In her book Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics, Tara Smith notes that Berys Gaut

“sees the roots of objective values in our biological natures. Value is a teleological concept, he reasons, and for living organisms, the teleological is biological. ‘Trees can have good roots because trees have goals, specified by their nature, and good roots are those which help achieve these goals’. It is human beings’ physical and psychological needs that establish the nature and requirements of our flourishing.*

*Gaut, pp. 185, 178, 184–85, 186, emphasis added.” (p.3)

Art, Emotion and Ethics

Berys Gaut (Oxford 2007)

From the back cover: 

"Art, Emotion and Ethics is a systematic investigation of the relation of art to morality . . . . Berys Gaut explores the various positions that have been taken in this debate and argues that an artwork is always aesthetically flawed insofar as it possesses a moral defect that is aesthetically relevant. Three main arguments are developed for this view; these involve showing how moral goodness is itself a kind of beauty, that artworks can teach us about morality and that this is under certain conditions an aesthetic merit in them, and that our emotional responses to works of art are properly guided in part by moral considerations.

"Art, Emotion and Ethics also contains detailed interpretations of a wide range of artworks, including Rembrandt's Bathsheba and Nabokov's Lolita, which show that ethical criticism can yield rich and plausible accounts of individual works. Gaut develops a new theory of the nature of aesthetic value, explores how art can teach us about the world and what we morally ought to do by guiding our imaginings, and argues that we can have genuine emotions towards people and events that we know are merely fictional."

Thanks for these contributions!

Larissa

Hi Stephen. Thankyou for starting this thread, the questions you have posed are very interesting and complicated and we will probably require a very lengthly discussion about this issue in order to come to any definitive answers. This field interests me particularly because I study history of art and make art from time to time, and I believe, as Rand did, that ARt is intrinsically linked to philosophy, whether in explicit or implicit terms.

Before I saying anything about esthetics and beauty, I want to discuss art-making as such, the reason behind art making and the process of art-making -therein lie the issues of sense of life, value, morality and philosophical outlook because, as you have quoted, art is, properly, the concretization of abstract ideas - intellectual and emotional (good art has both in my opinion). When one selectively recreates the elements of reality , one (self-evidently) chooses, whether consciously or subconscious, what it is he wants to depict and why, in other words, what is important for the artist to depict. From this one can infer two things: 1) the artist is projecting something about his psycho-epistemology (and we can discuss that in essentials, without turning into armchair psychologists), and (2) the artist is projecting/communicating something about (but not necesarily the entire system of) his values. By making art, the artist himself is posing a metaphysical value-judgement, not simply about what is beautiful or what is good, but, I think, first and foremost, what is important or essential to man's life. When you apply this idea to questions of beauty, goodness or harmony, you end up formulating such questions as : what is essentially important in this artwork, good or evil, beauty or ugliness, hope or devastation? You as the spectator of an artwork, when you make such simple decisions as whether or not you like some artwork or style, are posing these fundamentally philosophical metaphysical value-judgements, in response to the value-judgements that the artist presents you with. Obviously, those questions and judgements become more complicated than either-or's when you're faced with the Mona Lisa or Bosch's Pergatory panel, but those complicated issues are the result of the philosophical or pre-philosophical standpoint, or sense of life, that the artist holds.

I hope that this answers some of your questions, and please keep posting on this issue!

Larissa ( Leonid's daughter)

Stephen,

Again thanks for posting this. I skimmed the thread twice and read through it all once. I do short circuit when a writing goes from abstraction to abstraction, I am then begging to see pictures!

You do seem to be tying method, the how, with the end, the subject (in art the subject is what the work is, not the viewer–when I read philosophy I have to reverse that!) You touched on harmony, beauty, action/movement. Are you pointing out, or heading to, that art has a specific nature to uplift the soul?

I know this is how I experience and create art. I also know that people totally freak out at the thought, and assume that anyone who thinks such a thing is a fascist. Hahhahahah, silly people.

Rand mentions that art is about love of existence. And she explicitly demonstrates in her characters that there are specific moments in time, that are ultimate experiences, moments reached. Classic moment of Dagny coming to in Galt’s arms in the valley.

I know there are lots of people who flow in and out of trillions of moments, never quite knowing which one of them identifies their character or soul. And there are others that know, with certainty and clarity, that a look, an event, a thought–is exactly that unrepeatable moment that defines their life.

