Aesthetics, morality, the past and the future: reflections

Aesthetics and morality

Are aesthetic concerns substantially involved in moral reasoning? If so how? I think they are at least two very important ways:

1. helping to define certain ethical variables (e.g. “the good life”) and

2. acting as the substance of framing narratives about morality, living and experience that we tell ourselves to give our lives a sense of wholeness and meaning.

Moreover, I think there are other relationships. Not grasping the relationship between aesthetics and philosophy as a whole is, I think, one of the key things Analytic Philosophy gets wrong.

It’s important to theorize the relationship between aesthetics and morality carefully. Putting them together in a hamfisted way can lead to a kind of juvenile-fascist-Nietzschean-let-the-glorious-strong-romp-over-the-pathetic-weak mindset. Walter Benjamin, who we will be referring to again later in this essay, thought that fascism is what comes from a certain kind of aestheticization of politics- a thought that I return to again and again, because it seems both right and truly wise. I think the key to getting it right is to see aesthetics as woven into the good, not standing above it and trumping it.

Nonetheless, aesthetics and morality are inseparable. The danger of overweening (and crude) aesthetics overthrowing compassion is real, but so is the beauty of the good. Aesthetics must integrate with, but never overwhelm, morality.

How aesthetics helps to give the content of ethics

Consider the following universes:

A) A universe filled with creatures living happy but extremely simple existences with no variation whatsoever.

B) A universe filled with creatures living extremely simple existences in which they have what they want, with no variation whatsoever.

If you’re anything like me, you find both these universes repugnant. I’ve always been a kind of approximate utilitarian- I’ve always thought that utilitarianism is “good enough for government work”- but taken to such a degree, utilitarian ideals are unappealing.

One way to try to save utilitarianism is to come up with a richer concept of human welfare. What about:

C) A universe filled with persons living rich and flourishing lives.

Now it seems plausible that C is desirable- but how do we define “rich and flourishing”? We can give a list, of course. Such a life involves, in no particular order:

1. Joy & satisfaction (as above)

2. Creativity

3. Meeting others

4. Forming deep connections with some of them

5. Caring for them

6. The (healthy) pursuit of virtue- both virtues of personal excellence, and of concern for others

7. Romance and sex (if desired)

8. The pursuit of important kinds of knowledge

9. Play

10. Being appropriately challenged

11. The pursuit of excellence in expressive spheres- from arts to sports, to learning- with the spheres chosen by each individual according to their desires.

Call the state of having everything on this list (or close enough!) eudaimonia. The best approximation of my ethical view is that we should maximize total eudaimonia.

But this leaves us with more questions than we started with, including:

What do these things have in common?

How do they end up on the list?

The individual terms are quite vague- how do we define them more precisely beyond saying that we “know them when we see them”?

Attempts to define this list, its membership, and its precise contents biologically do not seem to me to work. There is no single scheme of life built into us, although of course, our nature constrains the lives we can live. Moreover, it is quite possible that we have tendencies built into us that we would deplore now, and are right to do so.

Attempts to define what gets on the list by appealing to a pre-existing realm of ethical truths regarding the right way to live are even less plausible to me than a biological approach.

Instead, I think what defines a eudaimonic flourishing life, by our lights, is probably set by our sentiments. But my sense is these sentiments are, at least in substantial part, aesthetic sentiments. Why do I not regard a life blissed out and wireheaded with no action a eudaimonic life? I’m not sure of the exact psychological processes that lead me to that judgment, but I strongly suspect aesthetic judgments are indispensable to them. Think why you intuitively reject the blissed-out hedonium worlds I described above (if you do) and I think you’ll find aesthetic feeling is involved.

To sum up, I am unsure of exactly how ethical and aesthetic feelings are related, but I am almost certain that aesthetic feelings help fill in certain “free variables” in ethical formulas. Among the terms that aesthetic feelings help define is the good life, one of the core notions of ethics.

{In “The first systematic program of German Idealism” the author goes somewhat mental with the idea that, just as Kant gave freedom and God as practical postulates- ideas that are necessary for action living in the world, so he too could give his own practical postulates, practical postulates built on aesthetic-ethical needs. It occurs to me, that now, in this age of post-analytic conceptual engineering- now that we’ve figured out that concepts are so vague that we will never capture them without participating in creating them, we have similar freedom. We can recreate ideas like freedom, personhood over time and intention in the mold of our ethical-aesthetic needs.}

Aesthetics and the past as a spring of action

For most of history, the idea that one should use the past as a spring of action was commonplace. In classical politics, for example, it was not at all unusual to present radical reforms as a blessed return to pre-existing constitutional order. Even today, both sides of politics in the United States present themselves as seeking to return to a past golden age. Among liberals, this phenomenon appears as appeals to an imagined preceding age of civility, among conservatives, it appears as demands to return to a (poorly understood, ahistorical) constitution.

There’s a dream logic to such a view. The past is seen as revealing or constituting a thing’s essence, and ‘good change’ is change that is perceived to reflect the essence of a thing.

Sandel in “The Tyranny of Meritocracy” remarks that in the speeches of Obama, one can find a paradoxical formulation. He will praise, say, the equality of opportunity the United States affords, and then use this (putative) quality of the United States as-opportunity-afforder as reason to enact some pretty basic policies to achieve equality of opportunity.

To make up a slightly bowdlerized example:

“The United States is a land of opportunity for all, which is why we must expand Pell grants so every kid has a clear path to college”.

But hang on, didn’t he just say that the United States is a land of opportunity for all? If this is true, shouldn’t it already be the case that all kids can access college?

