Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

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 ‘mountain-top’ 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 or perhaps look forward to a time when such beauty or sweetness will last forever. Others may counter that beauty 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.

The question thus becomes whether something can really have a 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. 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. I suggest therefore that the beauty is always only in our response, not in some quality inherent in the object of our attention. 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 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. The association of

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