Some years ago I did a casual survey, online, with some objectivist and art groups. I asked several questions but two specifically had amazing results. The questions were: have you ever been passionately in love? And have you ever been passionately in love with an artwork? An overwhelming majority of respondents answered either "yes" to both or "no" to both.

I thought, shit, the ones who never felt love better start experiencing museums, novels, and CD’s. The art works don’t talk back or walk away from you–so you can do all your romantic experimenting with art and find your way to love through that. And, once something clicks and hits home, and it will, you are ready for the moving target.

I actually have a point to all my rambling. I think that art is a beacon. It hails and guides you to come and experience a moment worth living for. Once you experience that, it stores itself away in your soul, it is as if, it expands the scope of your soul. And, sincerely, I think that is the phenomenon of art.

Michael

http://www.MichaelNewberry.com

Hey Stephen,

Delighted to see this. Alexander's link is nice to read. Not sure I could sit through listening to the others, I did my Kantian duty sometime ago. hahahahah, I am glad I did, but I wouldn't recommend Kant to anyone who wasn't insane and wanted to stay that way, or had a professional need to know!

I will follow this up but I think aesthetic value means quite different things to artists and philosophers. In art the aesthetic value is all about the how and the what is off limits--each artist free to do their own thing.

 Anyway...I got a model coming and I am going to play with dancing shadows.

Michael

Alexander Nehamas 

http://www.MichaelNewberry.com

On November 9th and 10th at New York University, there will be a conference on the topic:

 The Nature and Significance of Esthetic Judgments

There will be four sessions on historical figures—Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche—and a fifth session on contemporary treatments of the issue. Registration prior to 5:00 pm November 2nd is required. Contact the Philosophy Department at (212) 998-8320. 

November 9th 

2:30–4:30

Hume Speaker: Peter Kivy

Commentator: Paul Guyer 

5:00–7:00

Kant Speaker: Richard Moran

Commentator: Rebecca Kukla 

November 10th 

10:00–12:00

Hegel Speaker: Robert Pippin

Commentator: Angelica Nuzzo

2:00–4:00

Nietzsche Speaker: Sebastian Gardner

Commentator: Bernard Reginster 

4:30–6:30

Contemporary Philosophy Speakers:

Noel Carroll

Alexander Nehamas 

Do not fail to click on that last entry!

Can't get embroiled in it just at the moment, though. Gotta go do a work-out. I've got a body to get beautiful, after all!

In this thread, the generalized sense of the term harmony is covered by one of the definitions in American Heritage Dictionary:

harmony – The pleasing interaction or appropriate combination of the elements in a whole.

I want to recommend highly an essay that displays the profound and pervasive presence of harmony in Rand’s ethics. The author does not use the term harmony; rather he speaks of unity and integration in human living. Harmony is here.

This is the 1993 essay “A Philosophy for Living on Earth” by Peter Saint-André in Objectivity V1N6, which can be read at www.objectivty-archive.com.

“So we need to know the relations of intellectual harmonies to those given in perception, parallel the relations of intellectual similarities to those given in perception.” That is a proposal from the note Similarity and Harmony.

Recall that in Rand’s developed view, as in my own:

“All concretes, whether physical or mental, have measurable relations to other concretes. Every concrete thing—whether an entity, attribute, relation, event, motion, locomotion, action, or activity of consciousness—is measurable.

“Cognitive systems are measurement systems. Perceptual systems measure, and the conceptual faculty measures.” (From the Introduction of my “Universals and Measurement” in V5N2 of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies)

Similarities directly perceived are measured by perceptual systems. Those measurements are being discovered scientifically, becoming conceptually known. What we are calling intellectual similarities are not those directly perceived, rather, they are similarities that can only be discerned conceptually. These, too, are explicable in terms of measurements.

I expect harmonies given directly in perception (all of them, not only acoustical harmonies) to be measured in the perceptual process. I expect an expanding scientific discovery of those measurements. The mathematical relations between the structures of measurement in the perception of similarities and the structures of measurement in the perception of harmonies may very well turn out to be the same as the mathematical relations between the measurement structures appropriate to intellectual similarities and those appropriate to intellectual harmonies.

Even without completion of the mathematical part of the conceptual analysis of esthetic value and moral value, there is surely extensive analysis we have yet to do in answering the question: What is the difference between the morally valuable and the esthetically valuable?

