The true, the good and the beautiful

Abstract

Three dimensions are involved in the terms “true”, “good” and “beautiful”: respectively, Science, Ethics, and Aesthetics. Scientific statements can be assessed as true or false, according to the evidence; they are of universal credibility and overcome the “here” and the “now”. “Good” and “beautiful” – or their opposite: “bad” and “ugly” – are something else: they concern value judgements that are place and time dependent. This is another yardstick: verification or refutation are no longer at stake, and their praise (or otherwise) depends on historical and cultural values, according to which they are not considered true or false, but good or bad, and beautiful or ugly. The confusion among these instances leads to a naïve approach to architectural configuration: options are mistakenly taken to be “false” or “wrong”, when in fact they are ethically or aesthetically determined. In such cases, architectural codes, by which we cherish places or otherwise, remain implicit, but they should be made explicit; it is wrongly assumed that “problems” (notwithstanding sheer incompetence) are the result of a lack of knowledge of the “truth”, but their identification as such is a function of value options informed by ways of having, acting, thinking, and feeling – Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus – that position subjects in the social scale.