The Threeness of the World (4/6)

Axiology: The True, The Beautiful, and The Good.

The True, The Beautiful, and The Good walk into a bar.

The Bartender says: Glad to see you three are friends again! What can I get you?

The True says: In Vino Veritas—a glass of your finest red.

The Beautiful says: Aqua Vita, the water of life. Any Scottish single malt will do.

The Good says: Just soda water and lime for me please, I’m driving.

---

This is the fourth post in a series of six, but can be understood on its own terms. After an introduction to the metaphysics of threeness, a necessary preamble about maps and territories, and an exploration of ontology and epistemology, it is time to consider axiology, the study of value; with truth, beauty and goodness as our preeminent value spheres.

Part of my definition of the metacrisis we are living through is that it is

…The historically specific threat to truth, beauty and goodness caused by the misunderstanding, misvaluing and misappropriating of reality.

While my main purpose here is different, this post should hopefully help to explain what that means.¹

**

The true, the beautiful and the good are sometimes called The Big Three. No inquiry into ‘the threeness of the world’ would feel worthwhile without considering each of them, all of them together, and the problems arising when they are separated, which the barman alludes to above, and which we see in the world today.²

It is generally assumed that the big three come from Plato. For instance, Richard Tarnas puts it as follows in The Passion of the Western Mind (1991, p41):

The Philosopher is literally a “lover of wisdom” and approaches his intellectual task as a romantic quest of universal significance. For Plato, the ultimate reality is not only ethical and rational in nature, but also aesthetic. The Good, the True, and the Beautiful are effectively united in the supreme creative principle, at once commanding moral affirmation, intellectual allegiance, and aesthetic surrender.

My Plato spies tell me there are references to truth, beauty and goodness in various texts, especially in Philebus where it is argued that they are connected through harmony and order, but there are references to at least one or two of the three in The Republic, Phaedrus, and The Symposium. However, if you really want to understand the genealogy of this trio, I can strongly recommend the wonderful (and amusing) paper called The Birth of The True, The Good and The Beautiful: Towards an Investigation into the Structures of Social Thought by John Levi Martin (2017).

Here’s a shocker: Martin argues that the trio does not in fact arise as a trio in classical greek philosophy, and ‘the big three’ does not come from Plato as such.³ There are lots of places where any two of the trio are seen hanging out with each other in classical texts, for instance in the aristocratic notion of Kalos Kagathos about a nobility of soul reflected through beauty and goodness, but there is no evidence of a proper threesome until much later. It seems that while the big three contains trace elements of Plato, it actually stems from a mixture of neo-platonism and romanticism, and the key pattern that connects the trio is European (mostly French and German) attempts to understand ‘taste’, which sounds quaint now, but here’s how Martin puts it:

Taste required a capacity to orient to variations in quality that had a certain amount of irreducible and unpredictable incommensurability. It thus implied the introduction of a kind of horizontal differentiation in a world view that had tended to revolve around vertical differentiations.

By vertical differentiations Martin is alluding mostly to The Good and The True. If those are your transcendent values the challenge is how to make sense of reasonable variations in subjective judgment while retaining a sense of objective value and resisting a collapse into “it’s all subjective” relativism. It seems we don’t always want all kinds of beauty to be self-evident, and that our perception of it somehow should (in the sense of Good!) evolve and sometimes vary.⁴ Neither a transcendent Good nor a transcendent True capture the more experiential notion of human sensibility. We want to protect the dignity of how it feels for something beautiful to convey truth and goodness without that source necessarily being the good or the true. And why does some particular form or sound feel attractive or meaningful and therefore selected, rather than merely right (in the sense of good and true) and therefore compelled? That’s the work that ‘taste’ does.⁵

The fusion of these two concerns (taste and neo-Platonism) led to an emphasis on moral sensibility...But in the hands of some writers, this also led to an expanded notion of taste which could encompass not only beauty, nor even goodness as moral beauty, but even truth as an intellectual beauty. The flattening of the True and the Good into something that would be accessible to an embodied empirical sensibility then allowed Beauty to be seen as comparable enough to the others for the triad to appear as a set of three comparable excellences. As the tide of enthusiasm for such sensibility receded, it left these three as co-equals, now to be matched, each to its own faculty.

To my surprise and delight, it appears the origin of the thematic connection between the big three arises with the Third Earl of Shaftsebury, Anthony Ashley Cooper.⁶

…The most important thing about Shaftesbury’s understanding was not simply that beauty and goodness “are one and the same.” It was that practically everything was “one and the same” (one of his favorite phrases). Everything ultimately reached back to “the Whole of Nature”…And it is because of this that I believe that he was the first important writer to actually use the terms, the true, the good, and the beautiful not only together, but with an indication that the three claimed comparable places in his system. He asked rhetorically: “Will it not be found in this respect,” above all, “That what is BEAUTIFUL is harmonious and proportionable; what is harmonious and proportionable, is TRUE; and what is at once both beautiful and true, is, of consequence, agreeable and GOOD?”⁷

Why does it matter that the true, the beautiful and the good co-arise? Where is Justice? What about Love? What makes the big three not merely a philosophical ménage à trois but more like a reality principle?