Speaking of Harmony (and Mathematics):

“There were small houses on the ledges of the hill before him, flowing down to the bottom. He knew that the ledges had not been touched, that no artifice had altered the unplanned beauty of the graded steps. . . .

“The houses were of plain field stones—like the rocks jutting from the green hillsides—and of glass, great sheets of glass used as if the sun were invited to complete the structures, sunlight becoming part of the masonry. There were many houses, they were small, they were cut off from one another, and no two of them were alike. But they were like variations on a single theme, like a symphony played by an inexhaustible imagination, and one could still hear the laughter of the force that had been let loose on them, as if that force had run, unrestrained, challenging itself to be spent, but had never reached its end. Music, he thought, the promise of the music he had invoked, the sense of it made real—there it was before his eyes—he did not see it—he heard it in chords—he thought that there was a common language of thought, sight and sound—was it mathematics?” (The Fountainhead, pp. 544–45)

> the title or painter of the painting that Rand uses as an example of Realism - the one where the woman has a cold sore? Is it an actual painting?

Claudia, good question. If it is, I would like to know as well. My assumption was that her "if you saw" meant she was creating a hypothetical but it could be that the name of an actual such painting simply was not included.

The Fountainhead

Gail to Dominique:

“You’re so beautiful, Dominique. It’s such a lovely accident on God’s part that there’s one person who matches inside and out.

“Do you know what you’re actually in love with? Integrity. The impossible. The clean, consistent, reasonable, self-faithful, the all-of-one-style, like a work of art. That’s the only field where it can be found—art. But you want it in the flesh. You’re in love with it.” (532)

“I know a woman who’s never held to one conviction for three days running, but when I told her she had no integrity, she got very tight-lipped and said her idea of integrity wasn’t mine; it seems she’d never stolen money.” (534)

Toohey to Keating on how to rule the soul of another:

“Set him in reverse—and his own mechanism will do your work for you. . . . Kill his aspiration and his integrity. . . . Kill integrity by internal corruption. Use it against itself. Direct it toward a goal destructive of all integrity. Preach selflessness. Tell man that he must live for others. . . . [Because his constitution makes that ideal impossible to attain,] man realizes that he’s incapable of what he’s accepted as the noblest virtue. . . . To preserve one’s integrity is a hard battle. Why preserve that which one knows to be corrupt already?” (690)

Harmony enters within and between Rand’s conceptions of biological integrity, psychological integrity, and ethical integrity. Harmony plays a role in her concept of and argument for rational ethical egoism.

See also the factor of harmony in Rand’s statement of the moral virtue of integrity in Atlas Shrugged (p.1011). A fine discussion of Rand’s virtue of integrity is chapter 7 of Tara Smith’s Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics (2006).

the title or painter of the painting that Rand uses as an example of Realism - the one where the woman has a cold sore? Is it an actual painting?

Thanks for bringing those pertinent excerpts before us, Joe.

Here is a sample of recent work on responses to art: David Freedberg. (Jan 08 Postscript: See also Neuroarthistory by John Onians.)

Similarity and Harmony

Concerning the harmonies that constitute the beautiful, are they given in perception just as similarities are given in perception? Certainly the acoustic harmonies in musical chords are simply given in human perception. Are other types of harmony perceptually given in the esthetically valuable experience? It is harmony in this more general sense that is at work in a beautiful melody or dance or painting.

Rand distinguished between cognitive abstractions, which identify facts, and normative abstractions, which evaluate facts. Cognitive abstractions are formed from the varying degrees of similarity (or difference) between items given in perception. Not only are some similarities given in perception, some comparative degrees of those similarities are given in perception. I submit that the harmonious appearance of a well-styled automobile is an evaluative perception, simply given in human perception.

Rand took normative abstractions to be the epistemological foundation of morality and art, cognitive abstractions to be the epistemological foundation of science. Normative abstractions such as goodness and beauty, I say, rest partly on evaluative perceptions, such as pleasures and directly perceived harmonies, in addition to perceptually given similarities and comparative similarities.

In addition to similarities given in perception, we have similarities (and comparative degrees of similarity) discerned abstractly. Let me follow Rand’s terminology and call the latter intellectual similarities. Perceptual similarities can come to be grasped intellectually, of course, but we reserve the name intellectual similarities for similarities that are not given directly in perception.

