Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

cognitive).

The response to beauty is not necessarily totally pleasurable. We are not completely happy in the face of beauty — we might experience a range of emotions and not for any obvious reasons. There is a sense in which a beautiful object or experience is not an enclosed sentiment. There is the possibility of danger, unpredictability and chaos lurking on the boundaries of the object or experience of beauty and this seems to accord with our experience of life more generally. Why does the experience of beauty often result in ambivalent or bitter-sweet feelings? Some might say that the beauty or sweetness is a kind of ‘mountaintop experience’ and the sadness is because we have to leave it behind and know that it cannot last. Some might even say that our souls or spirits remember this beauty — as with Plato above — or perhaps look forward to a time when such beauty or sweetness will last forever. Others may counter that such things cannot and should not last forever. For them, the sadness that the beauty must end is an integral part to the experience and not just an unfortunate by-product.

Is the emotional response separate from the beauty of the thing observed or do these two have to be taken together? It seems like removing the emotional response removes the beauty, or at least reduces the beauty to a statement of facts about the thing observed. This is a key point, to which we will return below. If beauty is stripped of our emotional response to it then beauty would be equated with truth, in the sense that it might be reduced

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