Anxious Beauty, Haughty Beauty
Reducing the beautiful to the true requires the search for beauty to be an endless wandering or a timid abandoning.
At the beginning of this year, we collected a post consiting of "points we seem to reference again and again." One of these described the potentially infinite space of good designs:
Being made up of finite things, any design can only properly relate a few of its parts. Conversely, there is an endless ocean of good designs that vary upon which parts are most properly ordered. A child's drawing of Jesus with His arms looped around the world does not have a proper relationship to the human body or the globe, but quite accurately relates to the deeper truth that "God so loved the world…"
I had the very great pleasure recently in finding a far better expression of this intuition.1 The work is titled Art and Scholasticism by Jacques Maritain. While the prose is dense, the work itself is surprisingly short. The section I'm drawing quotes from is Chapter 5, “Art and Beauty”. The quotes themselves are not in their original order.
When I wrote the original paragraph, I had in mind a unified reply to two types of people. The first is an anxious designer, the second is an exaggerated traditionalist. Both suppose there is a certain construction that surpasses dismisses all other attempts at creation, the only difference is that the designer is keen to find it (and always failing) and the traditionalist argues we have found it (often some centuries ago). Maritain provides better language for this reply, and a deeper critique:
Beauty, therefore, is not conformity to a certain ideal and immutable type, in the sense in which they understand it who, confusing the true and the beautiful, knowledge and delight, would have it that in order to perceive beauty man discover "by the vision of ideas," "through the material envelope," "the invisible essence of things" and their "necessary type."
Both our designer and our traditionalist confuse the beautiful with the true. In a way, this confusion is fitting to both given their focus upon the true. My encounter with this idea as an anxious designer certainly stemmed from my familiarity with computer science, mathematics, and the natural sciences. There is One True Answer to each problem (if 'it depends' is an answer), and so my intuition would be to find the One True Answer (or approximations to it) for any design problem. The traditionalist often reacts against the relativism2 stemming from postmodernism, and so strongly perceives and articulates the true. However:
[St. Thomas] takes care to warn us that beauty is in some way relative—relative not to the dispositions of the subject, in the sense in which the moderns understand the word relative, but to the proper nature and end of the thing, and to the formal conditions under which it is taken.
To be clear, beauty is tied in with the true. Maritain notes "although the beautiful borders on the metaphysical true, in the sense that every splendor of intelligibility in things implies some conformity with the Intelligence that is the cause of things, nevertheless the beautiful is not a kind of truth, but a kind of good."
The end result is that there are indeed an "endless ocean" of potentially beautiful things:
It is the same with proportion, fitness and harmony. They are diversified according to the objects and according to the ends. The good proportion of a man is not the good proportion of a child. Figures constructed according to the Greek or the Egyptian canons are perfectly proportioned in their genre; but Rouault's clowns are also perfectly proportioned, in their genre. Integrity and proportion have no absolute signification, and must be understood solely in relation to the end of the work, which is to make a form shine on matter.
Finally, and above all, this radiance itself of the form, which is the main thing in beauty, has an infinity of diverse ways of shining on matter.
The traditionalist can claim that we have lost an important aspect of beauty, but not beauty itself. They can even use relations between the aspects to order them - an artwork that gets the spiritual end of man correct is better than an artwork that only considers the natural end of man, for example. However, the traditionalist ought to know the relations and aspects - and therefore the bounds - in which the work is beautiful.
Similarly, the designer must decide the bounds of their work and build from them. A fork designed with motors to counteract tremors for people with Parkinson's is not designed for ease of production; a fork designed for both of these values will necessarily be designed against other values.
Such is the task (and the glory!) of working with the finite to point to the infinite.
I am confident this idea is one that appealed to me because so much of my own formation is either explicitly or implicitly influenced by the Scholastic tradition.
I have met people with many positions on philosophical topics; I have yet to meet someone who holds the strawman relativist position that good and evil are truly relative to culture.