Beautiful Truth and Truthful Beauty: On the Cognitive Value of Art (original) (raw)

Introduction “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. These famous lines by John Keats in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” have been the subject of a great deal of debate and discussion within literary circles. In this article, however, I do not intend to enter into this debate. Rather, my interest lies elsewhere, in what Keats suggests in these lines in a more general sense: the cognitive or truth value of art. In an even broader way, this can be connected to the question of form and content. As Martha Nussbaum writes, “Literary form is not separable from philosophical content, but is, itself, a part of content – an integral part, then, of the search for and the statement of truth.” Such a cognitivist view has several supporters and can even be extended to other art forms as well. In his inaugural address as Professor of Theological Aesthetics at VU University Amsterdam, Wessel Stoker argued that, although art does involve the values of form...