Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

to some prescription of aesthetic rules. It does not seem appropriate to equate beauty with truth in this way. But it is a hazard, just as in ethics. Our culture has a habit of reducing all questions just to truth questions.

So, perhaps there is no such thing as beauty in the abstract sense. Maybe there is just our response to certain things — the experience of beauty is real, but beauty itself is not. This far then, the question is still between whether something can really have this quality of beauty in and of itself or whether what we describe as beauty is in fact just a way of expressing our emotional response to it.

C.S. Lewis, in his, The Abolition of Man, began with a description of a schoolbook that quotes a passage regarding two characters observing a waterfall. The schoolbook suggests that when one character describes the waterfall as sublime he is only talking about his feelings regarding the waterfall — not some quality in the scene itself. (The designation between the sublime and the beautiful is discussed by Edmund Burke in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful.) This view was roundly condemned by Lewis, who likened it to saying that when we describe someone as contemptible then it only means that this is our response to the person, not some quality (or lack of quality) inherent in the person themselves. Clearly, this is not the same. A person's actions dictate a moral judgement about them and the judgement is real, at least in the pragmatic sense. It would stand even if our feelings for the person were quite contrary to what their behaviour might dictate. But it would seem that

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