There’s a lot going on below the hood here, but a rough theory is that a lot of people think of the United States as having an essence that may or may not is expressed in the accidents of this or that aspect of everyday life. Positive change is a change that brings it closer to expressing its essence. The essence of the united states is equality of opportunity, and this has, in some uncanny sense, always been its essence- even during slavery, and certainly even during Jim Crow, and when a black man who didn’t graduate highschool was more likely to go to prison than not. A bizarre ideology.

This approach to using the past as a spring of action seems to me to be metaphysically incoherent and historically ill-founded- but are there better ways to appeal to the past? Are there ways of appealing to the past that progressives can endorse, and should proudly engage in? Let us hope so because the sheer ubiquity of appeals to the past throughout the span of such political history suggests that, without them, we will be fighting with one hand severed.

So what have these two lines of thought- on the connection between the past, and value, and between aesthetics and value have to do with each other? I don’t know, I’m still musing about it. Let me illustrate some of the possibilities I’ve been reflecting on.

Toby Ord, in his book “The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity”, contemplates whether our duties to the past could give us any special reason to prevent our extinction- to ensure our continuation into the future. He suggests a number of possible reasons:

The partnership theory: People in the past have done so much to help us, and set in motion great projects that cannot be completed in our time. The price of taking the help is helping to preserve the species so that the great projects might one day be finished.

The asymmetric obligation theory: People in the past have done things to help us. Generally, when someone does something to help us, this creates an obligation for us to help them back. However, because it is impossible (at least through conventional means) to help those in the past, we must instead discharge our obligations to them as they would have wanted us to- by “paying it forward” to future generations.

The valuable things theory: There are beautiful things that exist alongside humanity, that are the legacy of our past, from the Talmud to Beowulf, from the Mona Lisa to Mencius. Our extinction would mean the loss of these beautiful things we have made and accumulated during our existence.

The repentance theory: We have done terrible things in our existence as a species. Reckoning with these mistakes, correcting them, creating a world in which they are overcome- none of these things would be possible if we went extinct.

This is all quite interesting, but my favorite approach comes from Walter Benjamin. What if our task is to redeem history? Not in the narrow sense of repenting for it, but in the larger sense of tying it into a whole that retroactively makes sense of it all?

Approximately ten thousand years ago, humans started living in agricultural societies. My understanding is that health immediately declined. Disease worsened. Slavery became more common. Politics, which had hitherto been a means by which coalitions controlled would-be tyrants became reversed- politics became a means for the strong to control the weak and extract vast surpluses from them. Famines became more devastating. Genocide, though not previously unknown, was practiced on a much larger scale.

I don’t want the suffering of those subsistence farmers, to be in vain, or worse, to be nothing but a step towards our ultimate self-destruction. I want to integrate them into a history that gives their lives a cosmic purpose. I want this world to turn into something that would give their suffering meaning as sacrifice and not as absurdity.

What kind of justification for preventing our own extinction is this? We already know that extinction must be prevented, both for the sake of those living and for the sake of those to come. Why care about this fancy story about our past? It seems superfluous at best, a sentimental distraction at worse.

My answer is that a story like this helps ground what we need to do in aesthetic meaning, and such a grounding is motivationally and emotionally important.

Thinking about the good life isn’t just an ethical project, it seems to me to be an aesthetic one- trying to make meaning of our fragments, and turn them into a narrative. For me, Benjamin’s idea about the redemption of history allows us to do this- engage in this sort of meaning making. It is part of what I have previously called the aesthetic task of philosophy- sometimes the question is not “what must I do”, but “how am I to understand, narratively and aesthetically, what I must do”. In relation to Nietzsche I once wrote:

Nietzsche grapples with Schopenhauer’s pessimism. In a very crude sketch, this pessimism goes as follows. Life is a struggle. We seek what we desire. Satisfaction is only a brief respite, leading to the next round of seeking and frustrated desire. The overall picture given by Schopenhauer in relation to this matter is very nearly identical to that propounded by the Buddha. To exist as a being is to want things. To want things is to be frustrated and incomplete.

The new, secular, problem of evil then is this, how can we give meaning to this process in a way which makes the continual frenzy of frustrated desire acceptable? Or perhaps I should say joyous?

This problem is what I call an emotional problem. It’s a problem with the aesthetics of life. How are we to understand this overall picture in a way which makes it less horrifying, or, if we cannot do that, how are we to resign ourselves to the horror? It’s not a factual question about the way things are. It’s not even really a moral question about how we should live. It’s a question about how we can keep perceiving life as beautiful and enjoyable.

This kind of aesthetic or emotional problem- of making sense of patterns in a way that allows us to process them or cope with them-, is a lot of what ordinary people mean by philosophy. Sadly, it’s a pursuit that’s often missing from Analytic Philosophy, because what is being searched for is not so much a hidden truth or even imperative- but a method of setting life to the right kind of narrative.

Nietzsche’s solution to the problem of pessimism is that the struggle itself has to be seen as valuable- and not merely success in those struggles. By learning to love the beauty in the struggle to live well, we can reconcile ourselves to the permanent hunger of existence. This is a way of framing the aesthetics of life which makes it something other than ugly, and only cruel. I’m not sure if this is quite the solution- but I think it’s on the right track.

Such problems- of aesthetic sense-making are part of philosophy both as commonly and as historically understood. Analytic philosophy should take them up again.

Moreover, the idea of conceptual engineering is becoming more popular- of designing concepts in response to human problems, and not just trying to meet the data given by the analysis of intuitions. If we are in the business of designing concepts, then designing them along lines that make aesthetic sense of our world becomes attractive.

Finally, and very speculatively: Some people think that we’re on the edge of a leap into transhumanism. If that’s true, then we urgently study what matters about being human so we don’t accidentally shave it off in the process of transcending. It seems to me that such an inquiry needs to consider jointly what is good and beautiful about human life, and these are not so easily separated.