BEAUTY, TRUTH, & GOOD

By Yasuhiko Genku Kimura

© 2019

We have defined wisdom as the intelligence that is the transcendental consilience, the coincidence of opposites

(coincidentia oppositorum), that forms the cosmic conscience (con-science) which transcends paradoxes. Beauty,

Truth, and Good, herein capitalized, are three variations in the human experience of coincidentia oppositorum and

of wholeness.

In so far as Beauty, Truth, and Good are three varied experiences of coincidentia oppositorum and wholeness, each

contains a paradoxical tension, suspense, and a transcendental reconciliatory release, catharsis. That is to say, all

three are dramatic. Also, as an experience of wholeness, each contains the other two within. Therefore, Beauty is

Beauty because it contains both truth and good; Truth is Truth because it contains both beauty and good; and

Good is Good because it contains both beauty and truth. Beauty is truth and good perceived in the world of

appearance. Truth is beauty and good conceived in the world of abstraction. Good is beauty and truth achieved in the

world of action.

A survey of philosophical descriptions of Beauty throughout history—from the ancient, through the medieval,

and to the modern and postmodern world—confirms that however different the accounts of Beauty may seem

on the surface, with a surprising regularity, the descriptions agree upon presenting Beauty as a coincidentia

oppositorum—a paradoxical unity and a transcendental consilience of elements that would otherwise seem to

stand in irreconcilable opposition.

Therefore, Beauty sought and achieved in art is the sublime experience of a transcendental consilience of the

merely beautiful and the merely ugly of the dualistic mundane existence. Following Friedrich Schiller, we can

say that Beauty fulfills our humanity in all of its irreducible complexity; however paradoxical it may seem,

Beauty satisfies our desire for enlivenment, movement, change, surprise, and novelty, while simultaneously our

longing for rest, stillness, permanence, stability, and familiarity.

Beauty is an intimate encounter between the human soul and reality, actual and possible, which takes place in

the meeting ground of appearance. According to Thomas Aquinas, Beauty represents a kind of hybrid between

Good and Truth. Like Good, Beauty appeals to our appetite, but what distinguishes it from Good is that, like

Truth, it includes an ordination to the intellect at the same time. He states in Summa Theologiae:

Thus, it is evident that beauty adds to goodness a relation to the cognitive faculty.

Whereas the desire for Good is a desire to have the reality itself (Aquinas: a thing is desired as it exists in its own

nature), Beauty is a more graceful or gratuitous appetite that allows the reality simply to be in itself, and accepts

what the reality gives or shows of itself.

While Beauty appeals to our intellect, it does not satisfy our desire for understanding, in the way that Truth

does. The desire for Truth concerns the concealed inner reality beyond mere appearance (therefore “truth is

unconcealment,

” as Heidegger illuminated), while the desire for Beauty is an intellectual desire that rests in the

appearance itself. Some reality is implicit in the appearance in which we delight as beautiful. We experience a profound sense of fulfillment in Beauty because we are made to perceive the appearance of things—because it

is not just “all men by nature desire to know” but “all men by nature desire to perceive.” In so far as Beauty tells

us something about appearance, it follows that learning to love Beauty opens up a depth dimension in our

experience of reality more generally.

Few people have the imagination for reality. ―Goethe

The act of will, the realm of Good, can be seen, as did Aquinas, as a kind of joint work, a co-operation, between

the will and the determining power that lies beyond the human soul, indeed, infinitely so. All of these factors

are involved in every choice made, which is why we need always to view the agent, not as an isolated, sheer

power to choose, but as a subject embedded always in concentric circles of relations, that is, as organically

connected to the world from the beginning. Therefore, the will is moved, in different ways, by the intellect, the

sensorial appetite, the will itself, and an extrinsic principle, that is, the good and ultimately the Good (which is

often synonymous with “God”).

Aquinas defines the will (voluntas) as the ‘intellectual appetite’ (appetite: ad-petere = to move towards and seek

out), which implies that it is essentially a desire for what is good in truth, as the intellect reveals it. The will is

the intellectual appetite, a movement, originating in reality to which we join ourselves through free choice. It is

our power to be attracted by the good, and to move ourselves inside of that attraction. It is a movement whose

principle lies beyond itself, and as such is able to initiate a movement that allows it to reach beyond itself.

Those who have no holistic wisdom, no holistic intelligence, fail to perceive Beauty, conceive Truth, or achieve

Good that transcludes (‘transcends and includes’) the contradictory or the paradoxical. Beauty presents an open

invitation to intimacy with reality. Truth represents our deep reception of unconcealed reality into ourselves.

And in the acts of volition rooted in Good, we give ourselves to that which is other than us, that is, we actually

involve ourselves with others. The integral act and movement of perceiving, conceiving, and willing evolves as

a dynamic trialectic interface and interchange between consciousness and reality, and the self and the world.

Art, science, and technology are three realms of conscious human experience in which a wholeness is sought and

achieved. Therefore, art, science, and technology are three fields in which human consciousness evolves and

expresses its evolution. The wholeness that is sought through art is Beauty; through science is Truth; and through

Technology is Good. Beauty, Truth, and Good designate three distinct qualities of experience of wholeness that

transcend the contradictions and dichotomies of the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false, and the good

and the bad at a higher level of reality (ontological), of perception and conception (epistemological and gnoseological),

and of action (praxeological).

As consciousness evolves, more Beauty, Truth, and Good will unfold in human experience and culture.