This a draft of a brief talk I gave at Oriel College Metaphysical Club on 23rd of November 2023. 

Captive Andromache by Lord Frederic Leighton (ca. 1888). The painting depicts Andromache, the wife of Hector, whose husband and children were killed in the Trojan War and who herself was taken as a captive to a foreign land.

Many of you might have heard of the doctrine of transcendentals, the thought being there – roughly – that goodness, unity, beauty and truth are universal properties of being itself, i.e. properties which cut across all categories of being so that to the extend something is that thing has truth, unity, beauty and goodness in its own manner. Whilst the doctrine itself is probably best considered a Mediaeval development, thinking along these lines goes back all the way to Plato and Aristotle.

I’m not going to offer here some kind of theory of transcendentals, though, because I don’t know that much about it. Instead, I thought I’d try and think a little further about how this kind of metaphysical connection between truth and beauty could become visible to us in our experience of art. These thoughts I’m about to present, then, do not necessarily depend on something like the doctrine of transcendentals being true, but they do represent some ways in which such a doctrine, if it was true, could appear to us on a phenomenological level.

Let’s presume then – somewhat controversially, at least in the context of modern philosophy of art – that at least some art gives us access to truth by exhibiting or conveying beauty because beauty and truth are connected. Thus, from now on, I’m just going to assume that at least the kind of ‘art’ I’m talking about here, has this intrinsic connection to beauty and that connection to beauty gives it its “truth-eliciting” power. I’m also going to be talking about the visual arts mostly, especially painting – although similar things could potentially be said about other art forms. When I say that visual arts like paintings can elicit truths by virtue of their beauty, then, I’m not just talking about pretty things that are nice to look at. Beauty should be understood here as something complex, perhaps at times even harrowing and dark, but nevertheless as something that awakens desire and which absorbs, fusing our thought to the sensory object.

Now, to ask the question how art can give rise to an apprehension of truth, we need to first inquire as to the character of the kind of truth we’re after. What kind of truth does art give us access to? First, I think it’s quite clear that the sort of truth art elicits isn’t just some narrowly understood propositional truth or conceptual knowledge. I think some persons, especially those logically and analytically minded, tend to think of that kind of truth as the only “real truth” and thereby they have a hard time making sense of the claim that art can elicit truth – they expect that to mean that art somehow gives us distinct propositional or conceptual knowledge, some kind of knowledge that.

There are, however, ways of knowing other than propositional or conceptual, such as experiential knowledge or knowledge how. Some think it’s that kind of knowledge art elicits, and maybe it indeed does sometimes. More importantly, though, I think art can engender an apprehension of truth that’s deeper than experiential knowledge and knowledge how, an apprehension of truth that is non-conceptual and perhaps also non-inferential. Art yields the kind of understanding that is often somewhat intractable, difficult to express in words, but which nevertheless is significant to how we view the world. Just because this knowledge or understanding cannot be expressed in neat propositions doesn’t mean it isn’t real. In fact, I think we have reasons to believe that many of the most important ‘truths’ about ourselves and our world are like that, sometimes because they are deeply emotionally-toned and relationally embedded: a person might, for example, give some propositional expression to the thought that they love their best friend, but what that love really is, what one knows about it, is hardly something which can ever be given full expression. Knowing that kind of love is a mode of being perhaps even more than it is a mode of thinking.  

Art can be a form of access to these kinds of intractable, emotionally toned, non-conceptual truths about ourselves and the world around us. For example, my looking at Lord Frederic Leighton’s Captive Andromache can give me an access into deeper understanding about loss, longing and isolation and therefore a deeper understanding of the human condition as such. I can feel this understanding, this knowledge, emerging as I look at the painting even though I don’t have any explicit thoughts as I look at it. However, the fact that often the truths art elicits elude conceptual characterization isn’t because there’s nothing there to be known, as some might argue. Rather, it’s because there’s too much. Art, then, allows an encounter with that which cannot be said and yet somehow finds expression through it.

