Abstract
The ‘Lonergan Approach’ (the adjectival use of the author’s name is unfortunate) in Dadosky’s discussion of beauty is largely in the use of Lonergan’s clarification of the spontaneous movement of enquiry from experience through question to understanding and hypothesis to the accumulation of evidence to judgement and, when the original question is moral—what ought I do now?—to decision. What, in the Introduction to Insight, Lonergan calls ‘the discovery (and one has not made it yet if one has no clear memory of its startling strangeness) that are two quite different realisms …)’ is not prominent. D (Chapter five pp. 108–11) discusses Lonergan’s treatment of the aesthetic pattern of experience (see Insight Chapter 6.2.4) but it would have been good to deal more closely with this sentence: ‘Prior to the neatly formulated questions of systematizing intelligence, there is the deep set wonder in which all questions have their source and ground.’
D is right to think that discussion of ‘Beauty’ and ‘The Beautiful’ is not prominent in contemporary courses in either philosophy or theology—sometimes not even in aesthetics. Yet, in our everyday lives, we are concerned with beauty, as we are concerned with truth and goodness. We spontaneously accept that propositions may be true or false and are concerned to determine which is true and which false; we spontaneously accept that actions may be good or bad and are concerned to distinguish between them. Some, incoherently, reject these distinctions but even they, when lost in a city, accept a distinction between true and false directions and think that to be given deliberately the wrong directions is bad. When questions of beauty are raised, people quite often accept that whether or not something is beautiful is, and can be, no more than a matter of opinion. Among the moderns, Hume and Kant are credited with that conclusion. That ‘Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. To seek the real beauty, or real deformity, is as fruitless an enquiry, as to pretend to ascertain the real sweet or the real bitter’ is often quoted from Hume’s essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (by D on p.5). Hume was in fact, and perhaps confusedly, more nuanced: ‘But allow him (one who desires to be a better judge) to acquire experience in these objects, his feeling becomes more exact and nice: he not only perceives the beauties and defects of each part, but marks the distinguishing features of each quality, and assigns it suitable praise or blame.’ The assertions that Durer’s etching of grasses, that Clonmacnoise, even in its ruined state, and that the mediaeval hymn from the monastery in St Gallen Media vitae morte sumus are beautiful, are true. Yet not everyone will know that they are, as not everyone will know that the assertion 3 (mod 4) + 2 (mod 4) = 11 (mod 4) is true. There was a time in human history when no-one knew it; was it then true? The proposition is not true if it does not yet exist but the fact that is truly asserted is the case; if the proposition that in Euclidean space the length of the circumference of a circle is 2πr is true, then before that was known it was a fact. A proposition under consideration is not yet known to be, but is, either true or false.
Is the hymn Media vitae beautiful even if no-one has ever taken it to be? Listeners utterly uninterested in philosophy may well find it beautiful and say so; they know how to use the word, they are expressing what they found and take to be right. Only if someone contradicts them do they revert to the ‘subjective’—‘Well, that’s how I found it.’—but may be willing to learn to become, as Hume writes, better judges. ‘Beauty’ is an ordinary word which we use without difficulty and which, or so we spontaneously think, expresses an important feature of our discovery of the world. The philosophical question is whether the everyday assertion is true of the thing found beautiful or is simply a misleading expression of the speaker’s response, much as ‘It is cold’ may be another way of saying ‘I am cold.’ D deals well with that question in Chapter seven, ‘Judgments of Beauty.’
Plotinus (oddly not discussed by D whose references are otherwise copious and valuable) begins his Ennead ‘On Beauty’: ‘Beauty is mostly in sight, but is to be found in things that we hear …’ Readers know, in an everyday way, what he is talking about. He continues: ‘and for those who are advancing upwards from sense perception, ways of life and actions and characters and intellectual activities are beautiful and there is the beauty of virtue.’ He writes of what people ordinarily do and, in the usage of his time καλός (kalόs) had a more varied range than our ‘beauty’: ‘physical beauty,’ ‘serving a good purpose,’ ‘morally beautiful,’ ‘right,’ ‘noble.’ Yet we use ‘beauty’ and ‘beautiful’ in many ways: to speak of a beautiful gesture or thought is not odd. When we find both In media vitae and a person’s action beautiful are we using the word in the same way or ‘is there one kind of beauty in bodies and another in other things?’ (Plotinus ibid.). We are responsible for what we make and the actions we perform. The goal of our desire to know is the real. If we rediscover the transcendentals, as D suggests we ought, and realitas et pulchritudo convertentur, then that the real is beautiful, now overlooked or totally forgotten, may be rediscovered, as Ronald Dworkin rediscovered in Religion Without God. To recover what has been forgotten is an underlying and important theme of this book.