Andrew's Wiki
Principia Ethica (changes)

Showing changes from revision #3 to #4: Added | Removed | Changed

• Analytic philosophy trying to determine an ethics ethics: we can use logic to be ethical
  • Although you can identify what makes something good, you cannot therefore say you understand value as a result: hedonists say that what is pleasurable is good, and that is fine, but you cannot therefore say that only pleasure is good.
    • You can say X is a good thing in Y, but you cannot say X is always good or that its presence in Z automatically makes Z good
  • Open question argument: you cannot define the good
    • You can say, X is good. But you can’t say what good is.
• Relies on moral intuitions: self-evident, contemplatable, but not refutable directly
• Victoria Rosner sums up the importance of this work for Bloomsbury: proves that “personal relations superseded all other social claims on the individual.” (qtd Rosner 13)
• Trying to figure out what is good in and of itself, apart from its ends or rationale
• “The consciousness of beauty…is the ultimate and fundamental truth of Moral Philosophy.” 192
  • “Any public or private duty” and the “sole criterion of social progress” is to increase the consciousness of beauty
  • Two kinds: “personal affections and aesthetic enjoyments” which are “by far the greatest goods we can imagine” 192
• Form:
  • Personal affections and appreciations of beauty are “highly complex organic unities”
    • What does he mean by organic? “The value of a whole must not be assumed to be the same as the sum of the values of its parts,” in prop. 18
      • the good is good in its assembly; “emergent” characteristics rather than additive ones
    • Beautiful stuff usually complicated
    • In your contemplation of this complex object, you must recognize the truly beautiful part of it, or your contemplation is invalid (kind of fascistic control there!)
  • They must be a recognition (intellectual) but also an appreciation (EMOTIONAL)
    • It’s a feeling, but each kind of beauty has its own appropriate emotion 193
    • The emotion is not good in and of itself but must accompany this certain type of beauty
      • In other words, you must have good taste (what an elitist)
    • Also, you must react to the particular beautiful qualities within the object for it to count (194): another elitist thing b/c this requires time and training
      • His example is Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: to enjoy it truly you must understand harmony and melody
• Thus you can’t be surprised when he calls an error in taste “a considerable positive evil” 196
  • What is error in taste? You aren’t looking for the right thing. If you merely judge incorrectly that this work has or doesn’t have something that’s good, that’s okay because you still have good standards.
• Does say that Aesthetics is not Ethics 204
  • Beauty and the Good are related, but not the same
  • Beauty is a necessary condition of the good, something the good must have
    • Saying that something is beautiful points to the whole to which it belongs, as being good 205
  • Although he therefore tries to say that aesthetics is not the same thing as ethics, he nonetheless creates an understanding of aesthetics that places it squarely in the middle of understanding the good. His systems allow you to think that by cultivating aesthetic contemplation and personal affections, you are laying the groundwork for understanding the good. You are therefore off the hook from understanding the good in and for itself, and you can substitute art for it.
• Definition of the beautiful: “that of which the admiring contemplation is good in itself” 204
  • It’s objective, not subjective. You have to judge that a work has a certain quality.
• Applauds uniqueness
  • the qualities that “differentiate” one beautiful object from another are “essential to its beauty” 205
  • It may share in common some characteristics with all that is beautiful, but object will NOT be beautiful without specific qualities 206
• Personal Affections
  • The person has to be “truly good in a high degree” 206
  • “appreciation of mental qualities must form a large part of it:” have to be smart 206
    • what are these? a large part of it is the capacity to have the right kind of aesthetic contemplation, as defined earlier
    • thus personal affections are the “contemplation of such contemplation” 207, a kind of squaring of artistic sense: you admire their aesthetic contemplation or their appreciation of other people
  • must also have “appropriate corporeal expression of the mental qualities in question:” the body is THERE, but only as a signifier for the mind
    • what are these “bodily expressions of character?” “looks” “words” actions”
    • without them, you can’t really imagine what affection would look like 207
• We like each other because we like each other, and we like each other because we like each other’s art, and we like each other’s art because we like each other’s aesthetic theories. And our bodies consist of the expressions of these appreciations.