Here I defer to Ken Wilber. Wilber is not exactly a controversial figure but is often unfairly disparaged by people who have never read his work. His love of maps and models means he could be described as what I’ve called “a cartological hedonist”, and doubtless he shares our human limitations. Yet his work has been touched by tragedy and is informed by dedicated spiritual practice, while the range and depth of the scholarship is extraordinary and breathtakingly brilliant in places - he has made a major contribution to humankind.⁸

Wilber speaks to the meaning and role of the big three as follows:

The beautiful, the Good, and the True, are simply variations on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person pronounds found in all major languages because Beauty, Truth and Goodness are very real dimensions of reality to which language has adapted. The 3rd person (or ‘it’) refers to objective truth, which is best investigated by science. The 2nd person (or ‘you’/’we’) refers to Goodness, or the ways that we - that you and I -treat each other, and wehter we do so with decency, honesty and respect. In other words, basic morality. And 1st person deals with “I”, with self and self-expression, art and aesthetics, and the beauty that is in the eye (or the “I”) of the beholder…So the "I”, ‘We” and “It” dimensions of experience really refer to art, morals and science. Or self, culture, and nature. Or the Beautiful, the Good, and the True…The point is that every event in the manifest world has all 3 of those dimensions. You can look at every event from the point of view of the I, the We, or the It…If you leave our science, or leave our art, or leave out morals, something is going to be missing, something will get broken…Self and culture and nature are liberated together or not at all…

This text and the images below are from Integral Spirituality (2006) p19-21. Wilber is a curious thinker with regard to threeness because he is better known for his fourness, particularly his four quadrant model that reflects and informs his AQUAL (all quadrants, all levels) integral theory.

Curiously, Wilber elides between the big three and his four quadrants and it’s definitely not because he hasn’t thought about it. Yet I have searched the Wilber canon for a discussion about the trade-offs between threeness and fourness and he doesn’t seem to get into it in much detail, so if anyone can point the way I’d be grateful.⁹

So this is the point: when we speak of the true, the beautiful and the good, we are speaking about the value of reality as a whole and the values underpinning it that are reflective of different way of being and knowing.

Axiology maps onto ontology and epistemology to some extent, so for instance Perspectiva’s “systems, souls, and society” correspond loosely to truth, beauty and goodness respectively. Knowing the big three therefore matters because they are our gateways to reality and characterise and mediate our relationship to it. It also follows that if big three regularly manifests in ways that are imbalanced, we are going to feel it (beauty) and know it (truth) and it’s not going to feel good, and arguably that’s what’s happening today.

**

What is ecological collapse caused by if not a misplaced idea of the good (profit) severed from the intrinsic beauty of nature and the truth of systemic consequences? What is Instagram but an attempt to valorise beauty with little concern for goodness and truth? What is scientism but a limited perception of truth that assumes superiority over goodness and beauty; a fixation with IT that disavows I and We?

And yet, relatively extreme cases aside, each of the big three has a reasonable claim to being primus inter pares, or first among equals.

Truth says: “I am the basis of all human progress. I guard against the moral and aesthtic errors that create illusion. Without me, Beauty, you are seduction, propaganda, manipulation - a Nazi Rally. And Goodness, without me you cause great harm; you are virtue signalling and self-rightenousness - The Spanish Inquisition.”

Beauty says: “I motivate action and create meaning. I am the attractor, the elevation, the vitality, the beating heart of all that is best in life. Without me, Truth, you are cold, harsh and cannot even be experienced - a soulless concrete jungle built to specification. Without me, Goodness, you are boring, earnest, rigid, formulaic and dangerous - a paperclip maximiser that destroys the world.

Goodness says: “I am the point, the purpose, the reason. I need to guide knowledge and beauty because I am what makes life worth living. Without me, Truth, what’s to stop you being cruel and destructive, sometimes even in the name of progress - you are the atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And without me, Beauty, you are empty, hollow, vain - the slaveowner’s suit, the autocrat’s palace.”

Scientists may lean towards truth, artists towards beauty, activists towards goodness. But they are all necessary. I am reminded that Daniel Schmachtenberger said somewhere that he wouldn’t care about truth and goodness is it wasn’t for beauty, I think because its value is so self-evident. I am reminded also of Kafka saying that you just have to know how to sit still and “the universe will roll in ecstasy at your feet”, and Dostoevsky, no less, said “beauty will save the world”.

