Truth and Beauty
“Girl with a Mandolin”, Pablo Picasso
From Thomas Mann’s “On Schopenhauer,” translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter:
“The pleasure we take in a metaphysical system, the gratification purveyed by the intellectual organization of the world into a closely reasoned, complete, and balanced structure of thought, is always of a pre-eminently aesthetic kind. It flows from the same source as the joy, the highest and ever happy satisfaction we get from art, with its power to shape and order its material, to sort out life’s manifold confusions so as to give us a clear and general view.
“Truth and beauty must always be referred the one to the other. Each by itself, without the support given by the other, remains a very fluctuating value. Beauty that has not truth on its side and cannot have reference to it, does not live in it and through it, would be an empty chimera — and ‘What is truth?’ Our conceptions, created out of the phenomenal world, out of a highly conditioned point of view, are, as a critical and discriminating philosophy admits, applicable in an immanent, not in a transcendent sense.”
Mesocosm 
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