ABSTRACT
When culture is understood via naturalistic facts and willful experience, then culture is aestheticized and thus denied. By definition, aesthetics is material and relational, not intelligible and ontological; it is concerned with the relationship of facts, feelings, and style. In contrast, beauty is traditionally understood as the realization of ontological Perfection in form or content. It is concerned not with an immanent inner necessity (since inner necessity alone justifies willful stupidity, arrogance, and even barbarism) but with the objectively numinous. It is concerned with the recognition of the Ideal, of that which is true and good in reality. It is marked by the material realization of some degree of that understanding in reality and life. That realization of the Ideal relies upon an intelligible object called Perfection.
