§ 27 Now the revolution…
Analysis, as an activity, offers us the opportunity to sharpen our conceptual framework to the point where we can speak of an accurate overlap between that framework and the aspect of reality it seeks to model.1
This is difficult, and we are far from arriving at any Hegelian completion of the world.
Nevertheless, science and scholarship with their rigorous protocols and methods are there to guide the way.
Where the overlap is indeed accurate and the abstraction not too reductive, we can begin to proclaim accurate truths.
Statements using our conceptual framework may be true or false on purely rational grounds, but if they do not also correspond to reality, they are of questionable use.
This is because the relationships among concepts expressed in words, images, or numbers cannot be judged solely by the truths they can achieve within the conceptual framework and its inferentially explored space of implications, but must be empirically demonstrated to be accurate with reference to reality. For this, we need our statements to be empirically tested.
My first thesis is that this is precisely what the time-honoured aesthetic concept of fittingness, whereby we conceptualise things as wholes made up of working parts, is useful for.
The experience of beauty, as mentioned above, arises in the measuring of things and in the finding of a fit.
This is done in conjunction with the activity of truth finding, but also in conjunction with the finding of use in affordance and thus in the finding of the good.
The notion of fitting, with the judgment of harmony as the first and ultimate objective, is both necessary and sufficient for the judgment of beauty and its corollary experience.
My second thesis is that aesthetic judgments are at least as common in our ordinary use of language as ethical judgments and alethic judgments, and we need all three to get by. Aesthetic ones to start things off and to tie everything together.
As such, aesthetics, as a discipline, stands alongside ethics and metaphysics at the very heart of our normative practices. There is nothing new here; Charles Sanders Peirce argued something very similar more than a hundred years ago.
There is a passage in Plato’s Symposium where Diotima asks Socrates ‘What is given by the possession of beauty?’ And Socrates had no answer ready. ‘Then,’ she said, ‘let me put the word ‘good’ in the place of the beautiful, and repeat the question once more: If he who loves the good, what is it then that he loves?’ ‘The possession of the good’, replies Socrates. ‘And what does he gain who possesses the good?’ ‘Happiness’, replied Socrates, ‘there is less difficulty in answering that question. ‘Yes, Diotima replied, ‘the happy are made happy by the acquisition of good things. Nor is there any need to ask why a man desires happiness; the answer is already final.’
This passage is interesting particularly for what it does not tell us. It does not give us the answer to the question ‘what is given by the possession of beauty’, and indeed the question is never answered in the dialogue. So here I shall try to give my own version of an answer and see if you agree.
The experience of beauty is expressed in various levels of satisfaction, fulfilment, elation, exhilaration, delight, and joy.
It comes about when something is found to fit satisfactorily, or even joyfully well.
But what should fit with what?
In the answer to that question lies the challenge. In principle, that is based on our Spinozist definition of the universe, everything can be made to fit with everything else, as long as the perspective from which that fitting is judged ‘a fit’ allows such a judgment mereologically, i.e. when the working parts fit together well so that they can perform satisfactorily with reference to some use or purpose.
To give you some examples: actions can fit with their intentions; intentions can fit with their outcomes. A chance meeting can be a happy one. An action can fit with the notion of nobility or indeed cowardice, hypocrisy and so forth; concepts and the attribution of properties can fit with what they are made to refer to in reality on the basis of social agreement. Means can fit with their ends, that end can subsequently fit as a means to a further end, the discovery can fit with what is being sought, but can also fit with a happy serendipitous contingency; the place can fit with what is on it, the chance can fit with a wish, a possibility can fit with its realisation, the accidental discovery can fit into a greater good, an event can fit with a plan or with lucky chance, or with a long-term plan. A man wearing a dress may not fit a certain notion of manhood, but may fit well with the idea of gender fluidity. In short, a fit depends on what is sought.
The experience of beauty comes from the discovery of, or the confirmation of, a harmonious relationship that has some logical narrative by which that harmony can be felt implicitly, or indeed made explicit by those who are good at expressing things in image, word, and/or number.
The logical connection that determines the fitting of things conceptually, where the understanding harmonises with the understood, and where implications harmonise with outcomes. Only when this happens can we be said to have been given what the possession of beauty gives us: a joyful satisfaction.
