On my way to the gym recently, I noticed a message carved into the stone above a side entrance of the Ball State Museum of Art: "Beauty is truth."
Such a striking phrase. So pleasant, so parsimonious, and yet, the more I considered its meaning, the more difficult it became to understand.
Definitions of both "beauty" and "truth" are extremely subjective, and there are about as many ways to look at the statement "beauty is truth" as there are people who look at it. After careful thought, however, I'm inclined to think that the statement "beauty is truth" is not an altogether accurate statement.
Suppose it's true. So, beauty is truth, and thus, truth is beauty. Depending on their philosophical orientations, some would allow me to deduce that if truth is beauty, then truth must be beautiful.
So far, so good. I'd be the first to admit that the truth is beautiful; when we know the truth, the discrepancy between the way we think things are and the way things really are is eliminated. Even if it negatively affects us, knowing the truth aligns us with the way things really are. The purity of existing this way is one thing that makes truth beautiful.
The question this idea raises, however, is what the truth exactly is, and how exactly we can see it. You could say everyone has a personal truth, or "tunnel of reality" as a friend of mine likes to call it. All people see the world through their own eyes and construe their own versions of how things are, believing what they see and, for the most part, assuming they're right in doing so. Since everyone's personal truth is different, how do we know the absolute truth, which sociologists like to call "the big-T Truth"? In other words, what is the nature of our world when it is unsullied by our subjective human interpretations?
People normally turn to religion to answer this question. Then again, religions are kind of like people. There are many different kinds of religions, but they each hold the belief that only this religion is in possession of the big-T, absolute Truth -- this is applicable to many politicians as well.
I doubt any self-respecting insurgents in the Middle East would commit a suicide bombing if they didn't believe they were in-tune with some sort of truth, often the militant Islamic version, in this case.
A common quote from the Christian Bible comes from Jesus himself: "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life," and if no one believed that, we wouldn't have Christmas, Easter or Billy Graham today.
So what do we get from this discussion? We learn that the truth is beautiful in that it represents harmony between our subjective world and the real world, but also that the path to finding the truth is often anything but beautiful.
As for beauty being truth, one must only look at Paris Hilton to know that which is beautiful is not always true.
The statement "beauty is truth" is, thus, more accurately restated as "the truth can be considered objectively beautiful, but what is beautiful is not necessarily the truth."
Think the museum staff can fit that above the doorway?
Write to Marie at
mmzatezalo@bsu.edu
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