not a subversion of goodness. And yet with beauty we think differently; when something appears attractive, or interesting, or entertaining or awe-inspiring, in spite of being unjust or untrue, we say beauty itself has been subverted to the ends of oppression or falsehood. If someone told us Truth and Goodness had run away with a dashing devil, we’d ask What have you been smoking? But when we’re told Beauty took his hand and hopped on the black stallion behind him and rode down into hell, we shake our heads sadly and say What a shame.

I think we’re wrong; I think we don’t know Beauty very well at all.