The Culmination of Beauty
Thomas A. F. Kelly
Our title, 'the culmination of beauty', is deliberately ambiguous, the ambiguity turning on whether we construe the 'of' as a subjective or an objective genitive. Thus we may speak of the culmination which beauty is, and the culmination which beauty mediates. This paper, which communicates the current author's ontological research, addresses both of these issues, and endeavours to indicate the centrality of beauty both within the metaphysically capital doctrine of the transcendentals and in the life of man, the animale metaphysicum.
1. Beauty as culmination. We assign a key place in metaphysics/ontology to the transcendentals because they form the condition of the possibility of language. Ontology, as understood generally within analytic philosophy, is the explication of the categorical framework of language--taking in such notions as entity, property, relation, event--which must be identical with the architecture of reality. This presupposes language as revelatory and truth-ful, and that which it reveals as ontologically and coevally true and good, the mutuality of which constitutes ontological beauty, the truly, manifestly, good.
2. The culmination which beauty mediates. The second part of our paper follows the logic inherent in the discovery of transcendental beauty to the hyper-reality of beauty as master transcendental and an especially revelatory name for God. God-as-beauty is the culmination of all human life and thus the key to any anthropology with a claim to validity. Central to such a conception of the human is beauty as the truth of art, in which the icon of the present is made visible and audible.
