Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
John Keats
In my previous posts I laid out a simple schema for thinking about what may be beyond the ken of rationalism and empiricism. Option 3 is the one I focused on: “There may be something beyond the reach of rationalism and/or empiricism, and it may be of interest, but we cannot — by definition — say anything about it.”
On second thoughts, I entirely disagree… with myself.
There’s of course another option. What lies beyond the reach of rationalism and/or empiricism may be spoken by art.
I’m a little shocked that I neglected this. And curious as to why. Let me suggest a reason. We’re perhaps haunted by a certain status of “truth”. I’m not talking about the truth of truth. I’m talking about truth as a brand. (Professionally, I know a whole lot more about branding than I do about philosophy.)
In many markets, there’s a dominant player, a runner up, and then a whole bunch of negligible wannabes. Microsoft, Apple, and the remainder. In the market for truth, there’s science, and then there’s religion. And that’s about it. (It used to be the other way around, but markets evolve.)
We don’t associate art with “truth”. Philosophically the discussion of art (driven by Kant) seems to be largely a discussion of taste — a question of whether it is “true” that something is beautiful, not whether something beautiful can articulate a truth. That’s just the way our culture thinks. If something is really, really true, science will find it. Or (for a shrinking minority) God will reveal it. Art is tucked away in a different building, troubled by different questions.
But what kind of nonsense is going on here?
In my previous post I set up a false binary: rationalism-empiricism on the one hand, and silence on the other. Art breaks the binary.