A personal letter on the realism of aesthetics and morality.
S.R.,
I’ve never been much convinced of a thorough Physicalism – i..e, an ontology that doesn’t permit of the nonnatural.
To my thinking, there are necessarily things that are immaterial (which exist in a “real” sense, i.e., realism rather than nominalism), which, though they correspond with, are not reducible to, physical processes.
It occurred to me, recently, that perhaps those properties to which we often make reference in common parlance, e.g., “true”, “beautiful”, “good”, etc., find their justification as entities (i.e., entities which exist independently of the mind, are sui generis; moral realism) in the following way(s):
That neither are these terms reducible to any one object which we predicate by them, i.e., of the multitude of beautiful things, no one thing suffices to describe the beauty which features in all.
That, without such entities, knowledge or belief, in the common parlance, i.e., that one can only know what is true, or that knowledge entails objectivity, becomes absurd.
A possible objection.
I could very easily imagine one as saying:
“These ‘entities’ are simply the relationships between physical objects and/or actual experiences; in referring to them as ‘entities,’ they’ve merely been sublimated or reified.”
This means to say that there is no entity which one might call “Beauty,” with respect to which things are beautiful (i.e., they derive their beauty from this source by some process), but that what is beautiful is, for lack of better phrase, happenstance, and can be understood, essentially (that is to say, exhaustively), in terms of sentiment and shared characteristics among objects.
I imagine these as meaning the following:
When we call things “beautiful,” we merely make reference to some matter of sentiment or personal taste (i.e., that one has a certain penchant for blue eyes, or mountain-landscapes), which we harbor at the individual level. This sentiment has perhaps been formed (i.e., conditioned) by any one of a range of societal or cultural influences, and is certainly bound by our perceptual capabilities.
Perhaps in the use of the term, we refer to the fact that the beautiful object possesses some relationship to a set of the general characteristics, e.g., form and proportion, which strike the perception in a certain way.
In either case (and the truth of experience is a mixture of the two), while both of these positions must necessarily be correct (i.e., they can’t be denied plausibly, or at least in a way that isn’t averse to common discourse), a simpler and more fundamental question looms – but what is beauty?
Likewise, so the objection might go, when one uses the terms “good” or “evil” (that is, passes some moral judgement), one merely makes reference to sentiment (e.g., “Murder is wrong because it feels wrong.”) or social concerns (e.g., “Murder is wrong because we are inherently social beings.”) or that one merely emotes (i.e., the terms are verbalized forms of praise or condemnation, and don’t in themselves make any truth-apt claims). In any case, “good” does not have some grounding in an entity independent of mind.
While these positions hold some weight in non-moral or non-aesthetic domains (e.g., in questions of “custom” or “practice”), and while they are necessarily true (in certain regards) in so far as we are speaking in terms of common discourse and of experience, ours is a peculiar case (e.g., customs, in so far as we feel bound to obey them, i.e., their stringency, are reflections of the moral and aesthetic).
The existence of these entities
I would like to posit what I believe lends credence to their existence as entities: our beliefs and notions of such things as “good” and “beautiful” are the result of, pardon the phrase, the causal efficacy of these entities.
What I mean by this is that our notions are caused by the existence of these things.
Consider the objection above, that these ideas are the result of perceived relationships, e.g., that actions we term “good” have some relationship to the individual or societal well-being, perhaps that “good” is founded on a certain kind of relationship, or, consequence. (This, I think, is self-evident, but too reductionist.)
A response comes to mind, as to when and wherein the course of societal evolution, or, further, human evolution, these notions arose.
If at any single point (if one can point to the birth of morality or aesthetics), one needs to pursue how exactly or whence the notion arose.
What I mean is this: if one were to say that morality (i.e., moral judgements) arose at a particular time in human history, e.g., with the birth of agriculture, when Homo Heidelbergensis evolved into Homo Sapiens, when the first unicellular organisms coalesced in symbiosis (so as to eventually form what we understand as the eukaryotic cell), the question still remains:
By what means?
