I've heard it said that beauty is truth, and truth beauty.

Clever sayings like this tend to put me on my guard. Picking this one apart over a mug of coffee, I'm initially inclined to disagree: looking around me, and inside me, I perceive a distinct contrast between evil and good. They appear equally true, equally real, but not equally beautiful. In my experience, truth always contains fair portions of beauty and ugliness.

If you were served a delicious plate of food, but were informed that a cook had sneezed on it, you would most likely reject the dish in disgust. If, however, you were not informed of the truth about the sneeze, you would enjoy the food and compliment the cook afterwards. The food is beautiful; the sneeze is ugly. Is the truth, then, beautiful or ugly? In this instance, we want to say the truth is ugly, because our initial perception of beauty has been tainted with the realization of ugliness; but consider a reversal. If you were served an exotic dish of unknown substance, with unappetizing appearance, you might be repulsed and call it ugly. If, however, you taste and find it delicious, you will be inclined to call this truth a welcome and beautiful surprise.

In both cases, the truth encompasses the beautiful and ugly aspects of the situation. Is it a matter of optimism, then, to say that truth is beauty? Could we just as well say that truth is ugliness? Alternatively, could true beauty lie in the contrast between evil and good?

The latter is an interesting concept, one which I can certainly appreciate as an artist. A charcoal drawing relies solely on the variation of value in black and white to create a simple and elegant beauty. This can be seen as analogous of evil and good in the world: in other words, the contrast of good and evil creates beauty.

Of course, this raises serious moral questions regarding the very nature of good and evil. If both are equal yet contrasting partners, indispensable to beauty, then is good necessarily "right", and evil necessarily "wrong"? Perhaps the analogy is faulty.

In my opinion, however, the analogy is not faulty, but incomplete. I believe there exists more than the two dimensions of black and white, right and wrong; I believe in color. Our eyesight utilizes more than the contrast of black and white to see beauty, and so may our minds morally "see" more than the contrast of right and wrong. White light is comprised of all color; blackness is fundamentally the absence of any light or color whatsoever. Good is comprised of all beauty; evil is fundamentally the absence of any good or beauty whatsoever. This model, then, defines evil not as a necessary part, but a subtraction from beauty.

Returning to the question: is beauty truth, and truth beauty? I've arrived at the conclusion that evil is separate from good, and that evil is ugly while good is beautiful. Taking it to be self-evident that evil and good both truly exist in the world, does the saying need to be rephrased, "beauty and ugliness are truth, and truth is beauty and ugliness"? No.

The opposite of truth is the absence of truth. The absence of truth is falsehood. When someone believes falsehood, they are disbelieving the truth. If falsehood is ugly, and ugliness is the absence of beauty, then we don't see ugliness. It's not something that's seen; rather, it's something that isn't seen. Ugliness is the part of truth that's missing, the empty space where we should see beauty but don't. Ugliness is nothing. Ugliness is the inside of our eyelids.

In the end, it turns out that John Keats was right. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye need know on Earth, and all ye need to know." If you examine anything and see beauty, know it is true. If you know truth, look and you will see beauty.

I've done both this morning. After three hours of argument and writing, I've discovered I was wrong and Keats was right. I've discovered beauty and truth together in this line of poetry, and it was well worth the effort.