Yes Beauty and love are indeed a kind of truth... the highest kind of truth in fact.

Many (most?) people would consider such an idea as a silly sentimentality, preffering cause and effect relations between objects as the only truth, but in an experience of love and beauty there is a sort of union of subject and object... or rather there is an experience without subject and object. Those so wrapped up in understanding cause and effect relations between objects struggle to understand that they are only focusing on one side of the picture, and that there is truth of a kind which transcends time and space, and even causality, and we glimpse this in experiences of love and beauty.

Can beauty exist without love?

Definitely, because I find a lot of things beautiful yet I care nothing for love at all. I don't have to love something to find it beautiful.

Do you never love? If you do love, does what you love have to be beautiful?

Can beauty exist without love?

Surely depends on which values one judges. Form v content? A rusty old 4WD car, may do the job better bringing you from A to B over rough terrain, than a shiney Ferrai. You may love the Ferrai more, but sometimes it's the inner beauty that should count.

The beautiful is the useful? A knife that cuts well is beautiful. Yes? An ornate knife that doesn't cut well is not beautiful.

My intention is not to put it so binary, either or.

In some situation the one thing is value, in other situations other things are valued.

It comes down to a matter of taste, of situational needs ..just that I wouldn't put anything in ston, but flexible values.

Gods prime work of beauty a beautiful woman

Gods prime work of beauty a beautiful woman

Sure, the practical man will laugh if you say that beauty is truth, as our self-deceit is often getting us killed. I grant the practical man his object.

But what about mathematics? There is a debate about the foundation of mathematics. Is it grounded on intuition? Or is it only a system of rules that must be followed exactly? Is it finite, or does it allow of the infinite? I think to say that something is intuitive is not far from saying that it is beautiful, at least in the case of math.

Let us also consider this phrase "beauty is truth." Is this statement itself a beautiful truth? Is e=mc^2 a beautiful truth? Is science influenced by our sense of the beautiful? Are we not more likely to discover the patterns that please us? F = ma. That's a beautiful simple equation. We want the simple and the true. Are scientist driven by the desire for practical power? Some of them are, I bet. But others are probably just seeking form. An interesting issue. I don't think it's dead.

How does the concept of beauty relate to Euclidean geometry, mathematics, and formal logic? For instance, our seemingly intuitive notion of a perfectly straight line. And the perfect circle, the perfect sphere, and so on. And what about the principle of identity?

Why do we all so easily agree that A = A ? Don't get me wrong. I do to. Why is it obvious that 1 + 1 = 2? What do we feel that these two ones are of identical value?

What axioms structure the most basic aspects of our thinking? This is proof as persuasion, and persuasion as related to beauty.

Sure, the practical man will laugh if you

I think he would just be perplexed, and ask you what you meant by that statement. Could you answer him sensibly so as to relieve his perplexity?

Shelley's Hymn to Intellectual Beauty is worth a read through.

71. Hymn to Intellectual Beauty by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Nicholson & Lee, eds. 1917. The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse

"Intellectual" means immaterial or the Spirit Beauty as opposed to material, transient, relative type of Beauty. Usually it is this assumed materiality, transience and relativity of Beauty that is used to distinguish it from Truth. But then Truth has been called transient and relative by some. Beauty and Truth could be the same thing only appearing to be different because of the different manners in which it participates in our mortal realm.

Consider the same poem but exchange Beauty for Truth and call it "Hymn to Intellectual Truth". It works quite well in places.

Spirit of Truth, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form - where art thou gone?

You tell me what it means to say that beauty is truth, and I will give you my opinion on whether that is true (beautiful?)

---------- Post added 05-28-2010 at 12:02 AM ----------

Reconstructo;154139 wrote:

Sure, the practical man will laugh if you

I think he would just be perplexed, and ask you what you meant by that statement. Could you answer him sensibly so as to relieve his perplexity?

What is it that grounds mathematics and formal logic? Why are these forms the ones we find convincing?

Can you or anyone give an exhaustive account of his own thinking? What is thinking, and why do you find logic persuasive?