Does truth have to be beautiful?

I would guess that it depends on your definition of beauty. Truth in and of itself can be considered a beautiful thing, as in it’s what is. It sets you free. But on the other hand, the truth may not be something that you like, which could be considered “ugly”.

I think not. Truth could be the ugliest thing on earth but still be truth.

As @ZEPHYRA truth can be ugly but it is the act of accepting the truth for better or worse as it really is, is in itself a beautiful thing.

We should never fear truth, good, bad or ugly.

It is what it is.

Better to be pained by the truth than live happily in a fools paradise. lol

I’d say that, while not always “beautiful” to us, it’s more abstractly beautiful, and it certainly should never be seen as ugly. No matter how difficult a truth is to take, you shouldn’t hold a grudge against the one who told it to you.

no, but it is radiant. maybe even radioactive :O

No.

In fact, that is often a thought schism that divides people.

Some people reject the truth because they have an idea that they consider to be so beautiful that they cannot abandon it if the “ugly truth” contradicts it. These people prefer beauty over truth.

Some people always search for what is true, even if it’s ugly and even if it shatters what they may have considered beautiful.

You are going to die.

Is the truth of the holocaust beautiful? I think not.

The concept of truth is beautiful.
An Actual Truth, however, can be as ugly as Hades.

Many people would prefer a pretty lie over an ugly truth.

I think the Ugliest Truth is far more beautiful than the most pretty, soul-warming, and comforting of Lies.

@RareDenver

The Holocaust was tragic, but…many, many inspirational stories and amazing and beautiful tales of courage and selflessness arose during and beyond the atrocity itself.

There can always be found some redeeming beauty in even the worst of situations.

@Coloma I guess, but for every inspirational story about a million people had to die horribly, is that beautiful? Were these stories worth the cost?

I agree with Keats that Truth is always beautiful.

And I think the ugliness that people have assigned to certain truths is not truthful.

What does it means for truth to be ugly? It means only that we would rather not countenance it. “Ugly” is anyway just a word that is used to describe things we would rather not look at, acknowledge. And I also think that to acknowledge a truth as ugly is to acknowledge that truth in an oblique way that renders the truth somehow less harmful (and, yes, less true).

And I would say there is no such thing as a pretty lie, really; a lie can only be perceived as pretty, and of course that perception is also untruthful.

And I would question what it means to say that “the truth of the holocaust” is ugly (or, even, not beautiful). The truth of the holocaust has nothing to do at all with the ugly meaning that has been assigned to the holocaust. The meaning we make is informed by perception, and perception is never Truth proper.

@RareDenver

Just looking for the silver lining in the face of adversity.
I believe there always is one, but sometimes it is a thin thread indeed. ;-)

Uh…No.

Truth can be many things to different people: joyous; hurtful; startling; sad; gratifying; or meaningful, (partial list) but that’s just it. Truth is none of these characteristics. Truth just is. People have all the reactions to it, all or none of which may be true at all.

It’s true that on average, someone starves to death every 3.6 seconds. If truth is beauty and a thing of beauty is a joy forever, then it is a joy forever that on average, someone starves to death every 3.6 seconds.

Keats’ language is figurative; truth and beauty are distinct concepts comprehending wholly different domains.

I’m reminded of another famous piece by this man.

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.

Truth, beautiful? It’s truth that destroys beauty, says Keats. Or our knowledge of it does.
Newton had recently figured out how rainbows work. And what a tragedy that was. That beautiful display had now just become an Ordinary Thing, as opposed to a miraculous thing of ineffable magic. What a tragedy indeed.
It was also a scientific breakthrough that enabled the invention of lenses, which were used in microscopes among other things, which in turn enabled germ theory among other things, which continues to save countless lives.
Write a poem that stops the plague from spreading, then you can talk shit about science. Jerk.

Lao Tzu said that words that are true are not beautiful, and words that are beautiful are not true.
I don’t think that’s quite right, either. A rational point of view would hold that statements can be true whether they invoke any emotional reaction in us or not. Many hopeful things are true (we can double our own natural life span and formerly life-threatening predators are now our bitch¹), many horrible things are true (a significant proportion of the world lives in hunger and disease), many utterly boring things are true (the wind speed in Copenhagen is currently 8 km/h).

Bottom line of this rambling soliloquy, not counting the footnote: Affect and accuracy have bugger all to do with one another.

[ ¹ For example, we think nothing of ordering shark fin soup in a restaurant. Let that sink in for a moment. We eat sharks.]

@ratboy

Why does beauty have to be “a joy forever”? That seems rather limiting.

And there is a difference between beauty and “a thing of beauty.”

Truth is relative and God is dead.

Poetry is often used to try to invoke spiritual states that, because they are beyond language or not experience in language, can not be explained in words. When someone says truth is beauty and vice versa, and that is the complete knowledge of the world, they are not talking about whatever it is that the words mean on their faces. Instead, they are trying to evoke a different kind of consciousness that can allow you to appreciate the world in a spiritual way.