And now, dear reader, you might be tempted to say something like ‘yes, but imperfections can be beautiful too!’ And thereby feel as if you have turned my argument upside down. Don’t, that move was foreseen, and if you have read the above carefully, you would realise that.
Imperfections, inconsistencies, and incoherences can be found beautiful when they fit with an expectation or with some idea, making them fit into a bigger picture in which that imperfection fits perfectly.
Pulchrum et perfectum idem est.2
Perfection and beauty are, in a specific sense, synonymous, in that perfection may be assumed in our universe, where everything fits into a working relationship. Analytically, that is, when seen as a puzzle, the world is perfect because it is one gigantic whole with (near) infinite working parts that all do their job perfectly.
Perfection aspired to, from the point of view of human being is more difficult. After all, what would be a perfect human being? I am a perfect Jacob, in that nobody Jacobs quite like me. But I do not feel my life to be perfect, especially when I am ill, out of money or hungover. Moreover, I look around at my world with all its idiocy and baboonery, and perfection appears a long way away.
And if perfection is not seen, beauty is not seen, but that does not mean that perfection is not there.
Our universe fits together perfectly; it works perfectly. The baboons ruling our world are very good. And the fact that I wish our world were run differently makes not the slightest difference. Finding a perfect fit somewhere within the manifold of the universe is a precondition for experiencing beauty, as everyone develops their own unique perspective. But my perspective, based as it is on partial knowledge and misguided beliefs, allows me to conceive of imperfection and feel sad because my naive beliefs and the ends based on them seem far away and even hopeless at times. I despair. But despair is a perfectly possible behaviour in this perfect universe.
I challenge the reader to find a counter-factual example. An example where fitting and its concomitant feeling of joy or even ecstasy is absent as the necessary and sufficient condition for the experience of beauty.
The working parts of aesthetic appreciation are sensitive to input and configuration, thereby determining output.
Without having to accuse someone of committing a fallacy in their reasoning(which many of us do all the time, making things even more complicated), each frame of reference, with its conceptual network of signification, delivers an output consistent with its own workings. Change our frame of reference, and inferences will follow different paths.
The point has long been understood but was succinctly summarised by William Blake:
“Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more.” William Blake, There is no natural Religion, Plate B4, (1788)
I can explain this using the game of chess. The moves you would make if you can play the game considering only one move at a time, would be a very different game from the one you could play if you can oversee two, three or more moves into the game. Grand Masters, who can reason about their current move by considering many hypothetical moves in the game, make very different decisions from beginners who barely know the rules, which might be obvious. Still, they make different moves than advanced players.
Our personal frame of reference operates within an objective, logical space that contains all that is possible in a universe. But all that is possible is not accessible to a limited consciousness. As such, our frame of reference provides access to a space of implications constrained by the wealth of our concepts and their inferential structure.
We might go through the trouble to analyse a snapshot of one person’s frame of reference at some stage in their life, and so objectify it and place it in the absolute space of René Descartes. But that would be almost impossible. Such an exercise would be as complex as making a snapshot of all the connections in a brain and then knowing what each connection meant. Our space of reasoning, as we access it, is organised according to the Brunelleschian principles of perspective.
Everything is aligned to a point of view, which gives a very personal view of everything, one that is not shared by others so easily unless they can recognise that point of view.
This is where hierarchies of importance, temporal sequence, and spatial nearness begin to affect things.
Objectivity is capable of convincing on the basis of the arguments alone. Still, subjectivity requires recognition, that is, the aligning of points of view, and it is here where the rub lies. It is in the perspectival organisation of our knowledge, beliefs, opinions, and convictions that the fitting takes on this subjective complexity, making each person’s taste unique to them.
Much is made common through the normative status of much of what we think we know, consider true and so forth, but the devil lies in the details. Even if a community achieves homogeneity, such that it succeeds in assembling around an exactly defined set of norms and values, that does not mean that every person in that community has the same inferential relationship to those norms and values. Each is shaped by the necessarily unique biography of that person at all scales: from the genetic to the developmental, to the hormonal, to the neural and whatever else I have left out.
The long and short of it is this: your fitting of ideas is not my fitting of ideas. The broad picture might be similar, but the puzzle will have been cut differently. As such, the fitting is purely subjective and personal, but the experience of beauty will nevertheless consist in a fitting of experience with ideas, a fitting whereby ideas shape the experience, and an experience that addresses ideas.
