Introduction to philosophy for aesthetics

"Philosophy" is often interpreted, etymologically, to mean the love of wisdom, but "befriending wisdom" probably is a little closer. To befriend wisdom implies to cherish (contemplate and act on) the wisdom you have, to recognize where you lack wisdom, and make efforts to seek wisdom. As a tradition of thinking and writing and living going back to ancient Greece, philosophy has developed a number of subdisciplines, some of which are included below.

One way to classify some of philosophy's sub-disciplines

Here are some of philosophy's subdisciplines in the realm of truth:

• • Philosophy of religion and philosophical theology

  • Metaphysics or ontology—reality-ology or being-ology

  • Philosophical anthropology: What does it mean to be a human being?

  • Philosophy of mind

  • Epistemology—knowledge-ology

  • Logic: the study of correct ways of reasoning

  • Philosophy of science and philosophy of nature

The concept of truth

What is truth? The question is huge and calls for an answer that draws on the fullness of the one who answers. Will the answer begin with philosophical reflections on statements like “The cat is on the mat,” or with religious statements, or somewhere else? This philosophy celebrates truth in its simplicity and also truth in its complexity in science, philosophy, and religion. The following pages offer an introductory overview so that the reader will not get lost by trying to build a unified concept from pieces studied in abstraction.

I asked aesthetics students, most of whom had no background in philosophy, to write their concepts of truth as part of a project in which, in addition to the study of philosophers and the consideration of works of art, we were exploring the idea of artistic living. The inquiry had to do with beauty’s relations with truth and goodness. In asking, “What is truth?” I assumed that everyone had some peak experience of insight, some major realization, even if that experience had since been forgotten or rejected. To begin by bringing to mind one’s own grasp enables the inquiry to be grounded, less passive, and more in touch with one’s own experience. Sydney Jordan’s response appropriately highlights goodness before coming to her core insight regarding truth.

For me, truth is a feeling of satisfaction. Not in the way of feeling full and satisfied after a meal, but rather a sense of wholeness. For example, my family has a rather large garden that we work every summer. This past summer was the first time I was allowed to have a crop of my own. The feeling I got from the start when the ground is first turned to the harvest is a sense of completeness. At the end of each session in the garden I am dirty, sweaty, and tired, but it is my hard work and dedication that produces something good. People that do what I do need determination, hard work, patience. Being in the garden every summer is a truth for me. We plant it, care for it, wait, and it grows then feeds us and others. Truth is what is there when all of the fancy is taken away. Truth is understanding the value of things, that all things have value and are in some way connected.

The meaningfulness of her insight, her truthful connection with reality, will become increasingly evident as we proceed.[i] A person who takes the time to recall, interpret, and express like this at the beginning gains greatly, since the result anchors inquiry in experience, simplicity, and insight. To be sure, the progress of inquiry brings expansion and often revision to the initial concept.

A sharp contrast with the previous answers is seen in this poem by Allison Johnson.

Truth

Full of knick knacks

Left-overs from late night snacks

Stale and salty

Yet we eat them anyway

Choking the jagged edges down

We take it

After all

I am not devouring it

It is devouring me

Consuming

With each and every bite

It gets harder and harder to swallow

To gag down the truth

How do I know?

I feel it

Confined all the tears

As am I

Till they come rushing out of my stale

Now salty eyes

The poem leaves several possibilities of interpretation intriguingly open. First, the concept of truth may be ironic: “truth” is official truth, a straight-jacket, needing to be rejected by an honest recognition of how distorting, rigid, and hurtful it is—in other words, a lie. A second possible interpretation is that truth here is all-too-real and recognized as such but resisted because of its unwelcome implications for a soul that remains torn. A third possibility is that truth is being confused with fact.

