Is a Sunset Beautiful if No One Sees It?
Reflections on beauty, morality, and reality
According to the theologian D.C. Schindler[1], beauty is the encounter of the soul with reality in the meeting place of appearance.[2] Hence for there to be beauty, a soul and reality are both required.
Beauty is a transcendental where reality (being) is convertible to beauty as a dimension of human interaction with reality.[3]
Truth is also a transcendental and convertible to being. Truth is the conformity of the mind to reality.[4] When we conform our minds to reality, our minds have the quality of “truth.” When we reject reality out of a preference for some construct of our minds, our minds lack the quality of truth.
With respect to beauty, the soul’s reaction to reality can be congruous or incongruous. There are some things where it would be incongruous with their reality to see them as beautiful, other things exist — a pretty sunset — where the only congruous response is a perception of beauty.
The idea of beauty as “congruity” between soul and reality was sparked by this essay by Eva Kurilova in Reality’s Last Stand. Kurlova offers C.S. Lewis’s ancient — but today, novel — idea about beauty:
Regrettably, Lewis observed a decline in such wisdom and integrity among the youth of his era, leading to what he termed “men without chests” — individuals devoid of honor and virtue. His critique was not about dictating the specifics of what is “right,” “moral,” and “good.” Rather, Lewis lamented that we have lost any sense that the right, moral, and good exist at all, writing: “Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it.”
To illustrate his point, Lewis began his first lecture with an anecdote about the English poet Samuel Coleridge. Coleridge was once gazing at his favorite waterfall when two tourists came along, one calling the waterfall “sublime” and the other as merely “pretty.” Coleridge approved the former judgment and rejected the latter
Lewis’ intention was not to dictate perceptions of waterfalls. His concern was that, when the story was referenced in a “little book on English” for schoolchildren that he called The Green Book, the authors declared that the tourist who called the waterfall “sublime” was merely making a statement about his own feelings. This, according to Lewis, exemplified a troubling shift away from recognizing objective beauty and value.
This sly inward turn toward subjectivity, and away from the belief that certain emotional responses can be congruous or incongruous with reality, deeply troubled Lewis. He feared this trend would lead to “men without chests.” He posited that we would demand from such men qualities like drive and self-sacrifice while relegating virtues like honor and patriotism to mere feeling and opinion. He uses the example of a Roman father telling his son that it is a “sweet and seemly thing to die for his country.” The authors of The Green Book, however, would feel the need to debunk this sentiment the same way they debunked the idea that the sublime nature of the waterfall has any reality outside of the tourist’s own feelings.
In the balance of the essay, Kurilova moves from Lewis’s insights about aesthetics to a discussion of the “new morality,” which centers a “hierarchy of oppression” as the sine qua non of moral analysis. In other words, she moves from the transcendental of “beauty” to the transcendental of “goodness.” She observes:
No matter what, the “trans” person in any scenario is viewed as inherently oppressed and incapable of wrongdoing, especially against those deemed as oppressors.
A case in point is Audrey Hale, a mass shooter who killed three adults and three nine-year-old children at a private Christian school in Tennessee. Because she identified as a transgender man, activists quickly slammed media outlets for “misgendering” Hale by referring to her using female pronouns. CNN and The New York Times even issued “corrections,” essentially capitulating to the preferences of a mass child killer. Prominent transgender activist Eli Erlick even called the school a “right-wing institution” and asserted, without evidence, that Hale had been “abused” there.
Kurilova has many great insights, but she does not understand the dependence on truth and goodness with being, the affirmation of these things with being. Since truth and goodness can only exist if there is an external reality — since they are simply ways of talking about external reality — truth and goodness must exist outside the personal choices of a person or group, truth and goodness in the same way and to the same extent that existence (or being) itself exists outside of the subjective feelings, hopes, opinions of individuals or groups. Kurilova doesn’t seem to understand this when she observes:
While I favor Lewis’ view, I’m not arguing that everyone must necessarily agree with the concept of objective morality. I’m sure many lively debates could spring up around his words, and no doubt many have. I know numerous people with strong morals and values who might insist that they came to those values rationally, that we don’t need to rely on tradition, and that morals aren’t necessarily objective. I also know that some would say evolutionary biology has played a significant role in shaping moral attitudes, a view I accept, though I believe is not the sole factor at play.
So, in the end, this worthy essay succumbs to the “post-modern predicament” of being unwilling or unable to affirm that reality calls the shots, that there is not “your truth” and “my truth,” there is only the truth and we either conform to it or we are delusional. [5]
D.C. Schindler offers a footnote where he addresses a recent example of this “bourgeoisie metaphysics,” which fears being too explicit in making claims about truth.[6] Schindler writes:
Just a few days ago, the head of the FBI explained the Bureau’s decision that no crime was committed in Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account to conduct official business. He said in response to a question at the congressional hearing, “That’s just the way it is. Folks can disagree about it.” What a bizarre statement! These two claims contradict each other, and yet they tend not to strike anyone that way: to say “that’s just the way it is” means that this is a true fact, regardless of what anyone might think. To say “folks can disagree about it” means that whether it is true or not is debatable. He is thus “pretending” to allow people to form their own opinions on the matter, regardless of what those opinions happen to be, and at the very same time making that allowance only by eliminating any possible significance the opinion might have.[7]
(Schindler, p. 28, fn. 13.)
