that quickly fade and that resist adequate repetition. In the second place, there is always a region of our aesthetic longing that remains unfulfilled—even by the most poignant encounters with beautiful persons, music, art, or natural phenomena. It is not difficult for any of us to conjure up examples from our own lives of the elusiveness of beauty. We are seemingly unable to completely control the beautiful, but must instead patiently await the summons to be taken into its grasp.
The experience of never being completely filled up by particular aesthetic experiences is of course frustrating. It might even tempt one to an “absurdist” interpretation of reality. The inability of particular aesthetic manifestations to satisfy the infinity of our desire for the sublime might easily be construed as just another instance of the insuperable incongruity of humans and the universe. And it would be very difficult to offer an empirical refutation of this tragic view.
However, there is another at least equally plausible interpretation of our aesthetic frustration. It stems from our thesis that, ultimately, the beautiful is the divine, a mysterium tremendum et fascinans. And if the divine is the beautiful or sublime, then, in keeping with what we have noted in each of the preceding chapters, we should expect not so much to grasp beauty as to allow it to comprehend us and carry us away into itself. However, as we have also emphasized, our initial instinct is usually that of resisting and even denying the gentle envelopment of our existence by the mysterium—in this case, the beautiful. Aesthetic frustration, therefore, is not so much a failure on the part of the beautiful to meet us as it is the result of our shriveling our aesthetic sensitivity to restrictive dimensions that “protect” us from the beautiful. The “absurdist” interpretation would insist that our aesthetic frustration is the result of the fact that while we ourselves have an insatiable, even infinite, capacity for experiencing beauty, reality is limited in its ability to satisfy our needs. Hence, absurdism places the source of our frustration in the universe itself instead of in the possible limitedness of our own aesthetic perceptivity. The view that I am presenting, on the other hand, holds that the “doors” of our perception are possibly too narrow to let in the fullness of the beautiful, while the inner chamber of our consciousness continues to ache in emptiness for a beauty that would fill it and to which our perceptivity is inadequate. Aesthetic frustration stems from the inadequacy of our perceptive faculties to the deep inner need we have for limitless beauty. The absurdist view seems to be based on an unrealistic notion of perception.
Whitehead has shown how an unduly narrow doctrine of perception has dominated most of modern thought, including our understanding of beauty.47 According to the commonly accepted view of modern, empirically oriented thought, the five senses are the only doors of our perception. If we are to be in touch with the real world, we are instructed to attend primarily to the data given to the mind by the senses of taste, touch, smell, sound, and especially sight (aided of course by scientific instruments of perception). But without denying that our senses do put us in touch with the real world, Whitehead emphasizes that the senses give us only a very abstract and narrow range of the universe. They are inadequate to mediate the full complexity—and beauty—of the world in which we are organically situated. They bite off only a very narrow range of the contemporary world and leave behind the unfathomable temporal depths and aesthetic intensity of the universe as a whole. And so, we typically tend to ignore the wider aesthetic patterning of reality, since it is left out by the clear and crisp impressions given to us by the five senses.
41. The following text is an excerpt. Previously published in Haught, What is God?, 69–91. Reprinted with permission.
42. See Dupre, Other Dimension, 228–42.
43. See Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 252–96.
44. See Whitehead, Religion in the Making, 115.
45. See Taylor, Erring.
46. Tillich, Shaking, 151.
47. See Whitehead, Process and Reality, 110–26 and 168–83; Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 148–69; and Whitehead, Symbolism, 12–59.
5: Truth48
What do we want more than anything else? What is our deepest desire? How many of us can honestly respond: the truth? “What we want most is the truth about the universe, about other people, and especially about ourselves”? Is truth what we really want most deeply? Or would we not be better off if we were spared from it? Søren Kierkegaard wrote: “It is far from being the case that men in general regard relationship with the truth as the highest good, and it is far from being the case that they, Socratically, regard being under a delusion as the greatest misfortune.”49 Why is it that we are not always interested in truth and instead often seek refuge in illusions?
Perhaps the reason is that the desire for truth is not the only passion governing our conscious and instinctive lives. Only a little reflection is needed to remind us that we are composed of a morass of drives, desires, longings, cravings, wishes, and hopes. Curiously, the inhabitants of this jungle of desires are often in conflict with one another. One part of us might want sensual gratification, another security, another power, another meaning, and another approval. Furthermore, one desire may be superimposed upon another, so that their disentanglement seems nearly impossible. It is often hard to determine which of the desires is dominant or to which of our various inclinations we should entrust the course of our lives. Often we experiment with a variety of our urges before we commit ourselves to any one of them as our fundamental option. Perhaps a serious pursuit of truth is one of the last of our desires to be accepted as a dynamic force in our lives because there is so much competition from other urges that are quite content to live with illusions.
And yet, the message of our great religious, literary, and philosophical classics is that there is really only one desire that we can completely trust to lead us to genuine happiness, namely our thirst for the truth. Only when we subordinate our other inclinations to the eros for truth will we find what we are really looking for. But how dominant is this desire in our own conscious existence? Perhaps the passion to get to the truth has not yet assumed a central role in our lives. “I want the truth” may be only a tentative, barely audible utterance, buried under many layers of longing that are not at all interested in the truth. We may, at times, wonder why the prophets, visionaries and philosophers have made so much of the pursuit of truth, especially if there is little inclination for it in our own lives.
What is the truth? Can it be defined? Or do we not implicitly appeal to it even in trying to define it, so that any attempted definition is circular? It would be an interesting experiment if you would pause at this point and attempt to define “truth.” The classical definition of truth is “the correspondence of mind with reality.” But what is reality? Can it be defined? The term truth often refers not only to the cognitional stance of one who is in touch with “reality,” but it may also be used interchangeably with reality itself. That is, truth may be understood either epistemologically (as referring to the correspondence of our minds to reality) or metaphysically (as the name for that reality our minds are in touch with). In one sense, truth means the attunement of the mind to being, to the real, to the true. In the following, however, I shall use the term “truth” primarily in the metaphysical sense—namely, as “being,” the “real,” or the “true”—which is intended as the goal of our desire for reality. In other words, I shall use the terms truth, being, and