A depressed person who was lucid and on the verge of making positive changes said, “I’m running away from truth because it’s so horrible.” This was the moment to draw a distinction. Facts can be ugly, but truth is something different. We take a step into truth just by looking at the chain of causes that led up to the ugly fact. There is an intelligible process here, and in an evolving, progressing universe, causes do not merely perpetuate themselves in a linear way. Ugliness does not last forever. Now a big-picture concept of evolution requires adding philosophic and spiritual components to scientific ones if it is to have the leverage that truth in its fullness can have. But if those components are present, the resulting concept of truth is not something to gag down but something to savor.

It is a fact that some persons are overwhelmed by the question about truth, and some doubt the very concept of truth itself. There are so many competing versions of truth. Isn’t it all relative to what a person happens to believe? Will the doubts and difficulties drive the concept of truth from the field or force it to retreat, or will they stimulate us to find a way to respond that does not suppress those difficulties but dissolves them?

The contrast between truth as embraced by Jordan and “truth” as rejected by Johnson is that in the first case truth is found to be livable. Indeed, this difference functions as a criterion that distinguishes the genuine article from what is false.

[i] Sydney Jordan was a student in Kent State University’s aesthetics class in the Fall of 2008, and the quotation from her paper is used by permission. The following poem by Allison Johnson, a student several years earlier, is also used by permission.

Relativism

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

These quotes raise the issue of relativism—the philosophical view that truth is relative to the person holding the particular view. According to relativism, “She believes that P” means “P is true for her”; and to say, “P is true” may be misleading insofar as it omits the reference to the person(s) holding the belief that P is true. Truth is just an affair of personal or cultural belief.

Beliefs differ of course, depending on personal differences, cultural differences, and so on. The fact of differences in belief or opinion is acknowledged by everyone in the debate. What distinguishes the relativist is the relativist’s view that the fact of differences in belief is given decisive philosophic importance. In other words, it doesn’t make sense to talk of truth except as the view of one side or other of the debate. In other words, there is no standard of truth, no ideal standard, no divine standard, no cosmic truth to which various views are more or less adequate. Opinion is all there is.

The non-relativist replies: just because people differ doesn’t mean that one of them can’t be wrong. When there is clearly a right answer to a particular question, we see that the fact of disagreement doesn’t make any difference about what’s true.

Relativism may be extended from judgments about what is true to judgments about what is beautiful or good. Thus there is no standard of beauty, just preferences; it would not make sense to say that one person’s aesthetic judgments are more mature or better cultivated than someone else’s. Beauty and goodness are not real; they are merely the projected correlates of preferences. Thus if we express a view about the moral horror of Nazism, a relativist may say, “Well, that’s the belief of your culture. The Nazis felt otherwise.” Note: as a statement of fact, the observation is indisputable. The relativist uses that observation of fact as though it humiliates the critique of Nazism.

Some criticize relativism for making rational disagreement impossible, since, according to relativism, there are no criteria to which one can appeal that are not merely relative to one’s personality or culture. If we disagree, we can either tolerate the other (e.g., the Nazi’s are free to do their thing—who are you to judge?!), or we can fight. However people do sometimes effectively criticize and persuade one another, and older and poorer ideas do sometimes eventually get changed. This also happens across cultural differences. It would seem that people’s value intuitions have more in common than the relativist is prepared to acknowledge.

Nevertheless, it is important to explore how people may reasonably differ in their judgments about truth, beauty, and goodness. One need not embrace either relativism or a monolithic and static conception of truth, beauty, and goodness. To some extent one may posit convergence, as evolutionary progress gradually brings views closer and closer. To some extent, one may recognize differences that tend to endure; perhaps there are certain aspects of many-sidedness that are structural, deep, and are properly represented by differing perspectives on truth, beauty, and goodness. Insofar as these perspectives are intelligible to all, e.g., tendencies to emphasize certain values more than others, then the prospect for mutual comprehension and cooperation in seeking wisdom remains open. Insofar as such differences are thought to be incommensurable, the relativist is vindicated.