An expert in the game will be able to look at your example of beauty and show you, with surgical precision, where the fit occurs. I cannot say for certain that there are no counter-factual examples proving that some experiences of beauty do not constitute a fitting of experience with ideas. I would not make such a bold claim. As soon as I find such an example convincing, I will happily revise my deeply Aristotelian theory, but not until that happens.
Pulchrum et perfectum idem est. Traditional aesthetics, with the above qualification given by our model of thinking, informed by the latest developments in mereology and pragmatic inferentialism, can help us remove aesthetics from the disastrous turn it took after Kant was so badly interpreted, making beauty something silly, inconsequential, and helpless.3
Of course, the thesis is unprovable; it can only be invalidated by exhaustive enquiry and counter-factual research.
And the notion I put forward does come dangerously close to the tautological circuitry of which Aristotle has sometimes been accused. But that accusation is nonsense; our conceptual frameworks are all necessarily circular and tautological. Aristotle’s tautologies were just a little too narrow because of our lack of scientific knowledge at the time, but they were not wrong within the frame of reference he was working in. It was a very sincere attempt at getting things right. Some people have large, bellowing, and generous referential frameworks. Others have badly fitting frameworks that are really too small to do their job properly.
The experience of beauty lies in the shudder of pleasure or indeed the aversion felt in something discovered to be fitting with something else. This is both a necessary and a sufficient criterion for the experience of beauty. It is necessary because the experience fails to materialise without the judgment of a harmonious fit, and it is sufficient because it is all that is needed within our conceptual garden.
What is surprising is that the judgment of beauty is entirely objectifiable as long as we invest the time and energy to objectify someone’s personal frame of reference and follow their paths of inference.
And those who see beauty as a feeling aroused, I can only say this: the notion that feelings and reason are somehow opposed is as absurd as it is wrong. Feelings are what cause processes of reason to start and what conclude them. Feelings of wonder, curiosity, satisfaction, euphoria, and so forth are both the raw material for, as well as the product of, the game of giving and asking for reasons. It is with a feeling of dissatisfaction or curiosity that a process of reasoning is begun, and it is with a feeling of satisfaction, of fitting, or indeed of exhaustion, anger or dissatisfaction that an argument is concluded, given closure, decided, or left open and unresolved. Feelings and reasons are complementary parts in the working whole of our cognitive apparatus.
Decisions, including design decisions, cut off the process of reasoning on the basis of feelings. Again, feelings of frustration, of exhaustion, of impatience, of satisfaction, of whatever. The trick is to make the right kind of feeling do the cutting, stopping the game of giving and asking for reasons when a satisfactory conclusion is reached.
People who set feelings up against reason should look into this again; feelings, emotions and reasons are complementary elements within a single system, they work like a team to play the game of giving and asking for reasons, whereby a decision does what the origin of the word decision already promises, it cuts off the reasoning to emerge in a feeling that it is either a good decision or a bad one; one that fits with a particular idea held, or one that does not.
That beauty should be analytically accessible and objectifiable may come as a surprise to many. But it is. Beauty is a product of logic and reasoning, even if it is implicit and embodied as an intuitive reaction. It is thus closely allied to truth-finding in that it looks for a fit, harmony, coherence, and consistency.
Beauty is the product of the operations of a conceptualised inferential logic, either an implicit and embodied logic, or a logic made explicit in which judgment seeks consistency within a framework of concepts that it must see as coherent. As such, the experience of beauty is highly personal; it has to be held by a subject, but it can be analysed.
Why is it not more than that? The short reason is this, our conceptual world, our world of thought, is all we have to deal with the world we think about. That cognitive apparatus works with truth, beauty and goodness as the three main ways to judge what to believe and how to act upon it.
Beauty sets things up for the true and the good and judges coherence and consistency as methods for finding a fit, a composition that works.
As such, logic, which is the discipline that looks for the consistency of our beliefs, is a discipline, like mathematics, properly belonging to the realm of aesthetics, even if its output is relevant for metaphysics as well as ethics.
Beauty may be expressed in image, such as a beautiful sunset as seen from a mountain top, it may feel exhilarating, needing no words, but that, as I have been arguing, does not make it less a product of your conceptual apparatus, a product of your own frame of reference, in which you can find instances of beauty where others might struggle to follow you.
