"Aesthetics are higher than ethics": some thoughts on Aestheticism

[Update: I went back to find this quote and realized that it's actually Wilde who said it, not Pater, in "The Critic as Artist" http://www.wilde-online.info/the-critic-as-artist-page45.html. The Aestheticism catch phrase associated with Pater is "art for art's sake," but I had mixed the two up. Text corrected accordingly.]

If you follow me on social media, you already know I’ve been teaching Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray for the last couple months, and that I’ve been completely obsessed with it. I’ve been having a wonderful time teaching the book; in particular it’s been charming to see my student come in to class having super emotional reactions like “Oh my God! I hate Lord Henry!” while inside I’m thinking “I kind of want to BE Lord Henry,” but that’s beside the point. In the course of teaching this novel, I’ve been thinking a lot about Aestheticism, and in particular Walter Pater’s Wilde's assertion that aesthetics are higher than ethics. It’s a delightfully subversive and beguiling idea, but it also seems to fly in the face of everything I was ever taught about morality, particularly as a Unitarian Universalist (yes, there is such a thing as Unitarian guilt. It arises from the knowledge that you will hit permanent compassion fatigue long before you ever join enough social justice committees). Don’t we humanist types usually tell ourselves that ethics should be at the center of everything we do? So I’ve been thinking about whether the proposition “aesthetics are higher than ethics” could possibly be true. There are obvious examples that seem to fly in the face of it: the antebellum South is an extreme one. Thinking about how that culture rested on the horrific violence of slavery, it’s hard to argue that the splendor it produced at the highest level of society could ever outweigh the monumental failure of ethics at its foundation. 

Today while I was taking a walk on a very beautiful spring day in the midst of the “superbloom” that has engulfed southern California this month, I came back to this idea: how do we judge between aesthetics and ethics? All at once I realized that I’d been thinking about it the wrong way entirely: it’s not a competition. It’s not an issue of one side winning or losing; that’s what philosophy calls a category mistake. It means, I think, that aesthetics encompasses ethics, or to put it the other way around, ethics is a subtopic within aesthetics. And this actually makes a lot of sense. People think about the foundation of ethics quite a lot in philosophy, although no one has ever come to a definitive agreement about it. Some people say it has to do with kindness and empathy (e.g. Hume, plus every motivational poster in existence), some say justice (Kantians), some say personal virtue (not to leave out my guy Aristotle), and a few just say pleasure (hello, utilitarians). Those are basically the main options, and most people who don’t bother about philosophy would probably just say it’s some combination of all of them (along with God’s laws, perhaps, but ugh I cannot be bothered with divine command theory). Regardless of which one you focus on, however, one way to understand ethics as a field is the study of the beautiful in action. What makes an action beautiful and why? Empathy, virtue, justice: most people can probably agree that these qualities are beautiful in some sense, and that actions that arise from these are therefore also beautiful. So, one way of defining ethics is the inquiry into what principles make for beautiful action. (Yikes, this is starting to sound alarmingly like Plato. Don’t worry, I’m not about to start positing the Forms.)

On the other hand, there are lots of things in the world --  like a beautiful day, art, music and so on -- that have beauty but do not have an ethical dimension at all. They’re purely aesthetic and it doesn’t make sense to talk about them in ethical terms. I can ask meaningful ethical questions about the production of art or music, of course. I can also ask ethical questions about how people choose to use or consume a work of art or music. But I can’t really apply ethics to the work itself. It’s just there, existing. So “aesthetics are higher than ethics” doesn’t mean that “we should solve a conflict between aesthetics and ethics by giving priority to aesthetics.” It means they’re not actually in conflict at all, because aesthetics is a broader category of study. From an Aestheticist perspective, kind or virtuous or just or pleasure-creating actions will always be beautiful, and the study of what makes those actions beautiful is the branch of aesthetics we call ethics.