Lecture 7: Beauty and Transcendence

Review and Recap

Beauty is not fully objective or subjective. Like relevance and insight, it arises through a transjective relationship—between mind and world.
Kant sees beauty as a free play between imagination and understanding. This is the imaginal process.
Gesture and conceptual metaphor exemplify the imaginal, integrating sensory and conceptual modes.
This points to 4E cognitive science: cognition is embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended.
Michael Anderson and Barbara Tversky show how cognition is exaptive: repurposing sensorimotor capacities for abstract thinking.

Propositional (Dianoia) – knowing that, stored in semantic memory.
Procedural (Techne) – knowing how, stored in procedural memory.
Perspectival (Noesis) – knowing what it is like, in episodic memory.
Participatory (Gnosis) – knowing by being with, rooted in your self-identity.

All non-propositional forms support the propositional.
Virtue depends on all four. It’s not just belief or rules, but embodied skills, perspectives, and identity.

Love is not a feeling or emotion. It is an existential mode: a participatory binding of agent and arena.
Beauty and love are metaxu—they bridge the finite and the transcendent.
Holding this duality (Plato calls this tonos) is vital: emphasizing only finitude leads to despair; emphasizing only transcendence leads to hubris.
Beauty-love-anagoge work together to help us inhabit our finite transcendence.

Logos: not merely logic, but the organizing principle, proportion, speech, intelligibility.
Hyland (following Plato): beauty makes space for logos, between dianoia and noesis.
This dialogos (back-and-forth between silence and speech) keeps us from nihilism.

Desmond: primary experience of being is metaxu—both familiar and mysterious.
Sammon: influenced by Christian Neoplatonism and Desmond.

Integration of:
Aristotelian science – taxonomy, organizing categories (e.g., mammals, reptiles, etc.)
Platonic spirituality – contemplative anagoge (ascent and return)
Stoic ethics – internalizing Socratic dialogos to cultivate virtue
Plotinus: what’s at the top of the hierarchy? Not a thing, but the power of One-ing.
Later Neoplatonists: not just top-down emanation but bottom-up emergence.
The grammar of cognition and the grammar of being are the same.
Participating in this structure brings flow, connectedness, and meaning in life.

The One meets these three criteria and thus can be considered God in a non-theistic, metaxu sense.
Compatible with Dao, Sunyata, and God—bridging religion and secularity.

Sammon sees incarnation as Christianity’s solution to bridging the spiritual and the physical.
Vervaeke is cautious: this approach may still operate within a two-worlds mythology (natural/supernatural).
He suggests considering:
Islamic Sufism: names of God bridge physical and spiritual
Zen: dissolves the dualism entirely
Proposes a synthesis: Zen Neoplatonism – dissolving the two-worlds framing while preserving the depth.

Dionysus: one of God’s most important names is Beauty.
Beauty is not just a label for God—it’s how God is God.
Beauty is the metaxu of plenitude (transcendence) and determinate objects (immanence).

Beauty binds the Good and the True:
The Good is the fullness of being, most transformative, most real.
The True is determinate content, most intelligible.
Beauty draws determinate things into fuller meaning and draws us toward the inexhaustible.

Beauty is the imaginal realization of the good into the true and the true into the good.

The True, Good, and Beautiful interpenetrate and mutually reveal being.
This triad is called the Transcendentals.
Around this triad is mystery—for Aquinas, that mystery is God.

Beauty is not a thing to define, but a process of metaxu.
Beauty binds, reveals, guides, and transforms.
To live beautifully is to live between—to love wisely, to engage in anagoge, and to remember our finite transcendence.

“Beauty is the glue of the cosmos, the light by which we see the good and the true, and the invitation to become fully human.”