Thus John Keats, in the same year he wrote Lamia, also penned perhaps the greatest statement of the Joy in the Merely Real ideal ever, writing: “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, that is all / Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.”
Maybe I’m interpreting it wrong, but I’ve never liked that couplet (likewise Dickinson’s expression of the same sentiment). Truth is not beauty! We’re the products of billions of years of bloody blind natural selection, clinging desperately to what scraps of value we’ve managed to achieve in this cold, uncaring universe! Everything you care about, everything you believe in (in the comforting, nonrationalist sense) means shit to the Price equation! It’s this sentiment that makes me like the poem preceding Greg Egan’s Distress, which ends:
And there must be room for all at the celebration of understanding
for there is a truth which cannot be bought or sold
imposed by force, resisted
or escaped.
That’s more like it. By all means, appreciate the beauty of the natural world—but not so much that it doesn’t scare you. Rationality is beautiful, but the truth is just the truth.
Other nominations … maybe Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Lie”? (Note that “give them the lie” here is an idiom for “Tell them that they’re lying.”) My favorite poem is Stephen Spender’s “I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great,” but it might be stretching the evidence to call it rationality-related—and of course stretching the evidence is something we must not do.
Beauty is not always nice or friendly. There is greater beauty in the strike of a cobra than...
...sorry, I’m still thinking in poetry mode. Yes, in any reasonable interpretation, “truth is beauty” is completely false (counterexample: New Jersey exists and Minas Tirith doesn’t). This is one of those cases where I am tempted to join the Dark Side and start saying things like “It’s not true on a merely factual level, but...”
I think of those lines sort of the same way I think of Buckminster Fuller saying “When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” Or Pablo Picasso saying “Art is the lie that reveals the truth”.
That there is a beauty to the structure of reality, and that bringing my beliefs closer to the truth makes me better able to partake in and increase that beauty, is one of the reasons this whole rationalism thing seems worth it to me. That’s how I interpret Keats, at least. Who knows what he was thinking? Evidently not enough to abandon his grudge against science for proving there were no gnomes in mines.
...but I promise I won’t start trying to use “Beauty is truth, therefore...” in any deductive arguments or anything.
Maybe I’m interpreting it wrong, but I’ve never liked that couplet (likewise Dickinson’s expression of the same sentiment). Truth is not beauty! We’re the products of billions of years of bloody blind natural selection, clinging desperately to what scraps of value we’ve managed to achieve in this cold, uncaring universe! Everything you care about, everything you believe in (in the comforting, nonrationalist sense) means shit to the Price equation! It’s this sentiment that makes me like the poem preceding Greg Egan’s Distress, which ends:
That’s more like it. By all means, appreciate the beauty of the natural world—but not so much that it doesn’t scare you. Rationality is beautiful, but the truth is just the truth.
Other nominations … maybe Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Lie”? (Note that “give them the lie” here is an idiom for “Tell them that they’re lying.”) My favorite poem is Stephen Spender’s “I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great,” but it might be stretching the evidence to call it rationality-related—and of course stretching the evidence is something we must not do.
Beauty is not always nice or friendly. There is greater beauty in the strike of a cobra than...
...sorry, I’m still thinking in poetry mode. Yes, in any reasonable interpretation, “truth is beauty” is completely false (counterexample: New Jersey exists and Minas Tirith doesn’t). This is one of those cases where I am tempted to join the Dark Side and start saying things like “It’s not true on a merely factual level, but...”
I think of those lines sort of the same way I think of Buckminster Fuller saying “When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” Or Pablo Picasso saying “Art is the lie that reveals the truth”.
That there is a beauty to the structure of reality, and that bringing my beliefs closer to the truth makes me better able to partake in and increase that beauty, is one of the reasons this whole rationalism thing seems worth it to me. That’s how I interpret Keats, at least. Who knows what he was thinking? Evidently not enough to abandon his grudge against science for proving there were no gnomes in mines.
...but I promise I won’t start trying to use “Beauty is truth, therefore...” in any deductive arguments or anything.