The author aims to provide a succinct and critical examination of how prominent Western philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, and Bernard Lonergan conceptualized the philosophy of beauty
“Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplate them,” famously averred David Hume. The attitude of all-embracing skepticism, popular in Hume’s epoch and all the more epitomized in the present-day Feyerabendian admission that “everything goes,” effectively relativizes not only whatever one can say about truth, but also whatever one can say about beauty. All too often one’s methodologically unaided embracing diversity and plurality translates into one’s inability to tell ugliness from beauty. This paper will conduct a concise critical review of the way such key Western thinkers as Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, and Bernard Lonergan conceived of philosophy of beauty. It will look into the possibility of perceiving beauty as something objective as opposed to its subjective apperception as something only “in the eye of the beholder.” In doing so, the article will proceed from the study of philosophy and theology of beauty by the Lonergan scholar John Dadosky, whose relatively recent book The Eclipse and Recovery of Beauty: A Lonergan Approach grounds the cognitive possibility, and the ontological importance, of an objective approach to beauty.
What made Thomas Aquinas (d. 1279) think that the notion of “beauty” is at any rate different from truth, unity, and goodness, i.e. Aquinas’ other transcendentals, i.e. the most common and yet transgeneric properties with which one describes being? For Aquinas, the transcendental “good” manifests through the final causality that determines the proper end or goal of something: something is “good” as long as it is useful for something else. In contrast, beauty manifests through the formal causality: something is “beautiful” as long as its contemplated intelligible form arouses an aesthetic pleasure.[1] Furthermore, for him, the transcendentals are convertible not only with the notion of “being” as “truth,” of which they are descriptions, but with each other as well. Indeed, if something is such and such, it must be true that it is so. In turn, every being is “one” and “whole” because unity is a condition of a thing’s individual being. Pleasing as the apprehension of the sunset (its “beauty”) might be, one’s realization of the cosmic utility of the movement of the sun (its “good”) and of the reality of this movement (its “truth”), is of no less significance. The problem in this regard is that such philosophical giants of the ancient and medieval times as Aristotle or Boethius did not mention “beauty” as a transcendental. Such scholars as Umberto Eco, Armand Maurer, and Franz Kovach are all of the opinion that Aquinas did believe in the transcendentality of beauty and, following Plato’s lead, declared that every being is both good and beautiful. Umberto Eco too says that, for Aquinas, “Beauty is identified with being simply as being.”[2] There are also such scholars as Jan Aertsen who argues that Aquinas did not confer the status of a transcendental on beauty because he did not deal with beauty when he discussed the transcendentals in his De Veritate. However, the fact that Aquinas did treat beauty in a greater detail later in his career, makes Aertsen’s point rather untenable. Later on, such thinkers as Duns Scotus and Francisco Suarez asserted that being and beauty are not really identical and that the link between the two is conceptual rather than metaphysical. For these later scholars, beauty becomes just a “‘logical note’ to the transcendental concept ‘good.’”[3]
The further caveat is that this identification between beauty and goodness, in Aquinas’s philosophy, is implicit rather than explicit: for Aquinas, “Beauty adheres to being only through the meditation of the good.”[4] Jacques Maritain’s reading of Aquinas, however, elevates beauty to the status of “the radiance of all the transcendentals united.”[5] Hans Urs von Balthasar, too, asserts that beauty sets some kind of “seal” upon all the transcendentals.[6] Moreover, many a scholastic apprehended beauty and goodness as identical due to the fact that the Greek notion of kalokagathia combines the attributes “beautiful” and “good” into one single notion.[7] In the same manner, in Islamic theology, the concepts of “beautiful” and “[morally] good” are expressed by the same word husn; the word qubh, in turn, means both “ugliness” and “evil.”[8]
What remains unclear in the works of these prominent thinkers, however, is how exactly beauty differs from the intelligible form and – if at all – from goodness? Aquinas points out that beauty “adds to goodness a relation to the cognitive faculty.”[9] That is, while goodness, as a transcendental, satisfies one’s goal of attaining perfection, beauty arouses one’s disinterested, unmediated pleasure of cognizing of the form of this perfection. As it were, beauty entices one into contemplating its referent, and not necessarily into doing something about it, for one appreciates beauty for the latter’s own sake. Further, even if one apprehends beauty as the pleasure of one’s attaining intellectual or physical perfection, one does not create this pleasure as an object of one’s apprehension. Rather than being created in the eye of the beholder, beauty, as the direct shining forth of being, is just out there – waiting to be appreciated and to yield pleasure.[10]