The most common element of spiritual feelings is this sense that we are all one. Or there is a oneness. Or we cannot separate ourselves from, well, anything really. The truth/beauty, beauty/truth statement is supposed to warp our minds enough that we can experience this, if only for a moment. Truth and beauty are one. Just as everything we know and experience is one. There is no separation between us and the world out there. We only imagine it is there. It’s a kind of Buddhist thing, but also a thing found in most other religions.

Literally speaking, there are ugly truths. But in the realm of direct experience with the world, there is no judgement. There is only experience and it is all related and connected and even the horrors of human behavior are part of that picture; that complete picture, that can not be comprehended by individuals who live in their thinking minds.

Our thinking minds think in words. Our non-linguistic minds, obviously, don’t have words to think in. Non-linguistic minds experience the world directly, without words to explain life, and thus that kind of mind can experience the oneness or connectedness of all.

The great irony, at least to me, is being able to use words to throw us into that place where there are no words. It takes enormous skill to be able to do that. You have to love the words and be able to seduce people using words into that place where there are no words. Mind-bending, no?

Sometimes I think that my ideas are off on some strange planet of their own. Maybe I’m just bullshitting; using words to spin my way from one half-baked thought to another. We can’t all be Keats… in fact, only Keats could be Keats. I don’t know if my thoughts about these lines mean something, or just sound like they mean something, or sound like I think they mean something, but really I’m just a fool. I don’t know if it even matters, since I don’t know if I’m talking to anyone. Or whether talking to anyone is important.

Of course, or maybe it isn’t that obvious that I’m desperate to talk to people. Silly me.

For some reason, the “maybe” in the previous sentence came out as “many.” This has been happening often, lately. I’ll be thinking and typing along and I’ll look back, and my fingers have typed something completely different from what I meant to type. As if they’d been hijacked. Maybe my mind has been hijacked, too. Otherwise, why would I be writing this stuff as if I were high or something. I have been seeing auras, too, lately. I think it’s my eyes, but maybe there’s something going… wrong different in my mind. Maybe I’m turning into a space alien. I think I’ll stop here before you all get really worried and send an ambulance.

See what I mean? Using words to get into an altered state of consciousness? I think it might not be such a bright idea for me.

I’m with @ratboy.

As in the ugly truth?

@absalom

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

—John Keats (Endymion)

If “beauty” and “truth” denote the same concept, then anything that is true is also beautiful.

@ratboy

Yes, I was aware of those lines, and I’ve usually reconciled the two poems (“Endymion” and “Urn”) by assigning the belief to Keats that only that which lasts forever is truly beautiful (which is to say both True and Beautiful). I realize that may be a copout on my part. But it’s common to believe that so-called real beauty doesn’t fade, and we also say that real Truth with a capital T is, or should be, unassailable and permanent. So I think these two ideas are not necessarily irresolvable.

If “beauty” and “truth” denote the same concept, then anything that is true is also beautiful.

I’d add a stipulation to that and say that truth is always beautiful, but true things are not always beautiful things. That’s what Keats seems to be saying, anyway.

And I believe that. (Or at least I’d like to.) I know it sounds kind of strange because there are, obviously, horrific and frightening truths in this world. But – and maybe I’m, like, splitting hairs – I think that Truth (perhaps as a concept, as @Kraigmo suggested, or as a “theory”) can and even should be separated from the reality that it comments on.

(If that makes sense.)

So no, neither the holocaust nor starvation is beautiful, but it is perhaps better to look at those things as facts rather than as truths. Maybe the facts point to the truth (i.e., the holocaust indicates a truth about human nature). But what makes the truth beautiful for Keats and (when I’m in my better moods) for me is that it’s immutable and eternal and represents a certainty that can’t be found anywhere else.

Truth is like trying to look at those little tiny holes in the air. You can see them lingering in your peripheral vision but they quickly dart away when you try to look directly at them. The reality may be that one is observing red blood cells floating on the surface of ones eye balls. Does such a truth make one have a beautiful feeling?

You are 3 people. You’re the person who you think that you are. You’re the person that others think that you are. But the truth is that you’re the person who you really are and that reality can be beautiful and or painful. The reality my this case is that I’m totally bored pounding on a keyboard. Why don’t I feel beautiful realizing this great insight?

I’m in agreement with @Kraigmo. The truth is different from a truth. One is the concept of truth (always beautiful) and the other is what a particular truth is about (which may or may not be beautiful).

Thanks for all the input. There is a lot to think about here. A poem is written in such a way that its words are pleasing to us and so we accept the ideas it presents. The beauty of a poem and its truth are one and the same. A poet may be inconsistent but a poem rarely is.

@RareDenver The Holocaust is the ugliest thing we know of or can imagine. But to those who lived in those times it was of great importance that the world be told about it. That was their gift to us.

@absalom

I don’t believe that we actually disagree—we’re talking about different things. My comments apply to truth with lower case “t”.

No and most of the time it’s not.

No. Certain truths are UGLY.