Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

the same could not be said about an aesthetic judgement. There seems no action or quality inherent in a person, animal, plant or thing that would dictate a particular response in terms of the subject's beauty or ugliness. So, the beauty is always only in our response, not in some quality inherent in the object of our attention. The association of beauty with goodness and truth — as made by Lewis — is so deep-rooted that it is very difficult to untangle this, but I think it must be untangled. Otherwise, we will, as so often happens, judge the ugly to be evil. And far worse, judge the beautiful to be good.

So, it seems necessary to return to the thought that there is something that causes us to have this experience of beauty. And this is not necessarily related to truth or goodness, or to usefulness or appropriateness. Whilst some things may be morally neutral, nothing is aesthetically neutral. So while beauty may be the hardest thing to define, it’s also the thing that moves us the most. As such, I think that this apprehension of beauty is a bigger clue to what life is about than either goodness or truth. Beauty — which seems the least definable — also seems the most real. Beauty speaks to the soul. Roger Scruton (Beauty) even suggests that the root question of theology is; what purpose does all this beauty serve? We are not simply passive spectators — far less consumers — of beauty. We are part of the beauty of the world.

Art can often achieve a visual analogy to help us express a deeper truth or clarify a question in morality. Perhaps it achieves this by going back to when we thought only in images. Anything

256