Hans Urs von Balthasar (d. 1988), another prominent theologian of the last century, believes that the “wrong turn” of humanity to subjectivism, the one that became especially problematic after the Cartesian revolution, is to be blamed for the decline of beauty in the West.[11] Armand Maurer, in turn, sees the famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant (d. 1804) as the major culprit and says, “The subjectivity of beauty and ugliness is a legacy to modern philosophy from Immanuel Kant.”[12] Indeed, after the Kantian demarcation between the phenomenal and the noumenal, aesthetic experience came to be divorced from objectivity and reduced to one’s subjective “feeling” of pleasure. Maurer writes that, for Kant, “the judgment of taste is therefore not a judgment of cognition, and is consequently not logical but aesthetical, by which we understand that whose determining ground can be no other than subjective.”[13] Indeed, for Kant, pleasure is the harmonious activity of one’s faculties of imagination and understanding. At the same time, for Kant, ultimate reality and beauty pertain to the noumenal world that is forever beyond one’s ken. All one can know is one’s world of phenomena, the one that he or she constructs through his or her a priori principles of sense and reason that are independent from any extrinsic source of knowledge. Since these a priori principles function identically in all humans, one can speak of universal aesthetic judgments which are, nevertheless, not objective. As it were, with this view of Kant’s becoming, in due course, as popular as to be called a “Copernican revolution in philosophy,” one’s extrinsic world, a real world “out there,” ceased to exude beauty as the splendor of intelligible forms. Concomitantly, beauty became stripped of its ontological ground in God as its source.[14] In other words, beauty became that which one’s own intrinsic faculties of intellect and imagination project unto one’s unique perception of the extrinsic world.
This is not to say that Thomist philosophy cannot accept, along with Kant, that one’s apprehension of the sensually beautiful is to forever remain entangled in one’s sensual imaginational intuitions and to always fall short of becoming a fruit of one’s purely reflective insights. This intermediate status of the sensual beauty alone might warrant suspicion in the eyes of an objectivist. In other words, when the pleasurable object is sensual, the intellect invokes the relevant abstract concept not as readily and directly as it does in the case of the objects of pure intelligibility – like, for instance, in the case of mathematical equations.[15] Even in this case, however, it will not be lost on the Thomist that, in a sense, the sensual beauty is perceived intellectually as well: ultimately, it is one’s intellect that contemplates the radiance of the form.[16] As for Kant, he comes to oscillate between affirming that something looks “beautiful” and affirming that something is “beautiful.”[17] It is also difficult to see to which extent the Kantian aesthetic judgments are the product of one’s imagination and not of one’s intelligence. Further, given to the Kantian emphasis of the non-cognitive status of aesthetic judgements, it is all the more bizarre that Kant speaks of universally binding aesthetic judgments. On closer inspection, it becomes clear that Kant’s whole epistemology is fundamentally confused. As Bernard Lonergan (d. 1984), a prominent Canadian philosopher and theologian, points out, while attributing truth to the noumenal world, i.e. that the knowledge of which is unattainable in principal, Kant goes on to build his positive philosophy on conceptualized sensitive intuitions which are built on the phenomenal world which is, in turn, nothing but the appearing of the same noumenal world![18]
Revolutionarily for his neo-Thomistic philosophical affiliation, Lonergan makes an epistemological “turn” to the knowing subject. For him, knowledge of truth is only possible when one is able to answer questions about reality through the four levels of one’s intentional interiority, i.e. the empirical level as one’s perception and recollection of sensual data, the intellectual level as one’s understanding these data, the rational level as one’s judgment as to the validity of what was understood, and, ultimately, the level of value and practical implementation of that which one judged to be valid. Every preceding level is sublated by every succeeding one.[19] For Lonergan, one’s a priori knowledge of reality is yielded by the very way one’s transcendental intending works, i.e. by one’s organized mental activity of knowing through one’s unrestricted drive to inquire as to one’s sensual experience, understanding, and judgment.[20] Most importantly, one can extrapolate from the unrestricted nature of one’s quest for knowledge to the unrestricted nature of one’s quest for beauty and goodness: one cannot feel that one has done “just enough” of good deeds, and one’s favorite music only arouses one’s further aesthetic appetite.[21]
The caveat here is that Lonergan never fully develops the notion of “beauty” in relation to the four levels of intentional interiority. In one place, though, Lonergan says that beauty is “self-transcendence expressed through the sensible,” i.e. through the whole structure of one’s conscious intentionality and the latter’s unrestricted orientation toward the intelligible, the true, and the good.[22] At this point, he seems to agree with Maritain in that beauty is the fruit of the transcendentals together, saying about beauty – as related to other transcendentals – that “it is the whole put together.”[23] Furthermore, for him beauty is “a total response of the person to an object,”[24] which suggests that Lonergan would approve of a philosophy of beauty that is constructed in the light of his philosophy of objectivity that grounds its truth claims in a critique of the knowing mind.[25]
