Beauty

摘要

The relevance of beauty in every category and its prominence in the more cognitive realms of sight and hearing give it an intellectual dimension that moves beyond the sensuous and lends color to Thomas Aquinas's suggestion that beauty - like truth, unity, and goodness - is a transcendental, allowing finite things, each in its own way, to point beyond themselves, toward a higher reality that none alone can encompass. (Such echoes of ethics in the terrain of aesthetics may help explain the power of negative capability in poetry or painting, and the play of moral tact in fiction.) Our love of beauty is deeply personal, yet subtly social: others are asked to see what we see, or hear as we do.