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I like the line from Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn"
"Truth is Beauty, Beauty Truth"
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Here's an illuminating discussion of this subject by Jurgen Lawrenz:
This line from Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn echoes a fundamental philosophical principle, stemming ultimately from Plato's to kalon, to which the philosopher ascribed "independent existence" and thus made a matter of concern to the human soul. I see it as the provision of an objective referent for the concept. It occupies one extreme position in the concept space relating to Beauty, reaffirmed in one guise or another by other philosophers of the front rank - viz. Aquinas and Cusanus, attributing of Beauty to manifestation of God's creativity (beauty as a reflection of divine truth); Kant and "disinterested contemplation" (beauty as a value criterion, communicating truth if we divest ourselves of fallible judgement induced by overt pleasure); Schopenhauer's notion of Beauty "absorbing" the Will and giving a glimpse of redemption; Chinese philosophers connecting Beauty to the rhythm of Life which is in "sympathetic vibration" with the Tao.
The opposite end of the spectrum is occupied by those thinkers who see in Beauty a psychological phenomenon, obedient to the "subjective referent": Hume attempting to put "good taste" on an objective footing; Voltaire analysing Beauty in terms of pleasure and delectation; Freud seeing in Beauty a mechanism for the "sublimation" of repressed (erotic) drives; adherents of contemporary Biopoetics looking on Beauty as an adaptionist strategy of organisms. None of these associate Beauty with Truth.
Others lean this or that way from a sort of middle ground. Thus Jung and Hegel both stress the mythical/symbolical content of Beauty, but while Hegel seems content with a "sugar candy theory" (Beauty as a mediator of [harsh?] Truth), Jung goes the opposite way, stressing that Truth mediates Beauty and touches deeper roots. Adorno puts a case (picking up on van Gogh's bon mot that "the world seems like an unfinished sketch") that Beauty conveys the rational essence of (constructive) experience, turning the table on evolutionists who labelled it a "luxury appetite" and forget that our troubles stem from mostly from language (mis)use.
This presentation puts all these ideas into a context for debate which, connecting the first and last, I call The Match between Plato and Vincent: impersonal, eternal, immutable perfection on one side blending gradually in the opposite claim that Beauty and Truth depend on human perception which is at once the making intelligible of nature's phenomena (rational beauty) and the making intelligible by mimetic/mythical/symbolic practice (creative beauty).
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create evolution
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