Beauty

In order to define his artistic identity Joyce aimed to elaborate a personal theory of aesthetics. As starting point he adopted basic terms (integritas, consonantia, claritas) and principles (e.g. pulchra sunt quae visa placent) from Thomas Aquinas, which he developed into an original interpretation of beauty. Due to his limited knowledge of sources, Joyce did not recognize that Aquinas had already resolved what he believed were fundamental difficulties of definition. Unfamiliar with the Thomist theory of transcendentals (the convertibility of being with the basic properties of goodness, truth, beauty, thing, one, and ‘something’), many of Joyce’s interpretations are confused. Detailed arguments and textual evidence is brought against the view of Jacques Aubert that Hegel, rather than Aquinas, was the inspiration for Joyce’s aesthetics.