Lecture 8: Beauty and Life
Reconnecting the Spiritual and the Scientific
- To address the meaning crisis, we must reconnect the spiritual and scientific worlds.
- Avoid prioritizing one over the other or dichotomizing them, or we risk falling into nihilism.
- Sammon provides a detailed historical argument tracing beauty from Plato to Aquinas.
Beauty as Between (Beauty as Metaxu)
- Beauty resides between truth and goodness, holding them together like glue.
- The final chapter of Sammon’s book is titled “Beauty as Between,” summarizing its metaxu nature.
Sammon’s Seven Characteristics of Beauty
- Beauty is transcendent plenitude
- Beauty overflows cognition, an excess of intelligibility.
- Beauty is a principle of determination
- Makes things present and discernible, gives clarity and shine.
- Beauty is the good becoming true
- Relevance connects what’s true and good for you.
- Beauty enables anagoge (intellectual ascension)
- Powers cognitive ascent.
- Beauty is intelligibility prior to determination
- Ontological excess prior to cognition; mysterious plenitude.
- Beauty is the whole in the part
- Emphasized by Spinoza: each part is in every whole and vice versa.
- Intellectual beauty as seen in scientia intuitiva.
- Mutual interpenetration between cognition and being.
- Beauty is the community of being
- Derived from “common unity,” i.e., participation in the One.
- Has political and cultural implications for how we relate.
The Turn to D.C. Schindler
- Schindler’s book chapter: The Primacy of Beauty, The Centrality of Goodness, and The Ultimacy of Truth (2013)
- Developed further in Love and the Postmodern Predicament (2018)
Schindler’s Influences
- William Desmond (Being as metaxu)
- Heidegger (Truth as aletheia)
- von Balthasar (Beauty as theological core)
- Aquinas (Good, True, Beautiful)
Schindler’s Framework: Primacy, Centrality, Ultimacy
- Beauty: The primacy of experience; prepares and motivates reason
- Goodness: The centrality of being; fullness and anagoge
- Truth: The ultimacy; realization and correspondence
Love and Being
- Love is not emotion — it’s an existential mode of reciprocal opening.
- Falling in love with being is central to solving the meaning crisis.
- Not about loving every thing, but about loving being itself.
Propositions Cannot Solve the Meaning Crisis
- Propositional knowing is insufficient.
- Meaning arises from non-propositional knowing:
- Participatory, perspectival, procedural.
- Love is the mode that binds non-egoic connectedness to the most real.
Sacredness Through Beauty and Love
- Sacredness: Connection to what is most real, transformative, and normative.
- “Beauty is a foretaste of being’s good truth.” — D.C. Schindler
- Through beauty, we attune the soul to reality.
- Reciprocal indwelling: Being and loving are fused.
Recovering Beauty
- Recovery isn’t just getting back — it’s re-seeing.
- Tolkien’s idea of recovery: adopting new lenses to return and see home anew.
- Art, poetry, and myth help us recover reality.
Creation, Giving, and Making Love
- Beyond having and being modes — a co-creative mode.
- Making love is not making an object — it’s reciprocal transformation.
- Shared reverence for the relationship’s beauty sustains commitment.
Collective Consciousness?
- Rover scientists: embody imaginal identity with machine.
- Group intelligence arises — collective intelligence, not necessarily collective consciousness.
- Extended mind theory: cognitive agency distributed across systems.
Existence, God, and the One
- Al-wujud al-ladhi la yujad — “the existence that does not exist”
- The One is pure relationality, not a substance.
- Dissolve the question: existence doesn’t have to mean objecthood.
Beauty and Art
- Beauty not in the object or the subject but in the relation.
- Latent beauty exists in potential relational structure — not as a property.
Deconstruction and Relevance Realization
- Derrida’s différance = Vervaeke’s relevance realization
- Derrida rightly critiques propositional tyranny.
- But relevance realization isn’t trapped in semiotic deferral.
- You can deconstruct postmodernism itself.
Final Message:
To overcome nihilism, disconnection, and the crises of modernity, we must learn to fall deeply in love with being itself. Beauty is not ornamental — it is essential. It is the bridge that binds goodness and truth. Through beauty, we participate in being. Through love, we realize beauty. This is the recovery of cosmos — a world not of things, but of sacred relations.
Central Practice:
Fall in love with being. Live the solution, not just think it.