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.
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.