§ 28 Truth, beauty, goodness, and their working relationship
With that, from an analytical point of view, everything within logical space can, in principle, be found beautiful. Beauty is therefore subject to normativity. The fit that will determine whether it is so found will depend upon the working elements of our cognitive apparatus, shaped as it is historically through evolution, giving us deep-seated biological and sociocultural norms and values that are, however, only ever necessary a posteriori.1
There can be no a priori necessity to the finding of beauty except insofar as anything can in principle be found beautiful, but does not have to be found so. We form our norms culturally, and they can become embodied over time, but we can also overcome them. That comes with a price. The price of losing our foothold. But even that can be refreshing, even if it is an existential challenge.
A judgment of beauty is a normative event. Norms inform it and, in turn, are formed by it, either by affirming them or by reforming them based on an altered frame of reference. Actually, instead of using the phrase that ‘everything can be found beautiful’, which is analytically true from an objectified space looked at sub specie aeternitatis, I should have used the phrase ‘anything can be found beautiful’. In a perspectival organisation of the world, with a human being whose life is filled with challenges at the point where that perspective comes together, it is probably not possible, and almost certainly unprofitable, to find everything beautiful or to like everything.2
A river is a body of water that flows as a unified body on condition that there are banks that serve to funnel it into the direction of lower ground and so keep it together as a thing and sever it from what it is not. Its restrictions, which keep it separate from that which it is not, shape it and make possible its activity as a river.
This analogy allows the apparent contradiction: while it is necessarily true a priori that anything can be found beautiful within logical space, it is also necessarily true that not everything has to be so found from any specific frame of reference.
For something to be, that is become an entity in our consciousness, the being requires a boundary to sever it from what it is not.
That boundary imposes conditions for its being this or that. A river spilling its banks is no longer a river but a flood.
Restrictions govern the conditions for being. Those restrictions and the peculiar fingerprint conditions of each situation allow unique structures to develop in each person’s thinking. These things, as constructed, constitute true subjectivity, which, through its unique structures and ontological restrictions, allows all things to become subjectified objects that are engaged with.
The Danube is not the Rhine, Versailles is not Caserta. It is that subjectivity that allows each thing its identity. Subjectivity is also what, through learning, allows us the freedom to be ourselves.
Human being, as growing, developing, learning, and mobile creatures who come to consciousness within a culture of others that, over history, has developed norms and defined values, similarly need their limits, their place between the restrictions that make it what it is and the ones that separate it from what it is not.
However, there is a wide diversity of things people find beautiful. Some are strange and worrying. We shall come back to that a little further down.
The knowledge needed to arrive at the judgment that something fits, and the feeling of satisfaction, joy, and beauty that indicates that arrival, constitute a special kind of knowledge. The knowledge is of two sorts and may be embodied and implicit. The first kind of knowledge is knowledge of what one perceives, which can be either rich or poor. It is our conception of what it is we are perceiving in an ecstatic realisation or recognition.
The second kind of knowledge is what is often described as a taste.3 A taste is a conceptually held collection of more or less coordinated positions taken about one’s likes and dislikes. It is a subjectively held knowledge that contributes to the identity of the person who holds it. It helps shape and give direction to her fingerprint conceptual framework, her fingerprint space of implications, and her fingerprint conceptual wealth, each tailored by her own unique experience.
These factors, in turn, form the preconditions for any fit between a thing, an event, or a situation and the set of ideas held at that moment.
A person’s image of the world and their place in it is formed by concepts that they have made their own with properties of which they are aware, delivering inferential possibilities that are peculiar to them and upon which they have taken a position.
This personally held, and only partially shared, conceptual structure, which each person must service, maintain and explore the logical connections, is organised within a ‘self’-defining perspective on things. This construct is as unique as a fingerprint or an iris scan.
Who then knows how any subjectively held view of the world fits together? Some will make a slapdash job of constructing and maintaining it; others will take great care in its construction.
Some will have a natural flair for such work, while others will struggle and give up. It is for this reason that we can fairly say that each person has their own world that in terms of its conceptual structure and space of implications is unique and incompatible with that of others.
But complicated as it may be, that does not yet make a judgment of beauty less objectifiable. Any instance of a thing, event, or situation found beautiful can, in principle, be made explicit and analysed in its workings.