Second, then, we might want to ask why art should give rise to this kind of non-conceptual, intractable knowledge, that is, what it is that makes art so well-fitted for the task of eliciting this type of intractable knowledge. More specifically, we might want to ask why beauty is central to our coming to apprehend these sorts of truths. What exactly is the connection between my coming to understand something about, say, human longing through Captive Andromache and the beauty of the painting? In other words, why should the beauty of the painting be central to my coming to acquire this kind of understanding through it? Couldn’t I explain the painting’s truth-eliciting power simply, say, in terms of the emotional impact of its depiction of Andromache? I can’t give you a full account here, of course, but here’s an idea: there’s something inexhaustible about beauty and about aesthetic objects which exhibit it. Desire for beauty, as Elaine Scarry says, is not like most other desires in that it’s not co-terminable with its object. You eat a good meal and it just so happens that your desire for a good meal ends with your meal: you desire terminates there. Not so with beauty: it goes on and on and on, taking our desire with it.

As such beauty is expansive; we experience this expansiveness in the way aesthetic objects absorb our attention, inviting slow thought, a kind of non-controlling “letting appear” of the thing we’re looking at. In this expansiveness, thought can be freed from its usual constraints. We are free to explore and discover unexpected connections between things, to take creative turns. In its expansiveness beauty shows forth also the depths of the world we inhabit, and the inexhaustible quality of experiences like loss and longing. It is beauty, therefore, which arrests my attention and calls forth my understanding to grapple with Andromache and the true depths of her longing.  

Because beauty is expansive in this way, it also invites us to pay attention to that which is beyond our grasp, that which cannot be pinned down in propositional formulations or exhausted through conceptual analysis, the desire which carries our minds with it toward the yet unknown, unseen. Something beyond the concrete particular. Beauty says that the profound depth of Andromache’s longing points beyond itself to something even deeper. In this expansiveness beauty teases reason, sometimes finally frustrating it, opening the door for that which is beyond it. As beauty breaks open reason’s self-enclosed circle, it brings in what’s new and strange, perhaps even mysterious.

Thirdly, having asked about what kind of truths art can elicit and why it is so apt to do so, we might want to ask more specifically how art yields this kind of encounter with intractable truths, how does it connect us with deeper truths about ourselves and the world around us. Again, I won’t attempt an exhaustive account but here are two thoughts, inspired by two thinkers.

First, Mark Rothko. He says that “a picture is a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need”. In looking at a painting there is this sense of return and resolution: something familiar returns as transformed. Sometimes this transformation feels like clarity: the familiar becomes illuminated as art sheds its obscure light on it, returning our thoughts to ourselves with a new-found lucidity. As a consequence, one sees in a new way. This might be because aesthetic contemplation invites and teaches a different kind of attention, as Bence Nanay has argued, the kind of distributed attention which looks at things not with a specific practical or cognitive aim in mind, but more leisurely, lingering contemplative, open to the surprising and the unexpected. This aesthetic attentiveness, gets carried over: other things as well, and not simply the aesthetic object, can appear in a new light. The familiar becomes a revelation.

The second thought is from John Dewey, the famous pragmatist philosopher. He says (and this is a slightly longer quote): “A work of art elicits and accentuates the quality of being a whole and of belonging to the larger, all-inclusive whole which is the universe in which we live. This fact, I think, is the explanation of that feeling of exquisite intelligibility and clarity we have in the presence of an object that is experienced with esthetic intensity. It explains also the religious feeling that accompanies aesthetic perception. We are, as it were, introduced into a world beyond this world which is nonetheless the deeper reality of the world in which we live in our ordinary experience.”

In many ways Dewey suggests the same sort of insight I already expressed earlier with respect to that shorter quote from Rothko. He brings in an important additional element though which also connects with my earlier thought about beauty’s inexhaustibility and expansiveness: it’s not just that aesthetic attention allows familiar things to appear to us with a new-found salience and clarity but it also transforms our sense of the context in which those things appear. They now appear as being part of a larger, intelligible whole, a deeper world beyond our world which nonetheless is the truth about our world of ordinary experience. Art works which exhibit beauty make this whole available to the viewer in, as it were, ‘spatially condensed manner’ by virtue of their ‘harmonious wholeness’ which is like a microcosmic image of the world.

Lastly, let me say something about how knowledge of God comes into all this. First, art can be important for our coming to know the God who dwells in inaccessible light, whose bright darkness cannot be comprehended because it “trains” our minds and hearts to appreciate and approach the mysterious, it points to the limits of human reason and how, beyond those limits lies not nonsense but Truth so Real and Intelligible that it is known not in reasoning, not in language as in a mirror, but in a union of love, the joining of thought and its object. Second, in its inexhaustibility, the unending way we desire it, Beauty points to the transcendent end of human desire: the God who is Beauty itself.