Introduction

This issue of Soundings might be thought of as an extended consideration of the concept famously addressed in John Keats’s 1820 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and especially the canonical line from its closing stanza, “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.” What is the exact relationship between art, beauty, balance, and truth? Can and should considerations of beauty be used in assessing seemingly nonaesthetic ideas and concepts? What is the nature of the boundaries between “art” and “reality” and what is gained through pushing these boundaries to their breaking point? How are works of art and artists shaped by historical and philosophical notions of law, justice, morality? Can beauty and truth, however defined, be reconciled? These questions are unpacked and explored by the contributors in this issue.

To begin, Junxiao Bai’s “The Spectrum of the Divine Order: Goodness, Beauty, and Harmony” interprets the writings and ideas of Ptolemy and Augustine in considering the relation between a harmonious world order and the divine. Exploring deeply their notions of numerical and musical harmonic ratios and the connections of these ratios to the cosmos, the author concludes that Augustine saw such perfect relationships between numbers and music as evidence of God’s divine order in both the physical and metaphysical realms.

Devon Brickhouse-Bryson considers somewhat similar conceptual territory in his article on the relationships between judgments of beauty and judgments of theory. Interpreting a method of evaluating theories known as “reflective equilibrium” through which common sense principles are weighed against background theories, Brickhouse-Bryson makes an engaging case for both the centrality of the idea of coherence in this evaluative method, and for the idea that such judgments of coherence can best be conceived of as species of judgments of beauty. This insight, he argues, will help theoreticians more effectively understand reflective equilibrium and devise epistemically better theories.

Next, Jenessa Kenway examines the “blurring of life and art” in the works of visual and literary realist and hyperrealist artists. Focusing particularly on nineteenth-century French realist painter Gustave Courbet, the late twentieth-century superrealist American sculptor Duane Hanson and the contemporary Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, she considers the intersections between their deep exploration of the repetitive, mundane reality that makes up most of human existence. Kenway imaginatively argues that these artists force their readers and viewers to confront the truth of what she characterizes as “the thought stream running through non-being,” but also to recognize the richness of considerations of daily “nothingness.”

Finally, Mark Packer reinterprets Herman Melville’s classic unfinished novella Billy Budd through the intersecting prisms of literary criticism, jurisprudence, philosophy, and American and British history. In “‘Yet the Angel Must Hang’: Billy Budd and Melville’s Moral Skepticism,” Packer concentrates on the moral ambiguity that permeates so much of the novel and explores its legal and historical implications. He connects the struggle in the story (set in 1797), between how to balance admiralty law and natural morality in determining Billy Budd’s fate for having killed a superior officer, with similar tensions experienced by Melville’s anti-slavery father-in-law and Massachusetts Supreme Court Chief Justice who reluctantly upheld the Fugitive Slave Act and similar legislation. Packer concludes that Melville’s refusal to provide a morally definitive conclusion was a product of this history of the refusal of men in positions of authority to act on spiritual wisdom rather than legal mandate.

Collectively, these works provide multiple approaches toward considering the nature of the boundaries and distinctions between art and life, law, and justice, and the everyday and the sublime—issues that remain as vexed and pertinent today as in Keats’s time.