Relation to the world· Aesthetics
Primacy of the ethical
Axis: Beauty in life — Is beauty at the heart of a flourishing life, or a secondary luxury next to ethics and usefulness?
Beauty is subordinate to the good and the useful: a secondary pleasure, even a suspect seduction of appearances. The good life is measured by moral uprightness, not aesthetic refinement, and art must serve that end or be a mere luxury.
Philosophers 6
Platoexplicit
Beauty plays a unique anagogic role: it is the only Form that shines forth in the sensible and, through erōs, sets the soul moving toward the intelligible. Yet it remains subordinate to the Good and to justice: seductive poetry is banished from the city if it corrupts the soul, and the beautiful is valuable only insofar as it leads to the true and the good.
Phaedrus, 250d-251b · Republic, III, 401b-403c
Rousseauexplicit
Though Rousseau exalts feeling and nature, he does not make art the highest place of existence: in the Letter to d'Alembert, he denounces the theatre that softens morals and flatters the passions. Ethics takes precedence over aesthetics, virtue over taste. In this he already differs from the aesthete Romantics he nonetheless inspires.
Rousseau, Letter to d'Alembert on the Theatre
Show inferred positions (4)
Diogenes of Sinopeinferable
Whatever does not serve virtue, fine arts, refinements, elegance, is held to be social vanity: the only work to be shaped is one's own conduct. Diogenes lives not for beauty but for rectitude, and mocks distinguished culture as a mask of . The form of life takes clear precedence over aesthetic form, which places him firmly on the side of the primacy of the ethical, even if his provocative existence has, by ricochet, something of a performance about it.
Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI, 24 and 27-28
Socratesinferable
What decides the worth of a life is, for Socrates, the goodness of the soul and not the brilliance of appearances: ugly as a Silenus but beautiful within, he judges a man by his virtue, not by his looks. Beauty is not thereby despised: in the , the love of beautiful bodies is the first rung of an ascent that, from beauty to beauty, rises to the Beautiful and then to the Good. But this dialectic of ascent, where sensible is only a step toward the intelligible, is already Plato's work; the primacy of the ethical remains, the beautiful being worth only as a path toward the good.
Plato, Apology, 29d-30b (virtue before reputation) · Plato, Symposium, 210a-212a (the ascent of eros, from beautiful bodies to Beauty itself) · Plato, Symposium, 215a-216a (Socrates as Silenus, inner beauty)
Plotinusinferable
Beauty has worth only as a degree and a springboard upward: sensible beauty reflects intelligible beauty, which in turn reflects the Good, and love of the beautiful is the first step of the ascent toward the . The aesthetic life is therefore not an end in itself but stays subordinate to the spiritual end, the beautiful counting only as that which reveals and leads to the principle.
Enneads, I, 6 (On Beauty) · Enneads, V, 8 (On the Intelligible Beauty)
Schopenhauerinferable
Art is a 'quietive' of the will, a Sabbath in which the forced labour of desire ceases for a moment, and as such the aesthetic experience is the highest of the goods accessible within the world. But it does not last, the genius is not the saint, and the final hierarchy places ethical holiness, the denial of the will, above the mere contemplation of beauty.
The World as Will and Representation, Books III and IV
- PrescriptiveAesthetic Thought experimentLife as a work of art
Making one's life a work of art, seeking the intensity of beautiful sensations: is such a life self-sufficient, or does it end up hollow, indifferent to good and evil and stalked by boredom?
a whole life - PrescriptiveAestheticThe beautiful and the good
Are the beautiful and the good one, or are they rivals: does beauty raise the soul toward the good, or seduce it by flattering appearances against duty?
a beautiful act - DescriptiveWhere the value of beauty comes from
Is beauty a real perfection of things, or merely a pleasure of taste? If it is all a matter of taste, its claim to count in a flourishing life weakens.
a beautiful thing