Beauty is scrutable.4 And so, questions of taste can be resolved if the interlocutors are willing to perform the necessary work of questioning and clarifying their statements, which is what philosophy, in the end, is all about.5
The scrutability of beauty, and the analysis and objectification of its experience, apply equally to truth and its experience, and to the good and its experience. What we need to understand is how each of the three works to create judgments that can graduate into norms and/or actions.
Here is an attempt at a simple pragmatic formula: The function of a model of the world is to allow us to think about the world and to accommodate ourselves in it as best we can. A good model is either accurate or exerts power, helping us accommodate ourselves well.
The function of truth is to judge conceptualisations of things, events and situations made within the conceptual structure of that model for consistency with it.
A true conceptualisation is consistent with the model, and an accurate conception is accurate with respect to what it models.
A truth is valuable when it is both consistent with the model and accurate with respect to the modelled, because it is reliable knowledge.
Beauty is valuable because it seeks to find a fit, that is to construct harmonies of reason using truths to construct positions a person might want to take regarding things, events and situations bringing them into the realm of tensions and opposition: the admirable versus the hateful and the repugnant, the attractive versus the unattractive, the joyful versus the sad, the true versus the lie, the good versus the bad.
Looking the other way, beauty is used to judge whether things, events, and situations fit with a position taken within that model of the world, with respect to its uses and virtues.
Both truth and beauty serve the good. The function of the good is to judge ends, means, and their working relationships in terms of their fit. As such, beauty serves both truth and goodness in their operations because it judges the fit between things, the harmony of reasons, the coherence of a whole and its parts, and the consistency of something with something else. The good is what we need, truth and beauty, to accommodate ourselves well.
Truth resists subjectification because it must accurately reflect reality. And because all human beings have comparable means to perceive and conceive the behaviour of reality, however much of themselves they bring to any image, subjective truths, i.e. propositions consistent with one’s personally held frame of reference (beliefs), can be held to account when measured against other frames of reference.
So truths measured against observation and comparison tend to transcend the individual subject.
Beauty is transcendent in that it is a function of the universe’s perfection: the necessity for us to conceive it as a coherent and consistent unity expressing a universal harmony of working parts, each doing their thing ineluctably.
Beauty can thus be found anywhere and in anything, but won’t be, as it will only be found where something or a situation is judged to fit with a set of ideas held in the judge’s subjective model of the world.
Only in our own conceptual model of the world is negation possible.
Only in our conceptual model of the world can we divide between true and false, finding the joy of beauty in truth and the dissatisfaction of ugliness in falsity and only when we begin to organize our model of the world perspectivally relative to some view informed by values, norms, uses, and purposes do we acquire the capacity to divide things between the beautiful and the ugly and the good and the bad relative to that view.
The finding of beauty will be restricted by the capacity and point of view of the human being seeking it or coming across it by accident. Beauty discovered and found forms a subjective fingerprint that makes a person uniquely them. And the good is what then uses beauty and truth to find fitting ends and useful means to act well.
© 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) ↩︎
- Paul Shepheard, How To Like Everything: A Utopia, (ZerO Books, 2013) ↩︎
- Giorgio Agamben calls taste “a special kind of knowledge”, see Taste, translated by Cooper Francis (Univ. of Chicago Press 2017)] a knowledge that enjoys but knows not what it enjoys. This is connected with G.W.Leibniz’s famous use of the phrase je ne sais quoi : ‘we see that painters and other skilled craftsmen can accurately tell well-done work from what is poorly done, though often they can’t explain their judgments, and when asked about them all they can say is that the works that displease them lack a certain je-ne-sais-quoi.’ Far from instituting this as a legitimate criterion for the understanding of beauty, Leibniz merely observes that Artists and skilled craftsmen are good at what they do but are not necessarily good at explaining what they do. For this we need people who are skilled in that, which is a skill he sets out to make explicit in his very pragmatic meditations on knowledge. G.W. Leibniz, ‘Meditations on Knowledge, Truth and Ideas,’ in: Philosophical Papers and Letters, Vol. 1, Leroy E. Loemker ed. (Chicago University Press, 1946) p. 449. ↩︎
- See David Chalmers Constructing the world, (Oxford 2012) which argues the thesis that reasoning from a limited class of basic truths yields all truths about the world. If it is true that I find the Mona Lisa beautiful, then that must be subject to rational analysis, even if I am not going to go through the bother of performing that analysis. ↩︎
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, 4.112 ↩︎