What is this philosophy of objectivity? In a nutshell, Lonergan elaborates upon the operations of a consistent, self-evident cognitive structure within the mind of every human being as something that can address and even resolve such epistemological dilemmas as the apparent divide between objectivity and subjectivity, the natural and the supernatural, and theory and practice. This invariable structure presupposes that every human being, regardless of their profession or background, possesses an inherent, impartial, and unrestrained desire to comprehend all possible referents of the notion of “being.” This innate desire drives individuals to pay attention to all available information, engage in intelligent understanding, make rational judgments, and assume responsibility for their decisions. This pursuit of knowledge unfolds within the realm of fundamental "levels" or "operations" of intentional consciousness, where individuals direct their attention toward objects of thought.[26]
Dadosky derives a foundation for a possible Lonerganian aesthetics not only from Lonergan’s philosophy of objectivity, but also from the main inspiration of Lonergan himself, i.e. Aquinas. Indeed, both goodness and beauty, i.e., two transcendentals (most comprehensive categories of the human mind), are identical as far as their relation to form, goes.[27] At the same time, they differ as “notions” (ratione). That is to say, goodness is oriented toward the final cause as an object of one’s desire or appetite, and beauty is oriented toward the apprehended intelligible form as an object of one’s pleasure or delight.[28] Now, in Lonergan’s hierarchy of interior consciousness’ patterns, form is related to the question for intelligent understanding “What is it?” and goodness related to the question of value and deliberation “Is it valuable?” or “What should I do?” The answers to these two questions give rise to insights about the intelligible “what-ness” of things (the intellectual level) and to the "judgments of value" (the level of value and the practical implementation of this value) respectively. Insights into the intelligibility of an entity and the “judgments of value,” thus, come to correspond to the formal and the final causality, respectively. Insofar as the final causality subsumes the formal one, it transpires that both goodness and beauty are based on form, but in a different way – goodness indirectly (for it presumes the existence of an extrinsic goal) and beauty directly (for it is aimed at for its own sake). Further, for Lonergan, after the knowing subject realized the intelligible “whatness” (i.e. form) of something he or she invariably cannot but respond – explicitly or implicitly – to the question for critical reflection “Is it [really] so?” If answered affirmatively, what is affirmed comes to be judged as a fact existing independently, the question “Is it so” itself explicitly and invariably anticipating the affirmable existence of an impersonal and transsubjective fact. It follows that, as long as the judgments of both facts and value refer to the question of truth, and as long as truth is convertible with beauty due to the principle of the convertibility of the transcendentals, any aesthetic judgments are also judgements on truth.[29]
Furthermore, for Lonergan, a true value is not only something grasped by intelligent insight and decerned by judgment but is also something apprehended by one’s feelings.[30] Harmony, wholeness, and clarity, i.e. the components of Aquinas’ aesthetic “splendor of the form,” are well present within one’s value judgments as the unity and wholeness of one’s data, as a proportion between one’s data and the content of one’s cognitive insight, or as the latter’s lucidity. The fact of the convertibility of the transcendentals, however, allows Lonergan to go further and affirm that one’s apprehension of the aesthetic is one’s apprehension of human good on its profoundest level.[31] As a manifestation of moral goodness, values are intrinsically superior to mere satisfaction understood in the sense of the “sensual agreeableness” which, for Kant, underlies aesthetic experience.[32] On this reading, one’s grasp of beauty is one’s intentional and intensive response with all of one’s feelings to an apprehension of value in the object of one’s intentionality.[33]
But why form’s clarity, harmony and integrity produce such a breathtaking effect on its beholder that he or she is carried away in the act of his or her contemplation – so much so that one ceases, at least for a moment, to see the object-subject dichotomy? One, for instance, can feel “dissolved” in the contemplated beauty and lose oneself in a piece of art or some natural landscape, becoming a simple mirror of the object of his or her contemplation. In the words of Arthur Schopenhauer (d. 1860), in this situation, one becomes “that eye of the world which looks out from all knowing creatures, but which can become perfectly free from the service of will in man alone.”[34] Indeed, in this artistic pattern of experiencing the world, one transitions to what Lonergan calls the world of “elemental meaning,” i.e. one that is involved when the subject’s consciousness is not instrumentalized into a specific pattern.[35] If beauty is about one’s grasping a surplus of meaning that is elemental, God as the ground of all meaning must be the ground of all beauty.[36] This way, the beholder of beauty becomes liberated from any instrumentality, ceasing to serve anything except Beauty itself. It is in this point of contemplative stillness that beauty overshadows value, or, properly speaking, becomes the highest, nay sole, value.