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calling it "beauty"; at best "pretty," as in "pretty fake." 8. Beauty's Truth / Truth's Beauty "'Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty' - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." Oh? Hasn't every high school student smirked at least once at these lines from Keats's great ode? The one thing we did know, after all - or thought we knew, we wise high school students - was that the truth was not a thing of beauty: not that smell of rotten eggs coming from chemistry lab or the exquisite torture involved in finding a solution to a quadratic equation. We might even go as far as to say that something was true only if not beautiful, if it offended eye and psyche and mind, if it cut deep enough to 
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hurt. That only pain was redemptive, the price of success, and that of course only the successful deserved to be redeemed; that the search for beauty for its own sake was a morally objectionable attempt to escape (and the inhabitants of this earthly prison must not be allowed to imagine that they can escape - they must not only accept the prison of existence, they must embrace it, with enthusiasm), and that beauty itself, in all its glory, was morally unworthy, a distraction from "the program" that one is obligated to "get with," a guilty pleasure, existentially suspect. Beauty does indeed distract us from our concentration on the abstract imperatives of moral action: it is a power in itself, a sovereign god, and like all gods, somewhat contemptuous of the oblations owed to others. And the god of moral order has a right to be suspicious: its  |
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