What we judge as Beautiful reveals our state of being in terms of current perceptions of Truth and Goodness.

Editor's prefatory comments:

I am greatly indebted to Dr. Mortimer Adler for what I know about this subject; which isn’t much, as we’ll be investigating these concepts for a very long time to come.

In the “Writing” article we discussed how the typical story plot of our world will soon become passé. Look at virtually any DVD jacket. See the movie synopsis. It goes something like this:

“Mary and/or John Smith were having a wonderful life until a day came when, without warning, their world blew up. Threats and disaster suddenly mounted on every side. They now valiantly fights back against incredible odds to save themselves and those they love. Will they succeed? Be prepared for danger, action, drama, love, humor, and thrill-a-minute.”

Well, to one degree or another, that’s pretty much the size of it, isn’t it, for all “stories.” In fact, a “story” isn't even considered to be such without this element of problem-cause-solution, some threat to well-being. All this appeals to the "Needy Little Me" Ego. But we are headed for a new world, Summerland, wherein there are no invasions, no threats, no upheavals, no loss of happiness. And therefore the very concept of what constitutes a “story,” or meaningful literature, or even the nature of the arts, will change for us.

In that coming day of better sightedness, we will still be interested in literature and the arts, but not in a low-grade, base-passion, scare-me-to-death way. Instead, we will seek out artists, seers, and teachers who can answer questions such as,

“Who can tell me how to access greater joy in my life and spirit? Who can show me the way to better perceptions of love and peace? Who can tell me more about truth, goodness, and beauty?”

This “Part III essay on Beauty” offers a small down-payment on that coming attraction. I write this primarily for my own edification, to clarify my own thinking, but you can read my notes if you'd like.

The following is a redistillation of some of Dr. Adler's writings -- discussions from his Syntopicon essay, his book Six Great Ideas, and his 1950s tv-episode on The Great Idea of Beauty -- plus, at no extra charge, my own developing insights.

Much of what needs to be understood about Truth and Goodness has already been offered in various articles on the Word Gems site and cannot be reproduced here. We should also acknowledge that it would be very beneficial to study Dr. Adler’s writings on these subjects: his Syntopicon essays and his book “Six Great Ideas.” However, to offer a summary of Truth and Goodness:

The essence of Truth

Truth is not so difficult to define. Truth, in our thinking, is a one-to-one correspondence between the thoughts in our head and reality as it exists.

Our personal opinions never enter into the equation concerning truth. What we believe, shout about, have fits over, will not change what is.

The statement “This is my truth, even if it’s not your truth” offers more heat than light. The facts of the world, life as it is, reality unvarnished, will not be affected by our small opinions, one way or the other. If millions of people say, “The Earth is flat, and this is my truth, because I read it in the Bible” or “heard it at church from my Infallible Guru,” the spherical reality of our world will not suffer a whit.

To take the extreme relativistic stance that “This is true for me, even if it’s not true for you” confuses mere opinion with hard-edged reality. Our judgments about what exists, if they’re wrong – that is, if there is no one-to-one correspondence between mind and the facts of the world – will have not the slightest bearing upon Truth as it is. People believe all sorts of things, most of it errant, but none of this mental chaos affects what’s real to even the smallest degree.

The essence of Goodness

When people say, “This is true for me,” what they’re really saying is, “I like it, I want it.” In this declaration, Truth now enters the realm of the Good and becomes a form of the Good. To say something is “good” speaks to one’s desires. What we label as “good” is to view it as an object of desire.

Relativists say there is nothing good or evil in itself but that thinking makes it so. In other words, “If I want it, if I desire it, then, for me, it’s good.”

Look at how this principle of private definition of the Good has played out in history and in our world today.

cherished notions of “motherhood and apple-pie” vary from culture to culture

Herodotus (writing circa 450 BC), in his treatise on the Greco-Persian wars, comments on “nomos,” the Greek word for “custom, convention, or law.”

