Aesthetics and Ethics

Pleasure- Bentham identifies happiness with pleasure- supreme spring of action. Pleasure was a sensation not only caused by eating and drinking but also sex, wealth and kindness. The value of each and every pleasure is the same no matter what it was caused by.  He saw the ‘quantity of pleasure being equal’ which I personally disagree with because I believe that different things that are pleasurable give you different feelings of it. The pleasure of shopping is more exciting and indulgent whereas the pleasure of eating when you are hungry is more of a relief and makes you feel happier inside because your body is no longer hungry. Bentham said that the prime importance is the quantity of pleasure and pain for a utilitarian. A pleasurable action is pure if it is unlikely to produce a subsequent series of pains.

Aristotle decided on a distinction between happiness and pleasure.  He refused to identify happiness with pleasure of senses.  And decided on pleasure as simply being a sensation.  

Bentham said that Absolutists kind of action is wrong and shouldn’t be done. Consequentialist have a morality of actions that should be judged by their consequences. Prior to Bentham most philosophers were Absolutists and believed in the natural law. Bentham rejected the natural law and he decided it was no such thing when 2 people can’t agree on what it is.

Modifications of Utilitarianism

Stuart Mill spoke about happiness and how contentment and a sense of dignity is important to any amount of lower pleasures as without this it would not be happiness. A person who denies himself enjoyment of life for any other purpose is no more deserving of admiration. To some extent this statement does make sense today as people that aren’t happy do not tend to be admired by the rest of society. Every human should enjoy their life and not let anything prevent it from being good.

The moral code of Utilitarianism was thought of as being too strict and too lax. The ultimate moral standard was universal happiness. People rob other peoples property, murder, theft and criminals affect human happiness. The expedient people are seen as conducting general happiness on Utilitarian grounds. Whereas the not expedient but also moral is where a duty arises and you need to fulfil it. Justice implies that it is no only the right thing to do and that its not wrong not to do it but an individual can claim his moral rights. It is important to connect justice and moral rights as it emphasises the legal rights that are unjust and claims conflict with the law.

Schopenhauer on Renunciation

The Universal Will is a thing in itself in all phenomena and is not affected by birth or death. Death is a sleep where individuality is forgotten and humans are replaced by others. I like this idea that death is just like a shift changeover that you would experience at work where the only thing that’s different between people is their individuality. However I would say that this idea is a bit too simple in describing death. It would be silly to forget the society that these people may have come from and the impact on the world that they may also have had for the next generation to take over from. I would say that although death can literally be viewed this way, it does forget the society as a whole and how these ‘individuals’ may have changed it.

He also goes on to say the Intelligible character has an underlying reality outside of time that determines our response to situations. The Empirical character is what we learn through experience of the nature and limitations of our own character. The Acquired character has learnt the nature and limitations of their individual character and can recognise their own strengths and weaknesses. Life swings like a pendulum between pain and ennui on the basis that willing is need and pain and we suffer until our needs are satisfied.

The bad people are viewed as egoists and assert their own will to live and deny the sense of presence of will in others. They destroy the existence of others if they get in the way. Schopenhauer goes on to say that the ‘wicked’ people go beyond egoism and take great delight in the suffering of others such as Nero and Robespierre. The common or garden bad person regards his own person as separate and has their own will to live.

Between a bad and good man is an intermediate character known as the ‘just man’ who does not see individuality like the bad man. He is willing to recognise the will to live on the same level as his own. Schopenhauer’s ideal man adopts Bentham's ascetic principle and refrains from doing all that he would like to do and does all that he would not like to. This, he said was practised by Christians, Hindu and Buddhist saints. The Kantian distinction between a phenomenon that is necessary and a thing in itself that is free. The will that is free is outside of time whilst the history of any self- denying saint belongs in a world of phenomena.

The Moral Ascent in Kierkegaard

For Kierkegaard the renunciation that is the high point of the ethical life is only a preliminary to an ultimate leap of faith. Whereas Schopenhauer’s program was designed to lead to the erasure of individuality compared to Kierkegaard who aimed to put the individual in full possession of his own personality as a unique creature of God.