One might say that morality began in early man, in civilized man (i.e., the first “societies”), perhaps even in the first organisms, as the recognition of actions that were either beneficial or harmful to one’s own biological integrity (and, by extension, the integrity of like organisms with which one is associated), and by extension, survival (both individually and at large).
At its “inception,” so the account might go, this recognition was internalized and has since been promulgated by some means, through some form of transmission: culture (in which I include moral systems, customs, laws), or perhaps some collective unconscious (i.e., morality is one of the foundations of consciousness, or the very “notion” of morality is engrained at the unconscious level of every human being).
This, however, presupposes the value itself and its inception as a value which we are seeking.
Perhaps morality arose in early man through some facet of our biology (e.g., that Nature favoured the more altruistic, the moral, this being analogous to natural selection), though this doesn’t speak to the judgements themselves.
How was it that early man, that pre-man, attached these labels? That he recognized them? That he attached something more to his experience than the mere facts?
How did the value arise? And the judgement which underlies value?
Causation and mental content
The point which I’m alluding to is subtle: there must be, to my thinking, some causation in the formulation of morality in the human being which cannot depend solely on analysis of physical facts and consequences of those facts.
Morality, and the value which underlies it, is more than can be sublimated from mere experience. In hindsight, this has a vague resemblance to Hume’s thoughts on causation and the problem of induction. And for your convenience I’ll quote the passage here:
There is required a medium, which may enable the mind to draw such an inference, if indeed it be drawn by reasoning and argument. What that medium is, I must confess, passes my comprehension; and it is incumbent on those to produce it, who assert that it really exists, and is the origin of all our conclusions concerning matter of fact.
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section IV, Part II
(E 4.16, SBN 33–4)
The notions we have of goodness and beauty, moreover, are more robust than mere objects (construed broadly) of which we predicate them – they pertain to them, inform them, but are not reducible to them.
Morality and its accompanying notions, then, could not have entered into man’s psychology from recourse to mere happenings in the world. The same, I would argue, can be claimed of aesthetics.
I posit, rather, that morality and aesthetics are the result of causally efficacious entities, not at all unlike physical objects with their interplay of physical causation, and that we recognize them in a way that is akin to sense perception (in line with W.D. Ross’ intuitionism).
Much in the same way that we have sense organs and modalities that interact with, and are informed by, objects in our environment (I mean that sense modalities aren’t fixed means or mediums by which we interact with the world, but are largely conditioned by how we interact with it, what the organism is capable of, or what is necessary to it). As we have senses so attuned to our natural environment, so we have something similar in the case of morality and aesthetics.
Some responses
I don’t intend here to respond to possible objections to this view, but to delineate some which are apparent:
This view risks the same pitfalls as any (metaphysical) dualism – i.e., how to account for the interaction between such entities as I’ve described them and the physical world they affect.
In short, I think it’s the case that we just happen to be the kinds of beings which are able to recognize and “interact” with them (i.e., we have a particular kind of consciousness).
Additionally, these entities can be understood by the effects they provoke in conscious experience, e.g., the aesthetic experience and moral “impulse”.
One avenue to be pursued is that of disagreement, i.e., how we can have disagreements in these domains if we really do have this perception-like faculty. While disagreement abounds in moral and aesthetic domains, that these effects are tangible is not a matter of disagreement (e.g., that one feels the aesthetic experience at the sight of a beautiful object, and at the multitude of objects; that one feels a moral “impulse,” a moral conviction).
But let that be enough for now.
And so, as Socrates says in the Meno:
Meno: You seem to put it well, Socrates – but I don’t know how.
Socrates: And I seem that way to myself, Meno. But, I would not confidently assert the rest of it.
(Meno 86b5–7)
I only have a vague idea of what I mean, anyway.
Sincerely,
George