Aesthetics as the ethics of a state of affairs

_db

Let's say you're a fisherman in the middle of the ocean. You row your boat to an island and are astonished at how beautifully serene the landscape is. There's a perfectly white beach, dazzlingly blue lagoons and lush, deep green forests. You remember that the boat you were in is a bit cramped and uncomfortable, and you consider the option of cutting down some of the trees on the island to build a bigger, better boat.

However, you ultimately decide not to build a bigger, better boat because of two reasons:

1.) You would be "ruining" the "purity" of the island by cutting down its trees and bringing industrialization to a non-industrial place.
2.) You would be "trespassing" on the unique isolation of the island by leaving your older boat behind.

And so you leave the island, appreciating it from afar, believing it to be a good thing that it's left alone.

But is it at all a good thing that you left the island alone? The island isn't conscious - it has no sense of ownership or feelings. Nobody would have been hurt if you had walked on the beach of the island and cut down its trees - in fact, at least somebody would have felt more comfort after making a bigger boat - you would. The motivating factor behind your actions wasn't out of concern for the well-being of the island (as if it were a person), but out of an aesthetic appreciation of the island as a whole. There's something beautiful, sublime, awesome about the lonely island that would be tarnished as soon as you set foot on the island. Even if nobody else knew that you had set foot on the island, you would know. You would know that you had trespassed on a sacred place.

And so even if aesthetics are subjective and not objective properties of the world, the aesthetics of the island nevertheless caused you to act in a certain way.

Perhaps we can expand this to all ethical decisions, agent-oriented and state of affairs-oriented alike. Perhaps the suffering of others is bad because it is aesthetically displeasing to us - similar to the non-cognitive view that something is valuable or unvaluable depending on our approval of it.

However, there does seem to be a tension between agent-oriented ethics and state of affairs-oriented ethics, by which I mean agent-oriented ethics take primacy over state of affairs-oriented ethics. We wouldn't sacrifice a hundred soldiers to save a single painting, for example. It'd be a tragedy that we had lost the painting but an even worse tragedy that we had lost a hundred soldiers just to save the painting.

And yet we see this sacrifice occurring all the time, in the form of nationalism, jingoism and imperialism.

Going back to the fisherman-island scenario, it is interesting how a Heideggerian view would show how the island would appear to you (the fisherman) in different ways depending on your circumstances. If you washed up on the island's beach after your boat had been capsized during a storm, you wouldn't really care that much that you were using the island's trees as material for a boat. So our desires and needs transform the aesthetic of an object, state of affairs, or even an agent.

BC

The vacant isolated island became beautiful, sublime, awesome, and sacred -- in your mind as the mariner. Beauty, sublimity, awe, and sanctity are, as you observed, applied to the island. They aren't properties of the Island, its trees, its beach, or anything else. In reality, the fishermen lost their boat altogether, and everything with it. They were washed up on shore, marooned, naked, on the splendid place.

Being strong men, and true, they got themselves together fairly quickly and set off in search of the means for immediate survival. They found that oddly there were no fruit trees on the beautiful island, Just very tough, hard-wooded trees. One would need sharp tools to work the wood (theirs were now on the bottom of the ocean). Worse, they found there were no clams, muscles, crabs, or anything other than annoying insects living along the white sanded shore. And there were very few birds, no mammals, and little vegetation under the trees.

They quickly realized that far from being a beautiful, sublime, awesome, and sacred place, the island was a death trap. They were going to starve there.

Many of us grew up in places that were once beautiful in one way and are now beautiful in a different way. For instance, my hometown was once in a hardwood forest which occupied much of the land. I'm sure it was beautiful in the various seasons 200 years ago. It wasn't exactly pristine--the aboriginal people had been living across that region for at least 5,000 years. Much of the old forest is now gone, and what has replaced it are grassy river flats, pastures, fields, roads, and small villages. It is not always and everywhere beautiful, but it often is. It has been cultivated now for around 160 years.

People often grow fond of wherever they are. There are people who actually want to live around the Gowanus Canal in New York City. The Gowanus was long an industrial ditch, used to move freight short distances. It also served as a drain for all sorts of chemical companies. It's been disgusting for a long time; an industrial sewer. Now it's hot property. It is scheduled to be cleaned up, but time will tell whether this superfund site will actually ever get cleaned up or be clean. None the less, the land around it has become valuable. Developers are painting the filthy cloaca as "water front". Only in the drawings of their high rises are the rusting oil tanks and rotting warehouses gone. Readers of the brochure can not smell the cesspool.

(I've never seen there; I only know about it from the New York Times.)

_db

↪Bitter Crank

I agree that aesthetic properties are subjective, even though for some funky reason most professional philosophers believe in objective aesthetic properties. huh

I also agree that our view of the aesthetic changes, depending on what we need, what we want, what we expect, etc.

Aesthetics as the ethics of a state of affairs

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