He argues that a aesthetic person is deluded when he thinks of his existence as one of freedom; in fact it is extremely limited. Such a person he says is in a state of ‘despair’ but this does not mean a state of gloom or despondency. A despairing person is a person who has no hope of anything higher than his present life. It means to lack the possibility of achieving higher. The first step towards a cure is the realisation that one is in despair. There are people in this world that aren’t happy with the way that their life is or the job that they are in and it would be fair to say that they could be seen as Kierkegaard aesthetic person.

‘Everyone can, if he wants, become a paradigm man, not by wiping out his contingency but by remaining in it and ennobling it. But he ennobles it by choosing it.’  The man who Kierkegaard most often chooses as a paradigm of the ethical person is Socrates.

Nietzsche and the Transvaluation of Values

He agreed with Kierkegaard that a call to the Christian life was something that could be justified by reason. But Kierkegaard said ‘so much the worse for mere reason.’ Whereas Nietzsche stated ‘so much the worse for all Christians.’ Aristocrats described themselves as good people and labelled the characteristics of the poor and weak as bad. The poor and the weak resent the power and riches of the aristocrats and turned the system on its head. They set up their own system known as ‘a transvaluation of values’ which benefited the values of the underdog. Nietzsche blamed this on the Jews.

Christianity put itself forward as the religion of love but according to Nietzsche it is rooted in fear, weakness and malice. He says it has the desire of the weak for revenge on the strong which disguises itself as a wish to punish the sinner.  He concluded that if the human race wanted to be saved from decadence the first step must be to reverse the values of Christianity and introduce a new set of values. ‘The weak and the failure shall perish; that is the first principle of our love of mankind.’

There are two types of people according to Nietzsche ‘ascending people’ and the ‘descending people’ people that represent the upward and downward track of human evolution. It is not only Christians for instance, who regard the truth as a fundamental value. ‘Life itself forces us to establish values; it is life that does the evaluation by means of us whenever we posit values.’ Zarathustra who is Nietzsche spokesman came up with the idea of the Superman who will be the highest form of life, the ultimate affirmation of the way to live. But our will to live must not be like Schopenhauer’s as it is one that favours the weak; it must be a will to power. It is the secret of all life and every living thing should strive to be this type of person.

Superman will not come into existence through the forces of revolution but only through the exercise of will. The arrival of Superman will be the perfection of the world and give it meaning. I like his idea of this character that to some extent remains today as a children’s fictional character. He seems passionate and certain about his idea of the Superman however it appears he cant explain how this person will work or define the type of person this will be. Therefore his idea seems to be just an idea and not a scientific theory that can be applied to humans.

Nietzsche is an enthusiast where war is concerned. ‘Renouncing war means renouncing the great life war is an education of freedom.’ Suicide in certain circumstances also engaged Nietzsche’s admiration. Physicians should remind their patients that sick persons are parasites on society, and a time comes when it is indecent to live longer. I think this is a powerful statement to make and that it is quite harsh to label people that are sick as parasites. Of course how sick they are can be his own opinion on weather they should continue to live or not but in today’s society as we know its not possible to prevent people from treatment or help no matter what their illness.

Aesthetics- Beautiful

Kant makes a distinction between two types of satisfaction, he calls sensual delight ‘gratification’ and ‘pleasingness’ for the disinterested enjoyment of beauty. He said ‘what gratifies a person is pleasurable, what merely please him is called beautiful, what he values is called good.’ Animals enjoy pleasure but only humans appreciate beauty.  I agree with Kant on the understanding that animals cant appreciate beauty in the same way that humans do. However the word ‘beauty’ may be used by different people to describe different things that they find beautiful. For instance what one person may think is a beautiful piece of art may be ugly and rubbish to others depending on their type of taste.

Kant explains that there are two types of beauty, free beauty and derivative beauty. The first is known as the self-subsistence beauty of this or that thing and supposes no concept of what the object ought to be whereas the second is dependant upon a concept and ascribed to objects with a particular purpose. A flower is Kant’s regular paradigm of  a free natural beauty whereas humans are seen as derivative beauty. Nature can be both beautiful and sublime but art can only be beautiful. There are three kinds of beautiful arts; there are arts of speech, namely rhetoric and poetry. There are also what Kant calls the formal arts, namely painting and the plastic arts of sculpture and architecture. The third class of arts that creates a play of sensation is music. Kant views this as the most important of the arts.

