Wisik: A Splash of Reality

  BEAUTY = Integrity + Proportion + Clarity (photo from: https://www.catholicforum.com/forums/showthread.php?66510-Trifacial-Face)     The human person is an artwork of God. We were knitted in our mother's womb (cf. Psalm 139:13), crafted by the Creator's own image and likeness, and proclaimed as good. In a sense, we share in God's goodness, perfection, and beauty. In studying aesthetics, and particularly in reading the aesthetic theory of St. Thomas Aquinas, I came across the Thomistic formula for what constitutes the beautiful. If we are indeed beautiful since we are the Divine Artist's artwork and we share in his beauty, these qualities proposed by Aquinas are evident in us.     In Aquinas' Summa Theologica (q.39, article 8), he puts forth three   qualities of the beautiful:           For beauty includes three conditions, ‘integrity’ or ‘perfection,’ since those  things which are impaired are by the very fact ugly; due ‘proportion’ or  ‘harmony’; and lastly, ‘br

  (photo from: https://www.openculture.com/2015/07/an-animated-introduction-to-michel-foucault-philosopher-of-power.html) MADNESS IN THE SHIP OF FOOLS A Reflection on Michel Foucault: Beyond Good and Evil (1993)         Upon hearing/reading the word 'madness',  the common image that comes to some people's mind is probably that of a psychiatric ward filled with people displaying extreme insanity; the halls are filled with shouting, laughing, crying, or sometimes a deafening silence. Nevertheless, the feeling of pity is evoked upon witnessing this. Society sometimes neglects these individuals and would tend to cage them and treat them in inhumane ways; this was one of the observations made by Foucault.      Madness is a theme found in the corpus of the radical philosopher Michel Foucault, specifically in his work "Madness and Civilization" in 1961. This work was revolutionary and it did not follow a conventional manner of writing, a style that shocked readers specia