John Vervaeke

Spoken in English. Their words, as they said them.

Ellen Scarry, in her book beauty and how it trains us for justice and truth. She talks that way that instead of understanding beauty as like attractiveness or as Han says, we've reduced it to the smooth that which gives us most easiest access to the gratification of our desires and put aside the attractive or put aside the smooth. What about, and she says, no, what she says, the beauty you, I didn't realize trees could be like that. It's a tree. It's like all these other trees I've seen. They all, again, the one in the mini, they all come into this moment. They're all here. But then I didn't realize trees could be like that. And they all now are, I'll use a Christian term. They're all redeemed in that and, and they're all real life. And then the past and the future talk to each other. That I think is beauty. And I think again, that's the kind of beauty Plato's talking about is the beauty that calls us into the kind of love and participation and the metanoia. And then you could hear, you could hear Iris Murdoch's the sovereignty of the good, that beauty, but it, but when it does this thing, it actually prepares us for the truth. And I think there's a way of understanding that and that might help to give us a bit of what might Plato say. So I want to do both.

The issue that is needed for truth is the capacity to take things seriously in the right way and not from a place of motivated self deception. That's not truth, but if you don't have that virtue, you're not going to find the truth. And what is it to take something seriously?

We've done a lot of work on this. Right? We have a, we have a word, and it has two meanings and I'd only, I only wanna use one of the meaning. And the word is plausibility. It sounds technical. And one just mean one is just a synonym for high probability. I'm not talking about that. The other is when somebody says that's plausible, they meet and they'll say synonyms like it's reasonable. We should take it seriously. I think we find things plausible for because of a certain structure. One is what Reschler calls trustworthiness. This is when many independent things converge on something like the re like, if I can only touch it, I I don't know if it's real, but if I can see it, touch it, hear it because of, because if it's just one sense, let's do sight cause that's easy for people. If I can only see it, it might not be real. Right. But if all of my senses are converging on it, the chance that they're all deceived right at the same, not, it's not zero, but it's, it's low. And so I've reduced the probability that bias is leading to my thinking. Now think about what all the trees I've ever seen. They're all converging into the moment of the beautiful tree. They're getting this is a very trustworthy experience, right? But plausibility isn't just that. It's that, right? It it's it promises elegance. It promises insight. It promises to open. It makes good sense. It's opening up. You should take it seriously because it's putting a potential power in your hands to go into many areas and open them up.

And that's the other part of the beautiful tree. Right? I didn't realize trees could be like this, and there's whole there's a whole new opportunities around trees that's now available to so this convergent to trustworthiness, this elegance for empowerment, affordance, and then the way they come together, right, is something that's flowing. It's got the technical lingo. It's got cognitive fluency. Well, if you have all of those, that's plausibility, but it's but it's also beauty. And so I think what Plato would say is, can you relive beauty as the call to taking things seriously so that you become enabled to love wisely. That's what I think Plato would say.

And so I think beauty should tap into our fundamental machinery and that's why I'm making use of her work and I'm making use of wrestler's work and Elijah Milgram's work and all the work on cognitive fluid and bringing that all together and saying, let's re understand beauty as this is what it's doing. And this is Iris Murdoch. It tells, it says, take me seriously, but not just take me. It has a whole person involving all of this self, but not self involved. So love, take me seriously and love me wisely. I think the call to beauty should be that. And I think artists are now responsible for making that call for us.