Kant’s way of analysing the art was later expressed by the English Romantic poets and starts from the consumer and works back to the producer. Whereas the Romantics start with the producer; for them art is above all the expression of the artists own emotions.

The Aesthetics of Schopenhauer

When we view a work of art for example a nude sculpture it may arouse desire in us; sexual desire perhaps or desire to acquire the statue. If this happens we are still under the influence of the will and are not in a state of contemplation.

The ‘sublime’  is the upper bound of the beautiful its lower bound is what Schopenhauer calls the ‘charming’. This turns an object of contemplation into something that attracts the will. There are two elements in every encounter with beauty: a will-less knowing subject and an object which is the idea known.

The representational arts such as paintings or sculptures of animals are concerned with the species not the individual. He says the most typical lion, wolf and horse are always the most beautiful. But the representation of human beings is more complicated because is there a perfectly beautiful human being that has been produced. This all depends on people’s individual taste as to what characteristics of a human being they find ‘beautiful’. Whereas with animals they are all very similar in the way that they look so it is easy to class them all as one.

Schopenhauer’s theory of art combines elements from Plato and elements from Aristotle. He believes the purpose is to represent not a particular individual, nor an abstract concept but a Platonic Idea. Like Aristotle he concludes that far more inner truth is to be attributed to poetry than to history.

Kierkegaard on Music

Music we are told is all of the arts is the one capable of expressing sheer sensuality.  This is because music is the most abstract of the arts as it address the ear like language.

Kierkegaard uses characters from Mozart operas to illustrate various forms and stages of erotic pursuit.  First is the dreamy stage which takes a diffuse form with no specific object.  The second is expressed in the merry chirping of Papageno love seeking out a specific object.  The secret of the whole opera is that its hero is the force animating the other characters.

Nietzsche on Tragedy

For Nietzsche it is not Mozart but Wagner whose operas are supreme. This is because of a shared debt to Schopenhauer.  In Greek mythology there are two kinds of escape from reality: dreaming and intoxication. These two forms of illusions are personified in two different gods, Apollo the god of light and Dionysus the god of wine.

In his book ‘the birth of tragedy’ he concludes that art and not morality is the properly metaphysical activity of man and that the existence of the world finds justification only as an aesthetic phenomenon.

Art and Morality

For Nietzsche art is not only autonomous but is supreme over morality. Beauty is something objective, not a mere production of custom. Only if an artist is himself a morally good person will he be able to deliver the revelation in an in corrupt form, and set before us the glory of God. I agree with the idea that an artist has to be morally correct in his mind for his art to also be in corrupt because art is a way for an artist to express his feelings and emotions. If he isn’t stable in his mind this will also be portrayed in the type of art that he creates.

Ruskin saw that painting is a form of language where technical skill is no more than the mastery of the language. He judged Gothic architecture superior to the architecture of the Renaissance and the baroque. Some art he concluded appealed only to the sentiments of the upper class which extended no further than pride and sex. The real purpose of art was communication between human beings. While rejecting the Romantic idea that art must give pleasure, he agreed with Wordsworth that its essence was the sharing of emotion.

Art is only good if the emotions it injects are good; and those emotions can be good only if they are religious and contribute to a sense of universal human brotherhood.

Art for Art’s sake

Croce decided that art occupies a position between history and science. Like history it deals with particular cases rather than general laws but its cases are imagined. The core of art for Croce is intuition which is not the same as feeling whatever the positivists might say: feelings need expression, and expression is a cognitive not just an emotional matter.

Art should not be seen as the activity of arousing emotion but as the activity of expressing emotion. The true work of art is in fact the emotion in the artist himself. If art is expression of emotion, Collingwood argues the distinction between artist and audience disappears.

Poet and reader share and express the same emotion: the difference is that the poet can solve for himself the problem of expressing it, whereas the reader needs the poet to show him how it is done. This statement is powerful and is true to nearly all art as the poet knows what the hidden meaning of the piece they have done is and it is up to them to make sure it is obvious to the audience so they to can enjoy a good piece of art.

Most twentieth-century philosophers rejected the Tolstoyan view of the function of art as the communication of emotion.