[37] Beauty calls one to contemplate itself – so irresistibly that it stops one in one’s tracks. At this level, one even does not need to fully conceptualize one’s contemplated object, for an instantaneous insight allows one to grasp its intelligibility right within one’s sensual apprehension, such a grasp being – insofar as an aesthetic experience can be also deemed a religious one – an immediate gift from on high. The need for the Kantian “limiting” concepts arises only afterwards, as one transitions from the mode of immersion in unmediated, elemental meaning to the more mundane workings of the world mediated by meaning. Indeed, in aesthetic experience, one encounters a surplus of meaning or ulterior significance that is “not easily articulated.”[38] Yet, it is life-giving. From the perspective of Islamic Sufism, too, God is a “treasure to be contemplated”: He created the world with a view to contemplating His creative activity through the eyes of its beholders.[39] In this sense, what bedazzles one in one’s aesthetic experience might be the divine sublimity – “something that in its magnitude, force and mystery surpasses our understanding, even as it magnetically draws us in.”[40] Indeed, Evelyn Underhill (d. 1941) famously claimed that “all true artists are mystics.”[41] Lonergan would possibly add, however, that this contemplation of God via beauty, in order for it to be genuinely valuable, is to yield to the criteria of authenticity: the true lovers of beauty would always only partake of beauty (instead of claiming to “possess” or “own” it) and would never proceed from the urges of individual and group egoism, anti-intellectualist parochialism, or neurotic blockages.
Thus, for Lonergan, it would be one’s authentic subjectivity that will lead one to the objective understanding of what is of value and what is not. It is then that the authentic type of beauty – be the latter pertinent to the aesthetic, moral, or philosophical realm – will radiate forth both in one’s daily life and ideas. Always a fruit of one’s reasonable answer to the question “Is it [really] so?” and of one’s responsible choice to implement this answer in the course of one’s life, this authentic subjectivity is ultimately identical, for Lonergan, with objectivity and preserves one from succumbing to the quagmire of relativism.[42] Let alone creating works of art with physical materials, this authentic beauty creates a work of art out of one’s own living – something to which Lonergan refers as “dramatic pattern of experience.” This pattern denotes ordinary living that is so “charged emotionally and conatively” that humans come to be “capable of aesthetic liberation and artistic creativity.”[43]
Thus, beauty is not, as Gilson thought, just a subdivision of the good.[44] Again, according to the principle of the convertibility of the transcendentals, any authentic beauty is simultaneously good, and everything that is authentically good is beautiful – albeit this beauty might be moral or intellectual rather than aesthetic. In this sense, every judgment of beauty is like a judgement of value and fact. One might hardly have a clear grasp of the purposiveness of the object of his or her aesthetic contemplation, and beauty hardly lends itself to be associated with the final causality which underlies the concept of value. But it is so rather because beauty acts as a goal-in-itself. Verily, there is no particular use for beauty: one does not contemplate a beautiful flower to gain any material benefit. As the existence of art museums demonstrates, though, it does not mean that beauty is good for nothing. To paraphrase Kant, beauty is a value-in-itself. Beauty as aesthetic pleasure or delight, nonetheless, does technically pertain to the formal causality as the “splendor of form” of the contemplated object. This delight, however, is not only of sensual nature – even if the object of contemplation is physical, it does invoke intellectual delight and contemplative value – so much so that it can even motivate the person to live in accordance with this beauty via receptionis (the passive aspect of his or her will) and to “radiate” goodness due to his or her morality being centered in this beauty.[45] Therefore, one of the most important ways to reverse the eclipse of beauty today is to lead one into an authentic contemplative mood vis-à-vis the surrounding world. It is this mood that enables such Native Americans as Dine-Navajo to not only see beauty (hozho) everywhere in nature, but also practice beauty as their central value in their everyday living.[46] Accordingly, a Lonerganian philosophy of beauty needs not only to show the semi-agnostic people of the present age how to obtain authenticity in their experience of beauty, but it also needs to show how they can amplify, deepen, and diversify this experience through concrete contemplative techniques already found in different world religions. In this regard, mushāhadah (“[transempirical] witnessing”), a Sufi technique of the philosophical and spiritual contemplation of the way beautiful divine names unfurl both in nature and within one’s consciousness, might serve as a powerful auxiliary.[47] It could be this combination of the Lonerganian “authentic subjectivity” with these techniques that would allow humanity to once again see Hegel’s point as he said, “It is the function of art to deliver to the domain of feeling and delight of vision all that mind might possess of essential and exalted transcendent Being.”[48]
[1] John Dadosky, The Eclipse and Recovery of Beauty (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2014), 32.
