What do you think of this quote: ''The truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks'' -Oscar Wilde

Question

What do you think of this quote: ''The truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks'' -Oscar Wilde

Answer 1

Is a mask's truth an intrinsic or extrinsic quality?  

Answer 2

I think Oscar Wilde refers to truths of metaphysics as if they portray them, in other words, as if they are phenomena rather than essences.

In an Aristotle framework this would be the forms of the materials but

we would not attribute the same meaning or judgment to this case.

So, Oscar Wilde seems that holds metaphysics are philosophies about forms, or Ideas, if we consider them, in a Platonic mood, as Forms of the Essences of the Material World. And, to be more precise, in a literal or theatrical perspective, human are actor in a play that the truths they converge are Forms or Masks they wear, as long as Metaphysical Dogmas are considered.

Answer 3

It is a wonderful quote, but it is always difficult to understand what the author meant without the context that the author placed it in.  In this case, the context is an essay concerning the important role that costumes and other illusions (such as masks) had in the plays of William Shakespeare.  Oscar Wilde explains that these illusions served not to conceal, but rather to reveal, namely beauty, "adding picturesqueness to poetry".  The "truths of masks" therefore refers to aesthetic truths, which Wilde further explains are not universal.  Instead, "a truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true."  Metaphysics, according to Wilde, is similar to aesthetics in this way.  He gives the Platonic theory of forms and Hegel's system of contraries as examples of opposing metaphysical truths that reveal a great deal to us through the use of illusions.  But metaphysics is not just an example.  Wilde states that the metaphysical truths can only be understood aesthetically, which I take as his final endorsement of Shakespeare's method.

So the "truths of masks" refers to the contrary yet true ideas of aesthetics as revealed to us through the use of illusions, and the "truths of metaphysics" are the same truths as those of aesthetics.