But Iris Murdoch argues for The Sovereignity of Good, aligning with Plato’s notion of the Good as the preeminent objective reality, and with a focus on the cultivation of attention through and for the good, which gives new perspective on McGilchrist’s contention that attention is a moral act. Murdoch even says: “Good is the Reality for which God is the Dream”.

And yet, again, in the Bible, The book of Genesis tells us that in the beginning was Logos, which is closer to Truth, and we learn later in John that “the truth will set us free.”

So it’s complex! There’s a reason we need the big three, and there is also good (ahem) reason to think that none are really bigger than the other. The art of life seems to be about achieving balance between truth, beauty and goodness (or It, I and We). The balance is not about trade-offs in a zero sum game, but about navigating between lodestars of belonging that serve us best when we help them to serve each other well. We can almost see it in constitutional terms, an axiological separation of powers with checks and balances to keep us living well. (This point feels pertinent at the moment as the USA struggles to show the separation of powers is still an operative principle.)

Jurgen Habermas speaks directly to the same challenge at a societal level. On the one hand the separation of the value spheres has its advantages because science, aesthetics and ethics have their own languages and evaluation processes. For instance, it’s no bad thing that scientific inquiry can be free from religion, and we don’t want to judge poetry based on quantitative measurements, as was once beautifully demonstrated in a scene from Dead Poets Society. But the problems caused by the severing of the value fields are considerable and they manifest mostly through the overreach of instrumental rationality, which is another angle on the left-hemisphere taking over, highligthed by Iain McGilchrist. Habermas puts it with dark beauty as “the system colonising the lifeworld.” This is also why “systems change” is not enough - it doesn’t contend with our individual and collective interiority; with beauty or goodness; with soul and society.

**

Habermas argues that the differentiation of truth, beauty and goodness is one of the major things that characterises the modern age as distinct from the pre-modern age when they were more intertwined (Wilber refers to the separation of the spheres as ‘the disaster of modernity’). Some argue that this differentiation is not corrected by postmodernism rather but heightened by it.

On this account, science ceases to be the flame of inquiry and wonder and becomes amoral, prodedural, technocratic and dehumanising. Morality loses its moorings in an objective world and collapses into anything goes relativism. Art ceases to speak to Goodness and Truth, for instance through social critique, and becomes commercialised status-seeking. Habermas believes that as a corrective, we need to work towards a public sphere characterised by communicative rationality. That’s a complex notion, I don’t want to butcher it here, and in its first expression it was pre-internet, but one way to think of it is that it’s an attempt to establish public processes in which truth, morality and aesthetics may remain distinct, but are also allowed to co-arise and be discerningly integrated. I believe one of the points of metamodernism is to create practices that help with this process of reintegrating the value spheres, which Perspectiva tries to do, for instance, in the antidebate methodology.

**

It is lunchtime now in Putney, and I am not sure how to end this piece, so I’ll share a video clip from A Few Good Men (1992) that contains elements of the true, the good and the beautiful, and the struggle to find the balance between them.

The film is about trying to establish that an order was given by a senior military officer to discipline a soldier. When that operation went wrong and the soldier died, everything is called into question, including I think, the good and the beautiful. Colonel Nathan Jessop is clearly ‘the bad guy’ in this scene, but he believes his code of conduct is informed by ‘the good’, and even that this good is worth protecting by, at least initially, concealing the truth; but then he feels it so intensely that he wants the truth to become public, but thereby condemns himself in law. The entire scene is awash with sentiment and aesthetics (eg uniforms) and the timing and sequencing involved in extracting the confession, though very Hollywood, is arguably beautiful. Beauty and goodness notwithstanding, the signature line of the scene, which is well worth waiting for is, of course: “You can’t handle the truth!”

I’m going to need to focus on preparing teaching materials for a new course over the next two weeks, so there might be a longer gap than usual before the next post in this series, but no doubt I will find something else to share in the interim. Thanks again for your support,

Yours Aye,

Jonathan.

---

Full Series:

The Threeness of the World 1

The Threeness of the World 2

The Threeness of the World 3

The Threeness of the World 4

The Threeness of the World 5

The Threeness of the World 6

1. In what follows, I might give the impression that I know what I am talking about. I want to assure you that I am mostly making it up as I go along. I can only hope that is a fitting disclosure for an inquiry into the true, good and the beautiful…

I don’t mean this purely in the best Monty Python tradition, though we could all do worse than watch that clip before we write anything. I begin here because as I get older, I find I am increasingly unable to feign erudition I don’t have, and I have become more sensitive when others do that (though also more forgiving). I am familiar with the history of philosophy through years of university study and subsequent reading and viewing, so I hope I have developed something like a nose for the provenance, quality and evolution of ideas. However, that same nose means I also have a nose for what I don’t know (that’s two noses) which includes, for instance, Plato, and classical philosophy more generally where the notion of the big three is derived.

