Beauty and Knowledge

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Lecture 6 – Beauty and Knowledge

Dianoia and Noesis

  • Dianoia: Discursive reasoning, logical, propositional, conceptual.
  • Noesis: Successful noticing (e.g., “reading the room”). It prioritizes what is salient in a flowing, perspectival way. Deep insight, mindsight.
  • We need multiple types of knowing. Beauty relates deeply to noesis.
  • Beauty is profound noticing.

The Four Ps of Knowing (4E Cognitive Science)

  1. Propositional Knowing (Dianoia)
  • Knowing that something is true.
  • Stored in semantic memory.
  • Yields beliefs and conviction.
  1. Procedural Knowing (Techne)
  • Knowing how to do something.
  • Stored in procedural memory.
  • Yields skills.
  • Success = power (in the sense of reliability, efficacy).
  1. Perspectival Knowing (Noesis)
  • Knowing what it’s like to be here now, in this context.
  • Stored in episodic memory.
  • Yields situational awareness and insight.
  • Success = realization (truth as presence).
  1. Participatory Knowing (Gnosis)
  • Knowing by being in relationship with the world.
  • Memory = selfhood (how roles and identity cohere).
  • Success = belonging (meaning in life).

Dependency Chain:

  • Participatory → Perspectival → Procedural → Propositional
  • Wisdom and virtue require all four types.

Socratic Dialogues and Non-Propositional Knowing

  • Plato’s dialogues frustrate us if we expect clear definitions (e.g., of honesty).
  • Socrates uses dialogues to evoke awareness of non-propositional knowledge.
  • Beauty awakens us to these layers of knowing.

The Allegory of the Cave and Anagoge

  • Anagoge: A loop of inner transformation and deeper insight into reality.
  • The freed person ascends from illusion to reality (sunlight), returns transformed.
  • This cycle is reciprocal opening:
  • As you open to reality, it opens to you.
  • As you organize the psyche, you perceive more clearly.

Contrast: Reciprocal Narrowing

  • Addiction as a looping closure:
  • World and self both lose depth.
  • Leads to loss of agency.

Meta-Desires and Fulfillment

  1. Peace of mind (inner harmony).
  2. Contact with reality (truth).
  • Anagoge fulfills both: harmonizing psyche + deeper connection with being.

Love and Beauty

  • Symposium: Diotima’s ladder of love is anagoge through beauty.
  • Beauty-love develops from particular persons to universal principles.
  • Beauty and love are metaxu (between):
  • Between presence and absence, desire and fulfillment.

Finitude and Transcendence (Hyland)

  • Human beings are inherently metaxu:
  • Finite: Fragile, temporal.
  • Transcendent: Capable of insight, nobility.
  • Holding both together is tonos, creative tension.

Political Implications

  • Left (finitude): Compassion, shared vulnerability.
  • Right (transcendence): Nobility, virtue, maturation.
  • When polarized (not held together), we lose humanity.

Dianoia and Noesis in Dialogue

  • Speech without noesis: Empty chatter, nihilism.
  • Noesis without dialogue: Isolation, disconnection.
  • True logos requires back-and-forth (dia-logue).

Logos as Metaxu

  • Logos is:
  • Rationality (not just logic).
  • Proportionality, relationship.
  • A principle organizing reality and speech.
  • Bounded by non-discursive experience (suchness + moreness).

Beauty as Re-Inhabiting Humanity

  • Beauty brings us back to:
  • Non-propositional knowing.
  • Shared logos.
  • Space for self-transformation.

Crash Course on Neoplatonism (via Sammon & Desmond)

  • Neoplatonism = Platonic spirituality + Aristotelian science + Stoic ethics
  • Aristotle: Categorization of reality (reality as layered, nested).
  • Plato: Anagoge (spiritual ascent).
  • Stoics: Cultivation of virtue via internalized Socratic dialogos.

The One (Plotinus)

  • Not a “thing” but the power of one-ing (integration).
  • Transcends categories, both actual and potential.
  • Participatory knowing of the One = God as Beauty

Top-Down and Bottom-Up

  • Being is structured via interpenetrating processes:
  • Emanation (top-down)
  • Emergence (bottom-up)
  • Logos flows in both directions.

Deep Participatory Knowing

  • Contemplative practice (theoria) enacts alignment of psyche with being.
  • This gives us:
  • Deep meaning.
  • Virtue.
  • Love and beauty.
  • Fulfillment.

Beauty as the Participatory Knowing of God

  • Beauty is not just pleasing.
  • It’s a relevance realization, a call to transformation.
  • Properly understood, beauty is:
  • Participatory.
  • Transcendent.
  • Finite.
  • Real.

Final Reflection

  • The loss of logos as deep reason (not mere logic) has led to:
  • Shallow beauty.
  • Nihilism.
  • Political polarization.
  • To reclaim our humanity:
  • Rediscover metaxu.
  • Practice anagoge.
  • Honor the between of love and beauty.
  • Dialogue in logos.

Next: Brendan Thomas Sammon and Desmond on The God Who Is Beauty.

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