beauty changes everything
An aesthetic impact is powerful. From advertising influencing our decisions to political leaders instigating action, aesthetic motivations form a core compulsion of our lives, including for ethical or global issues. People often want to believe that they act only with good reason, since our emotions are frivolous. In "Taste, Foodways, and Everyday Life," Tim Waterman … Continue reading Positive and Negative Aesthetics
The relation between morality and beauty continues to capture attention. Philosophers, especially moralists like Anthony Cooper (aka Shaftesbury), connected the ability to comprehend beauty to a person's virtue. Making this explicit, Shaftesbury referred to this innate ability to understand beauty as the moral sense. Part of the basis for this belief was the idea that … Continue reading Virtue and the Beautiful
One of the more fascinating books I’ve read recently is Lauren F. Klein’s An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States. Klein writes that “in the late colonial era and into the early republic, America’s cultural and political leaders identified a causal relation between the cultivation of the American palate and … Continue reading Eating and the Tasteful Subject
Disgust is a basic emotion that has served a useful purpose for our survival. Louise Fabiani explores this idea in her article, "Is Disgust Related to Morality?" While people have a natural caution when around too many people (physical crowds), that changes when we are connected to the crowd (psychological crowds) through religious observance or … Continue reading Disgust, Morality, and Negative Aesthetics
Guest post by Meredith Drees In 1959 Iris Murdoch wrote “The Sublime and The Good,”[1] in order to sketch a “definition [of art] through a consideration and criticism of Kant’s” (S&G, 43). Murdoch’s general view of aesthetics is strongly influenced by Kant’s, but she argues that his theory must be rejected because it “fails to … Continue reading Tragic Freedom: Murdoch on the Sublime
Guest post by Sally Cloke In her article in this journal, Meredith Drees provides a clear and succinct explanation of Kant’s concept of the sublime, that sensation of terror mixed with satisfaction—“negative pleasure” as Kant expresses it [i](CJ 23:245)—that is frequently experienced when we observe the natural world at its most formidable and threatening. But … Continue reading The Sublime Spectacle of the Coronavirus Curve
Guest post by Meredith Drees In Kant’s Critique of Judgment, he states that “sublime is what even to be able to think proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense” (25:250). [1] My aim in this essay is to argue that experiences of sublimity give us a glimpse of morality and … Continue reading Sublimity as a Symbol of Moral Dignity