[2] Dadosky, Eclipse, 30-3.
[3] Dadosky, Eclipse, 36-7.
[4] Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (New Heaven: Yale University Press, 1986), 25.
[5] Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism (New York: Pantheon, 1953), 173.
[6] Dadosky, Eclipse, 34.
[7] Dadosky, Eclipse, 31.
[8] Ahmad Z. Obiedat, “Defining the Good in the Qur’an: A Conceptual Systematization,” Journal of Qur'anic Studies 14, no. 2 (2012): 111.
[9] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, http:/www.newadvent.org/summa, 1-2.27 ad 3, in Dadosky, Eclipse, 34.
[10] Dadosky, Eclipse, 44-45.
[11] Dadosky, Eclipse, 100.
[12] Armand Maurer, About Beauty: A Thomistic Interpretation (Houston, TX: University of Houston, 1983), 38-25.
[13] Maurer, About Beauty, 25. The italics is Maurer’s.
[14] Maurer, About Beauty, 25-6.
[15] Maurer, About Beauty, 38-39.
[16] Maurer, About Beauty, 37.
[17] Dadosky, Eclipse, 152-154.
[18] Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology, ed. Robert M. Doran and John D. Dadosky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 247.
[19] Dadosky, Eclipse, 22.
[20] Dadosky, Eclipse, 152.
[21] Dadosky, Eclipse, 45, 152.
[22] Bernard Lonergan, “Method in Theology Lectures,” Q&A, Regis College, 1969, unpublished, in Dadosky, Eclipse, 52.
[23] Lonergan, “Method in Theology Lectures,” in Dadosky, Eclipse, 52.
[24] Bernard Lonergan, “Method in Theology Lectures,” in Dadosky, Eclipse, 52.
[25] Tad Dunne, “Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984),” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A Peer-Reviewed Academic Resource, https://iep.utm.edu/lonergan (accessed December 3, 2020).
[26] John Dadosky, The Structure of Religious Knowing: Encountering the Sacred in Eliade and Lonergan (New York: State University of New York Press, 2004), 49.
[27] Dadosky, Eclipse, 42.
[28] Mark Jordan, “The Evidence of the Transcendentals and the Place of Beauty in Aquinas,” International Philosophical Quarterly 29 (1989): 396.
[29] Dadosky, Eclipse, 157.
[30] Lonergan, Method, 38-9.
[31] Bernard Lonergan, Topics in Education, ed. F.E. Crow and R.M. Doran, Vol. 10 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 37.
[32] Dadosky, Eclipse, 158-162.
[33] Dadosky, Eclipse, 166.
[34] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R.B. Haldane (London: Kegan Paul, 1891), V. I, 256.
[35] Dadosky, Eclipse, 113.
[36] Dadosky, Eclipse, 203.
[37] Dadosky, Eclipse, 167.
[38] Dadosky, Eclipse, 169.
[39]Ali El-Senossi, “Sufism – The Psychological Spiritual Teaching of Islam,” Almiraj Sufi and Islamic Study Centre, http://www.almirajsuficentre.org.au/sufism.php (accessed December 6, 2020).
[40] Michael Stoeber, “Mystical Concepts, Artistic Contexts,” in Mystical Landscapes: From Vincent van Gigh to Emily Carr, ed. Katharine Lochnan (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2016), 57.
[41] Michael Stoeber, “Mystical Concepts,” 55.
[42] Dadosky, Eclipse, 51.
[43] Dadosky, Eclipse, 90-91.
[44] Dadosky, Eclipse, 35.
[45] Dadosky, Eclipse, 203.
[46] Dadosky, Eclipse, 208.
[47] Fethullah Gulen, “Mushahada (Observation),” fgulen.com, http://fgulen.com/en/fethullah-gulens-works/key-concepts-in-the-practice-of-sufism-2/mushahada-observation (accessed December 5, 2020).
[48] Frank A. Tillman, Steven M. Cahn, Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics, from Plato to Wittgenstein (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 225.
[AS1]Judgment is rational consciousness, decision (value) is rational self-consciousness. When I make decisions I am constituting myself.