He talks about the arbitrariness of “nomos,” of how people become accustomed to what they know and what they’re taught in a particular culture, religion, or society.

barbarity to one, the good life to another

In Greece, Herodotus says, a certain activity “X” is considered a barbarity, something, according to his sensibilities, beyond the pale of what any person of even modicum advancement would tolerate. But, he asserts, in another society of the Near East, “X” is considered a normative expression of “nomos,” indeed, a reasonable, even honored, course of action, with the refusal of “X” deemed to be an atrocity and appallingly distasteful.

who wrote the html-code for your programming, what you believe

The great “father of history,” Herodotus, is correct, of course. That which the average person believes is simply a product of what Grandma said, the Nice Young Man at Church said, what teacher in third grade said. These early pedagogues “wrote the html code,” our cultural programming, for what would become our personal sense of propriety, of right and wrong. In popular parlance, we refer to this burdening weight of prejudicial assumption as our “baggage,” which is not easy to set aside.

you can be conditioned to believe anything

Krishnamurti's lecture, Brockwood Park, England, Sept 14, 1969

"You know, there is a whole section, the Communists, who do not believe in spirit, not in a spirit, nor in a soul. The whole Asiatic world believes that there is a soul, that there is the Atman. You can be conditioned to believe anything. The Communist doesn't believe in God; the others believe in God because that is the way they have been brought up. The Hindus believe in a thousand different gods, conditioned by their own fears, their own demands and their own urges. Can one become aware of these conditionings - not only of the superficial conditionings but also of those deep down - and be free of them? If one is not free, one is a slave, always living in this rat race, and that we call living."

READ MORE in the "Morality" and "Reason Behind The Reason" articles.

Real and Apparent Goods

Adler helps us to pierce all this subjectivism and relativism by offering an important distinction, real and apparent goods.

Whatever goodness is, it’s not a property of things themselves. What we call “good” is just another way of saying “I desire it, I want it.” And then, by extension, we go on to assert, “It looks nice,” that is, "it has beauty."

But think about how often in life this illusion is shattered into a million fragments:

The new car that seemed so thrilling in the showroom is now just a monthly burden on the family budget.

That good-looking fellow you married has not filled your desire, and the sense of emptiness in your life persists.

You thought that having children would strengthen your marriage, but instead, they’ve merely added to the daily stress, one more thing to fight about.

That new job, so promising for advancement, has devolved to something much less with an oppressive supervisor and unfriendly co-workers.

We could go on.

All of these things seemed to be real goods, but then revealed themselves as merely apparent goods.

Some, or maybe all, things are, or could be, “good” in the right context, at the right time, with the right person. But how easily visions of “the good” fade into a dreary struggle for existence.

Are we back to “the good” as creature only of private taste and preference?

Is there such a thing as the innately good? If so, in this we would also find basis for the intrinsically beautiful.

what we ought to desire

Adler: Aristotle said that there is a way of determining the true, the good, and the beautiful. These become manifest if they correspond to “right desire.” What did Aristotle mean by “right desire”? There are things that we “ought” to desire by virtue of our capacities as a human being. These are the “real goods.”

For example, says Adler, human beings by nature are growth-oriented. Our senses naturally delight in receiving information. And therefore, we “ought” to desire knowledge, in view of constitutional requirement. In these "right desires," we never “need” anything that is bad for us, although we can “want” what is bad for us.

Adler: “Our needs are never excessive, as our wants often are. We can want too much of a good thing, but we can never need [it] too much... We can certainly want more than we need… We may or may not, in fact, want what we need. Almost all of us want things that we do not need and fail to want things that we do need.”

Things that satisfy our needs are the real goods and are truly good for us. It’s quite ironic that we can never be mistaken about our wants: If we want something, then we want it, and the wanting is sincere, although often misguided. But we can be mistaken about our needs: We might say, “I don’t need that,” but in fact we might very much need it. This is another way of saying that people are confused and deluded about real and apparent goods.

I began this writing with a quotation from Plotinus:

"Beauty is the translucence, through material phenomena, of the eternal splendor of the One.” 

My purpose here is to explain what Plotinus saw concerning Beauty.

John-and-Mary romance as instinctual response

 Fiona Johnson, "The Girl In The Red Dress," The Matrix (1999)

supernormal stimulus

Nikolaas "Niko" Tinbergen (1907 - 1988) was a Dutch biologist and is regarded as one of the founders of ethology, the study of animal behavior. His findings, much of which is reported in his seminal writing, “The Study of Instinct” (1951), would earn for him a Nobel Prize (1973).

