Beauty and Life

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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

  1. Beauty is transcendent plenitude
  • Beauty overflows cognition, an excess of intelligibility.
  1. Beauty is a principle of determination
  • Makes things present and discernible, gives clarity and shine.
  1. Beauty is the good becoming true
  • Relevance connects what’s true and good for you.
  1. Beauty enables anagoge (intellectual ascension)
  • Powers cognitive ascent.
  1. Beauty is intelligibility prior to determination
  • Ontological excess prior to cognition; mysterious plenitude.
  1. 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.
  1. 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.

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