Understanding Beauty: Experience or Reason?

Do we understand things like beauty through action or thought, experience or intellection?

I was listening to Thomas Mirus on The Catholic Culture Podcast discussing beauty, and about an hour and twenty-one minutes in, he makes a fascinating point about how to understand music. Here is what he says:

I have sometimes wondered, to be honest, if philosophers don’t tend to have a bias towards the discursive because that’s their sort of stock-in-trade. And that might be part of the reason why I find the philosophical tradition on music often kind of dissatisfying, in that they often seem to not be interested in talking about music as music. They’re sort of only interested in talking about the moral implications of music or the cosmic—the music of the spheres—things like that.

His broader point is that philosophers, when trying to understand something like music, resort too quickly to discursivity—that is, reasons by way of intellection and words. He is implying that the meaning of music is both discursive and non-discursive, experiential or phenomenological. It is contained within both action and intellect. An important feature of the core meaning, the ontological account of music, is non-discursive. There is meaning contained within the action and not just within the intellection of the thing.

So how are we supposed to understand not just music, but all of beauty and all of reality? Is it something we understand through intellection, action, experience, or both?

The Limits of Pure Intellection

I first have to address my own presupposition and bias here. When I first heard him speaking like this, I was skeptical. I am typically wary of any account that sequesters experience away from analysis. It can strike me as an extreme form of mysticism where experience is a first principle that nothing can question or reinterpret. I felt a bit of that hesitation initially, but I don’t think that is what Mirus was saying. He was simply observing that philosophers tend to swing the pendulum too far toward intellection, failing to give due weight to the phenomenon, the experience, and the action.

Christians are not idealists. The world is a real thing. Practice is a real thing; it is not just window dressing.

How do we make sense of the idea that reality has at least two ways of being fully understood, through action and intellection? Two things can help us: first, an analogy with something we understand well both practically and intellectually; and second, Trinitarian ontology.

The Analogy and Trinitarian Ontology

Take something we understand both practically and intellectually pretty well: sex. We understand this practically at a very deep level, in its experience and its importance. Many people participate in this, so we have a good grasp of the phenomenological experience. But we also have a clear intellectual understanding of it—how it relates to reproduction, bonding, and many other realities.

Both of these realities are irreducible and interpenetrative. No matter how much explanation you provide, it can never substitute for the experience, and vice versa. Each is irreducible, and both are necessarily incomplete on their own. You cannot sufficiently understand the phenomenon purely by intellection, nor purely from experience. There will always be something missing without both.

Why are both necessary? Trinitarian ontology. In Trinitarian ontology, difference is an ontological first principle. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit are all ontologically necessary, each providing something the other persons do not intrinsically have. The one and the many, unity and diversity, are equally ultimate.

God seems to have designed the world to mirror this reality. The divine essence is mirrored by diffusing difference throughout the world, and those differences are both legitimately distinct and ontologically necessary for each other. The interpenetrative aspect means you cannot have a Father without a Son, or a Son without a Father. They are distinct, yet internally required for each other.

When we come to something like music, both the experience of it—the use and action of it—and its intellectual understanding are necessary for fully understanding the phenomenon. What is required for a mature understanding of anything God has created is both action and intellection, experience and reason.

Watch the original episode.