Black Bucket Essays
Volume 1, Issue 5
"Ethics and aesthetics are one"
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
Michael Dax Iacovone
Aesthetics and Ethics are intrinsically linked, often confused, and often employed without realizing it. For me, the confusion comes from the cursory definitions I grew up with. Aesthetics was simply the study of beauty, and Ethics was what guided you to believing something was right or wrong. Both important words boiled down to simple definitions, and in most cases those definitions were more that adequate. These cursory understandings exacerbated the confusion because they didn’t seem dependent on each other. But like many things, a deeper investigation fueled by thick assignments in grad school revealed my shortcomings.
I don’t agree that ethics and aesthetics are one, but I do think they are interdependent, and I also think that once I actually sorted out the definitions it guided me to making more informed decisions.
Believing that aesthetics is simply the study of beauty is damaging. If the definition stops there it lacks foundation and room for information. If we were to walk around judging everything by what it looked like then there would be no reason for art to progress beyond the Renaissance. Before employing aesthetics, we must first reconcile what it is that beauty means. Again, the danger of using the cursory understanding of that word can run into trouble because using beauty to describe things we find visually appealing is underutilizing the word. If you were to find something to be beautiful, you’d need to be able to describe why. And to be able to describe why something is (or isn’t) beautiful, or to the extent something has beauty, and other things have more or less beauty, you would need a criteria for evaluating beauty. And to be able to evaluate if something has beauty, you’d need a belief system to decide what is right and what is wrong. And that practice of systematizing, defending, and reconciling the concept of right and wrong is exactly what ethics are.
Sooooo…… to believe something is beautiful, or even to believe that something lacks beauty, you’d need to employ your ethics. So your ethics is your system for deciding your aesthetics.
Volume 1, Issue 5
"Ethics and aesthetics are one"
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
Michael Dax Iacovone
Aesthetics and Ethics are intrinsically linked, often confused, and often employed without realizing it. For me, the confusion comes from the cursory definitions I grew up with. Aesthetics was simply the study of beauty, and Ethics was what guided you to believing something was right or wrong. Both important words boiled down to simple definitions, and in most cases those definitions were more that adequate. These cursory understandings exacerbated the confusion because they didn’t seem dependent on each other. But like many things, a deeper investigation fueled by thick assignments in grad school revealed my shortcomings.
I don’t agree that ethics and aesthetics are one, but I do think they are interdependent, and I also think that once I actually sorted out the definitions it guided me to making more informed decisions.
Believing that aesthetics is simply the study of beauty is damaging. If the definition stops there it lacks foundation and room for information. If we were to walk around judging everything by what it looked like then there would be no reason for art to progress beyond the Renaissance. Before employing aesthetics, we must first reconcile what it is that beauty means. Again, the danger of using the cursory understanding of that word can run into trouble because using beauty to describe things we find visually appealing is underutilizing the word. If you were to find something to be beautiful, you’d need to be able to describe why. And to be able to describe why something is (or isn’t) beautiful, or to the extent something has beauty, and other things have more or less beauty, you would need a criteria for evaluating beauty. And to be able to evaluate if something has beauty, you’d need a belief system to decide what is right and what is wrong. And that practice of systematizing, defending, and reconciling the concept of right and wrong is exactly what ethics are.
Sooooo…… to believe something is beautiful, or even to believe that something lacks beauty, you’d need to employ your ethics. So your ethics is your system for deciding your aesthetics.
