AESTHETICS IS ALL:

[K]reeft shows how the pursuit of beauty, truth and goodness--which lead to wisdom--enriches our lives. Beauty, he remarks, pulls us beyond ourselves toward truth and goodness: "Beauty is what first impresses us about truth and goodness. It is their child and their ambassador. It is the quality of all objects of love, as Plato taught in The Symposium. And it gives us an ecstasy, a 'standing outside yourself,' a blissful loss of self-consciousness." 

This point ought not slip us by, for it is not merely good, true and beautiful things that we want, but goodness, truth and beauty as they are in themselves. Aristotle observed that "all men by nature desire to know." Not only do we have a natural curiosity to understand--hence the unremitting stream of interrogation from the toddler who asks, "What's that?"--but no finite thing ever satisfies our never ending quest for knowledge. Whether we study bees, financial markets, sales techniques, woodworking or philosophy itself, we find that the complete understanding we yearn for forever eludes our grasp. Moreover, even when we have had our fill of some subject, do we ever say, "I now have all I ever need to know?" On the contrary, when we reach our capacity in one area we find ourselves sailing toward the next shore of knowledge to colonize, ever searching for the complete act of understanding itself. This is no less true for beauty and goodness. Even the most consuming mystical experience pales in comparison to our unrestricted drive for infinite beauty itself. 

Tweet   @brothersjudd