So, according to Comey, you are free to disagree with something that is “just the way it is”?
That’s very white of him.
Of course, shortly after that, you are not free to disagree when the claim is “transwomen are women.”
Really, though, Comey’s willingness to let you disagree was permitted only so far as it never made a difference. You might think that Hillary’s failure to secure top secret information was a criminal offense, but your opinion never mattered, and that was the end of it until there was a Republican president who didn’t strictly comply with the rules for top secret information — never mind that those documents weren’t put on the internet for everyone to hack, then, the rule was reversed, and that was “just the way it is.”
Pre-modern understandings of Truth might expect that similar things would be treated similarly, but we are long past that kind of pre-modern thinking.
The examples could be multiplied.
What’s going on?
The answer goes back to metaphysics. As Schindler describes, in modernity (and post-modernity), we have a tortured relationship with reality. We are not sure that reality actually exists. We are told that all we can know is ourselves, our subjectivity, our feelings, etc., but none of that vouches for an external reality.
Perhaps we live in the Matrix.
Perhaps we are God?
Don’t we want to be God?
St. Thomas Aquinas explains that there is a fundamental difference between God and creation with respect to Being and Truth. Created beings know Truth by perceiving Being, i.e. we know Truth because our mind accepts and conforms to reality. Thus, for us, the direction of knowledge is from reality to the mind. We truly know something when our minds conform to reality. Anything else is delusional.
On the other hand, with God, the directionality is reversed. God knows the universe because God’s mind makes the universe.
Schindler explains:
Aquinas defines truth as the “adequatio intellectus et rei,” a proper joining together of the mind and reality. This definition may initially seem to reduce truth to a quality of knowledge, or in any event to reduce truth to an attribute of our minds, since it suggests that truth is not there in things to begin with, but exists only insofar as things are known by us. In fact, however, Aquinas explains that there is an ontological truth that precedes our knowing, and indeed makes that knowing possible in the first place: that truth is the unity things have, not with our mind, but with God’s mind. But God does not know things in an accidental way, as so many “pre-given” objects that he happens to encounter. Instead, his knowing is what makes things be at all.
(Schindler, p. 75.)
St. Thomas Aquinas alludes to this in the following passage of the Summa Contra Gentiles:
[7] Moreover, the divine intellect does not gather its knowledge from things, as ours does; rather, as will be shown later on, it is through its knowledge the cause of things. The knowledge that the divine intellect has of other things is after the manner of practical knowledge. Now, practical knowledge is not perfect unless it reaches to singulars. For the end of practical knowledge is operation, which belongs to the domain of singulars. Therefore, the knowledge that God has of other things extends to singulars.[8]
In short, prior to modernity, it was axiomatic that an external reality existed and that the truth we held in the mind came to us from that objective reality outside ourselves. Even if our understanding was biased, partial, or obstructed, our job was to do the best we could to understand and conform to reality.
That was the human approach.
The post-modern approach is divine. In the post-modern era, we — defined as the elite — do not have to conform our minds to reality, rather we impose our feelings and opinions on reality. Can men get pregnant? Don’t be silly — of course, men can get pregnant, if we feel strong enough about the subject.[9]
For moderns and post-moderns, our opinions/feelings/will define the essential nature that things have. Thus, men can get pregnant, humans can be border collies, and piles of trash can have ontological existence and civil rights.
It is good to be God.
All that is required for this happy state of affairs is to reject the transcendentals. If we disconnect existence from truth, goodness, and beauty, the world is our oyster.
Of course, by doing that we eliminate any possibility that we can have meaningful discussions about issues of truth, beauty, and goodness. How could it be otherwise if there is no external reality that contains meaning, a meaning that exists for its own sake, rather than to promote some agenda? Schindler makes this amazing statement, which we can see now as prophecy (but which was always just common sense):
According to the traditional doctrine, the transcendentals are “convertible,” which means that they coincide in any given subject: omne ens est verum et bonum (et pulchrum): whatever is, is true, is good, and is beautiful, insofar as it is. We wish to propose that their convergence in reality is essential for the proper existence of philosophy; when the transcendentals are denied, whether implicitly or explicitly, philosophy won’t long remain.
(Schindler, p. 25–26.)
If we pick apart the transcendental threads that link existence and essence, existence and truth, goodness, and beauty, then we are not just stopped from talking about whether there are beautiful sunsets, we are also stopped from talking about whether men can be women, humans can be dogs, piles of trash can be voting citizens, etc.
All we are left with is raw power where truth is determined by cancellations, shouting down opponents, and, ultimately, concentration camps.