It is the intellectual harmonies that may bear not only on esthetic evaluations, but on ethical ones. So we need to know the relations of intellectual harmonies to those given in perception, parallel the relations of intellectual similarities to those given in perception.

Stephen: "I wonder how the pleasures of sight and the pleasures of sound go into making the various kinds of harmony that yield the beautiful, whether in nature or in art. Concerning our sense of harmony, does that same sense have a role to play in the making of one’s life and character?"

I was JUST rereading RM today, specifically the passage where Rand discusses your question (I think). Anyway, here's her ideas, they might help, I'll leave 'em to you to discuss:

"As a recreation of reality, a work of art has to be representational; its freedom of stylization is limited by the requirement of intelligibility; if it does not present an intelligible subject, it ceases to be art. On the other hand, a representational element is a detriment in the decorative arts: it is an irrelevant distraction, a clash of intentions. And although designs of little human figures or landscapes....are often used to decorate textiles or wallpaper, they are artistically inferior to the nonrepresentational designs."

"(Color harmony is a legitimate element, but only one out of many more significant elements, in the art of painting. But, in painting, colors and shapes are not treated as a decorative pattern.)"

"Visual harmony is a sensory experience and is determined primarily by physiological causes. There is a crucial difference between the perception of musical sounds and the perception of colors: the integration of musical sounds produces a new cognitive experience which is sensory-conceptual, i.e., the awareness of melody; the integration of colors does not, it conveys nothing beyond the awareness of pleasant or unpleasant relationships. Cognitively, the sensation of color qua color is of no significance because color serves an incomparably more important function: the sensation of color is the central element of the faculty of sight, it is one of the fundamental means of perceiving entities."

"...the essence of art is integration, a kind of super-integration in the sense that art deals with man's widest abstractions, his metaphysics, and thus expands the power of man's consciousness. The notion of color symphonies is a trend in the opposite direction: it is an attempt to disintegrate man's consciousness and reduce it to a pre-perceptual level by breaking up percepts into mere sensations."

************************************************

Spaceplayer Sight and Sound

Leonid,

Warm greetings.

Your idea that the standard of esthetic value is man’s sense of life when human life is the standard of value seems right in connection with art. At least it seems plausible as part of the reason that we experience some art as beautiful. Such would be the painting The Hay-Wain by Constable.

Here are two reservations:

1. It seems doubtful that a sense of life had by someone holding human life as the standard of value is the only basic reason why beautiful art is beautiful.
2. It seems doubtful that a sense of life had by someone holding human life as the standard of value is the reason why all the beautiful things in nature are beautiful.

After a few seconds of looking intently into The Hay-Wain, the sunlight begins to strengthen. It shines on the field in distance, shines through the leaves of the tree, and shines upon the pond, reflecting the sky. The play of light in the scene is one of the factors contributing to its overall feel: All is well. However, the pleasures we take in the playwork of the light seems to be itself from factors closer to our visual perceptual system itself, factors more rudimentary than one’s sense of life.

In a remark Rand made to an audience in 1976, she stated that she thought beauty to be a sense of harmony. She applied this notion of beauty to both artifacts, such as paintings, and to natural scenes. If the parts are harmonious, the resulting unit they compose is beautiful.

That seems the right track to me. A sense of harmony, I would say, is more basic than a sense of life. Then the beauty we find in the song of a bird or in the frost on the window might not involve our sense of life, only our sense of harmony. And our sense of harmony might work jointly with our sense of life in creating our experience of a painting as beautiful and esthetically valuable.

I wonder how the pleasures of sight and the pleasures of sound go into making the various kinds of harmony that yield the beautiful, whether in nature or in art. Concerning our sense of harmony, does that same sense have a role to play in the making of one’s life and character?

Leonid:Indeed is very close and formidable connection between these two branches of philosophy. The object-matter of ethics is to define what is valuable or good. The object-matter of esthetics is to define what is beautiful.The standart of value is man's life qua man.The standart of beauty is man's sense of life when the life is the standart of value. No anti-life stylization of reality can be percieved as beatiful or can summarize implicite sense of benevolent universe which is base of the sense of beauty.Deformity, disease, atonal music ,anti-heros or ugliness in short cannot be good or valuable or beautiful.

The esthetically valuable includes design, art, music, dance, and natural scenery. What do these have in common in their relation to human life and mind, and how is that common relation related to moral relations?