Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

to be numerous possible alternatives, but I just want to dig down into the visual origins of value in this chapter.

Several chapters back we saw that quality — as our initial apprehension of the world — is the starting point on the moves to value, meaning, purpose and then morality. Even if we do not accept the idea that any of these are somehow innate to the universe, or given to us by God, nonetheless we could certainly say that the universe is primarily aesthetic. The appearance of things is not simply a matter of taste. There’s more going on with beauty that that.

So beauty seems to need a different approach from questions of truth and even to questions of morality. It seems to call forth a personal response. Our feelings matter in these questions, most especially in questions of beauty. But it seems much easier to dismiss the idea of an absolute of beauty than it does to dismiss an absolute truth. There is no good reason why this should be — perhaps it is just a reflection of the general disregard our culture sometimes has to questions of aesthetics.

There is a fair degree of agreement about certain things being beautiful. I’d venture that the agreement is more than the disagreement. For Kant, for something to be considered beautiful it must be dis-interested, universal and non-cognitive. (He used a tulip as an example.) So, beauty has no extrinsic, utility value (thus, dis-interested), it is such that everyone will appreciate it (universal) and the apprehension of beauty does not rely on us having to analyse it in order to decide on its beauty (thus, non-

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