Minding the aesthetic: The place of the literacy in education and research

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (From Keats: “Ode on a Grecian Urn”) (Ricks, 1999) It is easy enough to think of these lines from “Ode on a Grecian Urn” as a mere slogan. But I do not think it is. The nature of knowledge and its relationship to the imagination was one of the great Romantic themes, and we know that Keats thought long and hard about it, probably during lectures he attended during the three years he spent training in medicine. On 1 October 1815, Keats entered Guy’s Hospital for more formal training. Henry Stephens, a classmate and later the inventor of blueblack ink, described the would-be poet: Whilst attending lectures, he [Keats] would sit & instead of Copying out the lecture, would often scribble some doggerel rhymes, among the Notes of Lecture, particularly if he got hold of another Student’s Syllabus—In my Syllabus of Chemical Lectures he scribbled many lines on the paper cover. (The life of John Keats, 2004, pp. 9–11) I think I need to say to my audience who do enjoy singing the binomial theorem or chanting the periodic table in the shower that I do not see the arts and sciences employing diametrically opposed modes of cognition ... but more of that later. So what might be meant by an equation of truth with beauty? My thinking can be encapsulated in three statements: • The awareness of pattern is central to human meaning-making. • Form is the aesthetic face of knowledge. • There is a pleasure in form. These three statements suggest three phrases in aesthetic knowledge production. The first relates to perception or intuition, an awareness of relationship between events or qualities. The second relates to the emergence or embodiment of this awareness into something durable (a painting, poem or equation) or something