What constitutes beauty? How does art "bite" us? ... The sunset is beautiful when it shows a fabric of colorful clouds lacing the sky, Mozart's symphony brings us joy for its harmonic blend and swift trotting of sounds, Rembrandt's paintings seize us with arresting lighting contrast and context rich expressions.
But then again, some(times you) may prefer a bleak, wintry scene in a forlorn countryside, cacophonic jangle of heavy metal rock music, or a postmodern painting that looks nothing more than a mischievous combination of random shapes and colors.Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, you may well say. But I think a more accurate claim would be "Beauty (or art) is something that leads us to more than what our senses detect."
As Plato describes in his famous "allegory of the cave," we are like slaves tied up in a cave with our backs towards a fireplace at the far end where people and animals walk passing by. Not being able to move or turn our heads around, all we can see in our front are shadows of those people and animals passing by. Only on some rare occasions when we untie ourselves and turn do we see the real things.
In Plato's ontological parlance, there are two worlds we live in: the world of Being and the world of Becoming. The world of Being corresponds to an invisible world of "Forms"–the real things; the world of Becoming corresponds to the visible world of Appearance–the shadows.
How does one go from seeing the world of appearance to the world of forms? Probably through a mystical movement of the heart (or "God given grace," in religious lingo), an "ascending imagination" that combines and goes beyond the perceptual (sensual) and the conceptual (cognitive) capabilities of Man.
It is not a passive act. Though it is the form itself that provokes and initiates, it takes the will or desire to know from the individuals to shape themselves into the right receptacles for the form's beauty. The form is an objective being, while the reception of it a subjective effort and experience.
Such subjective/objective duality can also be used to explain the answer to the question "what is truth?". Subjectively, truth is whatever we believe to be true–we do not find truth in searching for it as one would seek some object but in "the fixation of belief." But such beliefs must be caused by some external permanency–by something upon which our thinking has no effect, beliefs that lead to conceptions and practical acts into a whole whose reality can at the same time signify another's reality yet stand on its own. Truth is thus objective.
If beauty and truth are the ultimate goals for the world of appearance to pursue, ideas and acts that lead people closer to such ends are "good" ideas and "good" acts.
Being, besides being Beautiful and True, is also the ultimate Good.
Inspired by the book "The Community of the Beautiful: A Theological Aesthetics" by Alejandro R. Garcia-Rivera:
