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jprussellThis is very much a "start writing to work things out and see where takes you" kind of post, or even more so, series of posts, I'm sure. The more I think about and reflect on the role of aesthetic taste in questions of meaning, metaphysics, and even ethics, the more weighty it seems to be. I know that it's far from an original thought to be like "whoah, maybe beauty is a transcendental virtue" (as in, "Plato talked about this, and it wasn't new then" unoriginal). Even still, it's a line of thinking I'm trying to work out for myself, and I think maybe talking it over with you will help with that. Hopefully you'll at least bear with me, and with any luck, I'll share something you find helpful.
In my head, this feels like a coherent, even simple idea, but whenever I find myself trying to explain it, I see that it is actually huge, messy, and touches nearly everything else. I had been thinking I should read more about this and wait to write about it until I had digested more folks' thoughts, but one of the things I'm trying to make myself do with these weekly blog posts is to do more of my thinking "out loud", both since it lets me get more feedback from others, but also since it makes me get it down in some more-or-less definite form, which often makes it clear where my thinking is fuzzy, derivative, or otherwise not what I'd like it to be. So, here's my attempt at a short version: our sense of what is aesthetic, what is beautiful, what is pleasing is central to our ability to sort out what is best and most meaningful in life. It's not the only thing around that, but it's one of the very weighty things.
What do I mean by this, exactly? If you have a philosophy that makes good sense to you and you can back up logically, but it leaves you cold, it's almost certainly not your path to a truly meaningful and good life. Likewise, if there is something that stirs you deeply, but you can't truly say why, you likely ought to follow it. I suspect, but don't yet have any way to make my case, that our sense of what "looks right" or "feels right" or "is beautiful" is a very deep synthesis of many factors, including some that are very important, but very hard to access consciously. An analogy I can draw on from experience: if you've ever learned to draw human bodies, then there are certain proportions in a drawing that you will just expect to see, and if you don't, you'll be like "something is wrong with this drawing, I don't like it". On the other hand, there are certain ways real human proportions can be exaggerated or manipulated for pleasing artistic effect (think the giant eyes that anime borrowed from Disney cartoons). With enough muscle memory of drawing correctly proportioned anatomy, getting the proportions wrong just "feels" off, even if you can't say exactly why. Now, you might argue that such drawing doesn't carry much moral or spiritual weight, and you're likely right, but it's a very clear cut example of somewhere that a lot of internalized knowledge due to practice, observation, and feedback leads to a situation where that internalized knowledge is perceived as "it just doesn't feel right". I suspect that most aesthetic perception of the sort "I dunno, I just like it" or "that just sounds off to me" is, in fact, the same kind of deeply internalized knowledge from repeated exposure and judgment.
One nice thing about this way of thinking about aesthetics is that it helps us get around the always-present and always-thorny problem of "what about sexual attraction, though?" If you haven't run into this, here's how it goes: "The idea of 'beauty' is clearly somehow related to the concept of sexual attraction, but there are beautiful things that have nothing to do with sex, so what gives?" This is an especially telling point if your primary basis for understanding aesthetics, or even all of human psychology, is an evolutionary one, where sex gets the starring role. So how does my proposal above address this? Well, if we take "aesthetic judgment" to mean something like "the qualitative feeling that something you observe is suitable or not suitable to the purpose for which you're evaluating it, whether or not you can articulate the drivers for that judgment," then all of a sudden the link between sexual attraction and aesthetic beauty becomes easy to define. If a judgment of something as aesthetically "beautiful" is the positive feeling you get for something that you're pretty sure will "work", even if you don't know why, then seeing someone that will "work" for you sexually, even if you can't articulate why, will present in a very similar way. Add in the fact that the sex drive is super important to most folks, and this becomes an area of aesthetic judgment that almost everyone exercises every day, all the time. So, by this logic, it's not that aesthetic beauty is some ramification or epiphenomenon of sexual attraction, it's that your judgment of sexual attractiveness is just your best exercised aesthetic muscle (if you're anything like most folks).d
Okay, my thoughts could go a lot of different directions from here, but that actually got me to a new conclusion (I hadn't worked out that judgment of sexual attractiveness is a subset of aesthetic judgment, rather than something foundational or ancestral to it). So, I think I'll wrap things up for now. Some directions I'd like to go here: what to make of evil aesthetic judgments (it is pleasing to torture this person)? Can you arrive at ethically defensible positions without bringing in aesthetics? Can aesthetics lead you astray? What role have aesthetic judgments played in my own spiritual growth? All these and more lead me to want to write many more posts, but I have no idea when they'll come out.