Beauty, truth, and goodness are the three pillars of our conceptual working in order to find reliable truths, harmonies of reason and with their help, good use.
It is for this reason that my favourite definition of beauty is that of Alberti in his ‘De re aedificatoria’. (1443-1452, published in 1485)
“Beauty is that reasoned harmony (my italics) of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse.”4
In effect, this definition sets the program for this whole text. Beauty is a harmony of reason of parts in a whole, where all the parts perform as a team, thereby creating something called a unified whole that is more than the sum of its parts.
© Jacob Voorthuis, 2026. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.
- A slightly older version of this paragraph was first published in Jacob Voorthuis, Theoria, use, intention & design, a philosophical reckoning; Analysis & Critique: Gardening in the metaphysics of the beautiful, the true, and the good, AHT, TU/e (2024) ↩︎
- Wladyslaw Tatarkiewics, A History of Aesthetics (De Gruyter Mouton 1970). ↩︎
- It is not the place here to give a thorough rereading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Still, my argument, for what it is worth, goes as follows: The phrase “purposiveness without purpose” is used by Kant to designate a phenomenon he illustrates with a picture of the feathers of a bird of paradise. He argues that we see the feathers might have some purpose, but we do not understand that purpose. It is also worth reminding ourselves that Kant wrote half a century before the theory of natural selection was thought of, let alone published, so we have to try to bracket our current understanding of the purpose of the feathers of a bird of paradise and see it with a sceptical but decidedly creationist mind. However, the argument still holds for many other examples: we interpret things as purposive even though we may not understand their purpose. This is certainly the feeling I get when I look at an electrical circuit inside my amplifier or when I see deliberately self-destructive behaviour in privileged people. This purposiveness without (grasping the) purpose is, for Kant, a major criterion of aesthetic appreciation in that it allows a purely theoretical and idealised pure judgment of beauty, where the imagination and the understanding are given free play in contemplating purposiveness, without being able to determine one. This is, according to Kant at least, how the pure judgement of beauty supposedly frees itself from interest and the useful. I would interpret that, with some support from Kant himself, as a kind of practising, so that the appreciation of pure, disinterested beauty serves a pedagogical purpose: learning to appreciate things through analysis and critique. Nevertheless, it makes the phrase purposiveness without purpose an anthropological problem as much as a philosophical one. Our lack of understanding, our unknowingness regarding the teleological, becomes a criterion of pure beauty, making any knowing judgment of beauty perhaps less pure, less theoretically elegant, but all the more interesting. Purposiveness pervades creation, certainly from our use-seeking point of view: eyes are for seeing, legs are for walking, flowers and their nectar are for attracting bees and wasps. Modern evolutionary theory has done away with the argument of design. Eyes and legs were not designed with a purpose in mind. Still, their homological forefathers proved their utility and were selected because they offered an advantage, and thus developed as a result of their usefulness. The same is true for flowers and their co-evolutionary waltz with the bee and the wasp. The eye is witheringly beautiful precisely because of its relation to its usefulness in all its different ways. Personally, I find Kant’s disinterested beauty only of theoretical interest because it is, at best, no more than a degré zéro at which aesthetic appreciation finds its logical extreme, its pure and innocent beginnings. But I am with Nietzsche here (Genealogy of Morals, 6), who rather scoffed at the idea that beauty can only be found in disinterest. After all, supposing there is such a thing as truly disinterested beauty, what would be our interest in it? There is no such thing. Disinterested beauty is where judgment achieves its degré zéro, its moment of theoretical purity as it disolves into nothingness. No more. It is of no interest to the rest. Beauty only becomes interesting when it offers its fittingness to any interest served, and this is, in fact, more than clear from all the attempts in literature to represent a disinterested judgment of beauty. With little effort, we can quickly find the interest served. See, for example, the section on Ruskin. ↩︎
- On the art of building in ten books, translated by Joseph Rykwert, Robert Tavernor and Neil Leach, (MIT Press 1988) book 6. See also Robert Tavernor, On Alberti and the Art of Building, (Yale Univ. Press 1998) and Michael C. Duddy, “The ends of reason: towards and Understanding of the Architectonic”, Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 5 (1): 1-13 ↩︎