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How are the beautiful and the good related? A popular answer to this ancient question takes it that to call something beautiful is just to bring it under the most general term of favourable aesthetic assessment and that since the good is in general what we reflectively want then, crudely put, the beautiful is the good's aesthetic dimension. Following this train of thought, we avoid the suggestion that there is any intimate connection between the beautiful and some more narrowly conceived moral or ethical good, since that is, again crudely put, restricted to the good's practical dimension, a dimension supposedly alien to aesthetic concerns.
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References
1 In Frege, , ‘Logic’ (1897) in Posthumous Writings (Chicago, 1979), 128.Google Scholar
2 What Chapman takes six lines to do Homer menages in (less than) three:
3 The confusion may lie in the thought about what we can imagine. After all, if it was the appearance of the song that had that effect on the sailors, it might be supposed to have the same effect if sung by the good hearted as by the bad. Only the good hearted may be expected to know that and to remain resolutely and virtuously silent. A change of heart would require that they change their tune.
4 InConnolly, Cyril, Previous Convictions (Hamish Hamilton, 1963), pp. 48–60.Google Scholar
5 ‘Hanc bonitatem vocamus pulchritudinem seu decorem quam approbat et in qua complacet sibi visus noster seu aspectus noster interior. Malum autem turpe dicamus de turpidine quam per se respuit et abominatur mens nostra.’ De Bono et Malo, 206 (ms. Balliol).
6 To dispel anxiety that comes with the term ‘symbol’ we do well to remember its etymology which suggests no more than that the beautiful ‘runs along with’ the good, or latine that it ‘concurs’ with it.
7 Cf. Simone Weil again: ‘distance is the soul of the beautiful’; ‘all other objects of desire we want to devour, it we want to be’.
8 Quotations from Weil, S. are all from Gravity and Grace, (Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1952), pp. 136–137.Google Scholar
9 Mary Devereaux, ‘Beauty and Evil; the case of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will', in Levinson, Jerrold (ed.), Aesthetics and Ethics, Essays at the Intersection (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 227–256.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10 We do well to remember Hume here who declares that his good judges, who are above all men of sound understanding (apart from being practised, discriminating and unprejudiced) are thought of as possessing a developed moral sense that gives them the edge over classic tragedians and enables them to attain an aesthetic estimation of those authors that is superior to that of the best contemporary critics. The view I have been proposing is entirely in line with Hume's thought. ‘The poet’s monument more durable than brass, must fall to the ground like common brick or clay, were men to make no allowance for the continual revolutions of manners and customs, and would admit of nothing but what was suitable to the prevailing fashion. Must we throw aside the pictures of our ancestors because of their ruffs and farthingales? But where the ideas of morality and decency alter from one age to another, and where vicious manners are described, without being marked with the proper characters of blame and disapprobation, this must be allowed to disfigure the poem, and to be a real deformity. I cannot, nor is it proper I should, enter into such sentiments. … And where a man is confident of the rectitude of that moral standard by which he judges, he is justly jealous of it, and will not pervert the sentiments of his heart for a moment, in complaisance to any writer whatsoever' (‘Of the Standard of Taste’, para. 31).
11 Perhaps we should not forget that the Sirens were not human and that they were only doing what came naturally to them. So maybe the judgement of perversion should be revised for that is arguably a judgement that is implicitly relativised to the kind of thing under consideration. However, that will not affect the ugliness of their song, since the ideal that their singing expresses is one that cannot but repel us, and the terms ‘ugly’ and ‘beautiful’ are terms that relate to specifically human values and valuations.