Among the many animal-behavior discoveries, Tinbergen, along with fellow researcher, Konrad Lorenz, learned that the color red often plays an important part in the mating process.

A particular focus of Tinbergen’s study centered upon what he called the “supernormal stimulus.” This precept would manifest in the construction of an artificial object imbued with a stronger stimulus for an instinct than one supplied by nature. This will become clear when we consider the following interesting examples:

stickleback sees red

The red-underbellied male stickleback, in its territorial protestations, will normally attack other sticklebacks when it sees their red. However, Tinbergen made cardboard versions of the fish, but without great attention to detail, except for the red underside which was painted with more red than found in the real fish. The territorial males mounted a more vigorous attack upon the cardboard fish with the “supernormal stimulus” -- or even against a lump of wax with a red stripe! -- than against the real stickleback intruders.

Editor's note: Tinbergen gained an initial clue as to the secret motivations of the stickleback when a randomly-passing red postal truck caught the attention of the fish in the aquarium, producing an attack-posture!

robin red-breast

A male English robin, in autonomic, stereotypical behavior, will ward off fellow males who venture into his territory. (As I commented to a friend, this is de rigueur on "Animal Planet.") Tinbergen put this stimulus-response to the test by constructing two models: one was simply a tuft of feathers with a bright red stripe (on the left), with the other, a well-crafted and detailed robin but with no red breast (right). The territorial males ferociously attacked the nameless red tuft but gave a pass to the smart-looking mannequin robin.

paper-butterfly dreams

A similar example, Tinbergen made paper butterflies but with exaggerated, more-defined sexual markings. The male butterflies chose the “super-stimulus” paper dreams, moreover, tried to mate with them, while the real-deal butterfly ladies were left idling on the bleachers without a dance partner.

Tinbergen outlines many other examples of programmed animal behavior in his work “The Study of Instinct.”

Let’s look at this carefully, this seminal work on animal behavior by Tinbergen.  

If these animals under review could speak to us, they would say, “The color red is the most beautiful color to me. I’m just wild about it, can’t tell you why exactly, but it just makes me feel crazy good. When I see red, I just want it. I desire it so much. It’s all I can think about. It just seems so right and true to me.”

The animals’ perception of beauty as focused upon the color red reveals an underlying biological mechanism. The animals didn’t rationally decide that red is most beautiful of all colors; instead, this view is imposed upon them, and they are helpless but to follow its directive.

On this lowest bio-animal level, we see that a “judgment” of beauty, here, in terms of the color red, reflects a “shining through” of an underlying constitution.

And the question for us becomes, how many perceptions of beauty in our lives are nothing more than an autonomic “super-stimulus” response?

There’s nothing wrong with a stickleback or a robin led by pleasant beauteous visions of red; and, as we are bio-mammals, there's nothing wrong with this principle as pertaining to our particular situation; but, let’s not confuse ourselves to believe that “seeing red,” in terms of species perpetuation, is anything more than instinctual impulse. It's very much a programmed bio-perception of "beauty."

the Nice Young Man at Church has no power to transform mere mammalian super-stimulus fever into a real marriage of spirits

Even the Pope said this; that, marriages thus constituted are “religiously null.” But John and Mary, even the conscientious and well-meaning ones, already know this; and the emptiness of heart and soul speak most loudly during sleepless nights at 3 AM. What's required is a "union of spirits."

You cannot change, you cannot transform -- via hocus-pocus, some magic hand-sign and empty godtalk -- common biological contagion into a true marriage of two souls in union. 

None of the “religiously null” marriages of this world will survive transition to the next, nor shall they enjoy legal standing in the “courts of heaven.” At best, it's just a temporary "domestic business contract," which might easily be voided.

Unless your mate is linked to you at the soul level, it’s all just “playing house” and “playing church.”

beauty is not in the thing

Jiddu Krishnamurti, September 24, 1967, London: “Like love, beauty is not the cultivation of thought. A thing of beauty is not beauty. Beauty is not in the thing, in the building, in the person; but there is that beauty which is not the result of conditioning, in which thought in no way interferes.”

The sense of beauty is an opinion, a judgment, concerning the good and the true.

Beauty issues not from one's “hardware” but “software,” the “programming.”

See more discussion in the “waves” article.