I will never share anything knowingly false, and I hope whatever trustworthiness I earn on The Joyous Struggle arises through the right balance of confidence, creativity, and circumspection. I believe in deferring to experts whenever required, and I have noticed that large language models can be good thinking partners if used with discernment. However, I will always resist intellectual servitude, and it matters to me that people should learn how to think for themselves and to work on getting better at it. Another thing I notice as I get older is that we are all more or less making it up as we go along, and that’s fine, but the lifelong challenge is to do it with integrity.

The quality of mind I am after is something like epistemic proprioception. Proprioception is our (mostly unconscious) perception of our body as it moves through space, allowing us to avoid falling or bumping into too many things. Epistemic proprioception is not just the mind’s capacity to notice what it’s doing (metacognition) but the dispositions that guide its movement between things that are relatively known and relatively unknown. This sounds juicy enough to explore in a future post, but for now, back to threeness…

2. The current US President for instance is probably best understood as pre-truth rather than post-truth, in the sense that the goodness of truth and the beauty of the truth are not part of his modus operandi. The orange one is more like an eight-year old who doesn’t yet understand the sanctity of truth than a purveyor of deliberate disinformation. Moreover, in a recent exchange on Substack Notes, Alex Ebert astutely put it to me that Trump, known to love Norman Vinvent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking, can be understood as a first generation new-ager in the sense that: “He’s not lying, he’s manifesting.” Whatever his exact relationship to truth, it’s certainly not true, as Trump once thought it might be, that we should consider injecting ourselves with bleach.

3. It has taken me a while to understand that just as Christ is not quite Christianity which is not Christian philosophy, so there is a difference between the texts of Plato, various strains of Platonism and monotheistically informed neo-platonism.

4. I know this from my formation as a chess Grandmaster. Expertise affords a perception of beauty in the latent ideas in a position that is not available to the beginner. While the untrained ideas sees exterior form, I have been learned to see geometry, flow, paradox etc. Please see my book, particularly chapter seven, for more details.

5. It’s a bit of a stretch, but we could almost say ‘the beautiful’ acted as ‘third force’ in Cynthia Bourgeault’s terms (next post!) to reconcile challenges between the good and the true, such that one becomes two, two becomes three, and the third creates a fourth (The big three itself) in a new dimension.

6. That means there is a connection to the Twelth Earl, Nick Shaftsebury, St Giles House in Dorset, and therefore a (very!) tenuous connection between the origins of “The True, the Beautiful and the Good” and The Realisation Festival (where I am involved, and tickets are rapidly selling out for June 26-28 this year).

7. The third earl seems to be a fascinating figure and I enjoyed what comes next in the paper:

This triad was not, however, a key structural element for Shaftesbury. And this is because, in large part, he had no structural elements, as his method in many ways was to wind himself up so that he could wax florid with enthusiasm for the All. This gave his writing not merely an analytic looseness, but something that later generations including writers like Adam Smith would, anachronistically, think of as downright girly. But Shaftesbury understood his own work quite differently, indeed, criticizing his peers for just this: “Our Sense, Language, and Style, as well as our Voice, and Person, shou’d have something of that Male-Feature, and natural Roughness, by which our Sex is distinguish’d ….” Without judging who was most macho, we cannot deny that Shaftesbury’s work encouraged an accumulating avalanche of sentimentalism…”

I like the idea of winding oneself up to “wax florid with enthusiasm for the All” and being thought of as ‘girly’ by Adam Smith in 1732 is surely some kind of epistemic prophecy in disguise.

8. If you don’t know Wilber at all I suggest starting with A Theory of Everything (2000) which is short and fairly accessible, and you might like his more personal work in Grace and Grit (2001) about his wife Treya Killam Wilber dying, but if you really want to blow your head back, Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality(1995) is where he ‘shows his working’ that led to the AQUAL understanding. For a taste of that, you might enjoy what I think is my longest ever footnote.

9. The claim is that the distinction between ‘it’ and ‘its’, roughly between individual behaviour and societal behaviour, or between science and system, is merely a matter of granular description. Since neither ‘it’ nor ‘its’ have any interior, little or no explanatory power is lost in most contexts when they collapse into one dimension which is assumed to have many scales. And maybe they don’t collapse into one as such, because the way he superimposes the big three in the image shared makes it look like beauty and goodness claim some of the ‘exterior’ terrain too, which makes sense. One way to understand it is that onto-epistemology is ‘roomier’ than axiology. Another way to see it is that there are so many versions of threeness that you need the fourness to give them the conceptual breathing room required to co-exist and not to supplant or extinguish each other. Thanks to Layman Pascal for helping to elicit some of these thoughts.