Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

don’t get moved in quite the same way about moral issues as they do about aesthetic issues. Remember Mr. Burke and the shoulders! All rationality is abandoned for a while and Burke is in a state of adoration! And it goes the same for what we might describe as sacrilege, or desecration, or profanity. These things are often about aesthetic rather than moral issues.

Why so, we may wonder? One reason might be that there needs to be a certain level of analysis in morality — we need to think things through — use our rational minds. Aesthetics — either of a positive or a negative kind — gets us much sooner. Gets us in the gut, touches our emotions, makes us feel things in our bodies. Aesthetics is visceral. And it’s important to note that some of our values spring directly from aesthetics — they are about seeing how things are — and they are often from our evolutionary past. It is only our later and more sophisticated values that spring from our uniquely human ability to rationalise — which springs, in turn, from our language. But rational thought is still a hard-fought battle.

This is what’s hidden in values and morality — this link back to seeing and to instinct. This is via biology, anthropology and psychology — but, we could say, there’s a philosophical spin-off from there.

That’s part of the reason that Burke’s contrast of the sublime and the beautiful makes sense to us. The sublime invites us to think a bit, whilst the beautiful just hits us — hits us like a fine pair of shoulders!

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