The stakes are high. If there is an independent reality, then it calls the shots. In the end, Reality will rule. If we don’t think that we have to conform our minds to reality, then we might be right on occasion, but that will occur only accidentally. When it doesn’t occur, then we will be in for a rude surprise that will be absolutely inexplicable to us until we do conform our minds to reality and thereby seek the good and the beautiful as they really exist. [10]
Footnotes:
[1] Love and the Post-modern Predicament by D.C. Schindler.
[2] “[B]eauty is an encounter between the human soul and reality, which takes place in the “meeting ground,” so to speak, of appearance.”
Schindler, D. C.. Love and the Postmodern Predicament: Rediscovering the Real in Beauty, Goodness, and Truth (Veritas Book 28) (p. 3). Cascade Books, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition. (Hereinafter cited in the form “Schindler, p. 2.”)
[3] In philosophy, “transcendental” refers to a property of being that describes the way that being is experienced by by other beings. Truth, beauty, goodness, and unity are transcendental properties of being itself. Aristotle postulated that unity was a transcendental property of existence, i.e., for something to exist, it had to be the existing thing. If a dog exists, it has to be a dog, a single dog, one dog, one unified dog. If it was an incomplete dog, it wouldn’t exist as a dog. Thus, existence implies unity; unity implies existence but somehow speaking about unity does not exhaust all the possibilities of existence. Other transcendentals include truth, goodness, and beauty. Plato in the Symposium suggests that “love” might be a transcendental property of existence. See this Stanford Philosophy Dictionary entry for more information. A corollary of the concept of transcendentals is that they are convertible to each other and being. For example, something is true if it conforms to reality. Since reality is everything that has “being,” truth is said to exist if the mind conforms to those things with being. This understanding gave Western philosophy an empirical orientation by orienting understanding to reality..
[4] Now since everything is true according as it has the form proper to its nature, the intellect, in so far as it is knowing, must be true, so far as it has the likeness of the thing known, this being its form, as knowing. For this reason truth is defined by the conformity of intellect and thing; and hence to know this conformity is to know truth.” (Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part I, Q. 10, a. 2. )
[5] To be fair, evolutionary biological ethics is a form of objective morality. Presumably, it exists without regard to the desires or feelings of those subjected to its control.
[6] Here is how Schindler discusses “bourgeois metaphysics”:
Why might this neutralizing of truth claims be desirable? The point seems to be, above all, not to deny any particular truth claim outright, in the sense of taking a definitive position on the matter (“It is absolutely not the case that leaves are green, and anyone who says that they are is therefore wrong.”), but, just the opposite, to avoid taking an inflexible stand on one side of the question or the other. We want to allow a particular claim to be true, but only “as far as it goes,” and as long as this does not exclude the possibility of someone else taking a different view of the matter.13 Gianni Vattimo, the Italian philosopher-cum-politician, has advocated irony as the proper stance of citizens in the modern world: democracy works, he believes (ironically?), if we are sufficiently detached from our convictions to be capable of genuine tolerance of others, whose convictions may be different from our own.14 Such a stance is what Charles Péguy took a century ago to be the essence of modernity. According to him, to be modern means “not to believe what one believes.”15 Along these lines, we might think of the status of truth claims in terms of the so-called “right to privacy,” as analogous, that is, to private opinions. A thing is permitted to be true, as true as it wants to be, as long as that truth does not impose itself on others. Its truth is its own, as it were, and may not bear on anything beyond itself, may not transgress its particular boundaries. It is a self-contained truth, and, so contained, it is free to be perfectly “absolute.”
Let us call this a “bourgeois metaphysics.”16 “Bourgeois” is an adjective meant to describe any form of existence, pattern of life, set of “values,” and so forth, that is founded on the principle of self-interest, which is posited as most basic. To speak of a “bourgeois metaphysics” is to observe that such an interest, such forms, patterns, and values, are themselves an expression of an underlying vision of the nature of reality, namely, a view that absolutizes individuals, that holds that things “mean only themselves”; it does not recognize things as belonging in some essential manner to something greater, as being members of some encompassing whole, and thus pointing beyond themselves in their being to what is other, but instead considers them first and foremost discrete realities. On the basis of such metaphysics, it is perfectly natural to make self-interest the basic reference point for meaning, the primary principle of social organization.
Schindler, D. C.. Love and the Postmodern Predicament: Rediscovering the Real in Beauty, Goodness, and Truth (Veritas Book 28) (pp. 14–15). Cascade Books, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.
[7] At the time, I thought FBI Director Comey’s entire presentation was bizarre, but this particular bit of banality completely escaped my attention. Truly, our elites are imbeciles.
[8] Singulars — a man rather than mankind — are a problem for classical philosophy. If “forms” are the most intelligible unit of understanding, what do we do with the flawed knock-offs that are individuals? Aquinas’s answer was to point out that God is the creator of everything. God does not create some general category and then let lesser demiurges work on spec. God creates everything and so must know everything. God therefore puts the existence and essence into the things via what he knows, rather than extracting essence from perception as we do.
[9] “I do believe in fairies. I do. I do.”
Shout it very loudly; Tink’s life depends on it!
[10] “Modern culture is largely a conspiracy to protect us from the real.”
Schindler, (p. 2).
