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COPYRIGHT BY LUCILE WOLFS GREEN 1956 ETHICS IN THE "NEW KEY" DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Lucile Wolfe Green, B. A., M. A ******* The Ohio State University 1957 Approved by Department of Educati TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE Prologue ill I Ethics in the "New Key" 1 II Genealogy of Ethics 1*+ III "Scientific Ethics"* Moore's Princinia Ethics 35 IV Promethean Ethics 55 V Resolution in Aesthetic Form 75 VI Ethics as Feeling in Form 86 VII Formal Patterns in Thought and Feeling 102 A. Logic and Language 106 B. Language and Art 111 C. Art and Ethics 128 VIII Teaching Ethics in the "New Key" 1^6 Epilogue 165 Bibliography 167 Autobiography 177 ii PROLOGUE The world is full of people who are searching for a myth— a myth for those who "hunger and thirst after right eousness*” The old myths no longer satisfy this hanger, which is made acute by the modern pace of living* They have richly nourished in the past, but now they have lost their vigor, worn thin and weak with usage. They are not enough for the acute yearning of today’s people. Falling to find a myth, many people turn to magic, and here they find— if not food— at least power. The magic of machines, the magic of propaganda, the magic of the atom— all these provide power and a temporary illusion of control. But like the Sorcerer's apprentice, these people fear the magic getting out of hand, and have nightmares of being beset by a monster of their own creation. I am one of these people. Frightened by our magic, I too am looking for a myth about righteousness. For I believe the troubles of our time have their roots in good and evil. The dislocations of divorce, the tragedy of delinquency, the stupid brutalities of prejudice, and the neuroses of nationalism are at bottom moral problems, and I believe morality is in man, not in nature. As a teacher I am multiply concerned. I am concerned about my role in other people's search for a myth. I am con cerned also about the role of the college in guiding the im iii iv pressionable years of those who are best equipped for the search. The vacuum in vigorous young lives, made at the col lege age by the dissolution of family ties, was formerly filled by religious institutions. These are now low-pres- sured, if not extinct, in most colleges. The teaching of values, original purpose in the founding of most institu tions of higher learning, has been virtually disavowed by them. They have forsaken their own creation myths and have not found new ones virile enough to replace them. Instead, colleges too have turned to magic. Science and vocational studies promise the practical things* security, wealth, and power, while the liberal arts coyly beckon to a vague, imaginary realm of "the finer things in life." For moral standards the student is left largely to his own devices. The only intellectually respectable stand ard, consistent with the scientific method, is expedience. The best interest of the group, as determined by majority rul£, is defensible on rational (scientific) grounds. On the other hand, in the many personal choices of those four years, the student is allowed to flounder his way, with counseling to be sure, but little ipore in the way of ethical awareness than the trite notion that right and wrong are matters of personal opinion. This amounts to an admission that ethical values are biases to be tolerated but hardly respectable enough to be a part of the college curriculum. Instead, the mind is trained to follow the facts (any facts) V and to give evidence (any evidence) for its conclusions (any conclusions). Intelligence is substituted for righteousness. That it is a poor substitute is attested in the dislocations of our educated and enlightened society. And so, as a teacher as well as a person, I am search ing for a myth. It must be a cosmic myth, one which will fit the universe to rightenusness--not a little myth for a single class, or race, or creed. It mptst be a vital myth, rich and strong enough to satisfy the hunger and the thirst. It must be an intellectual myth for intellectual people. In addition, I would have heroes who are incarnations of the truth of my myth. Finally, I would find fellowship with other believers like me so that I would not be lonely. Nearly twenty years ago I began my myth in a poetic essay I wrote in connection with my Master*s Degree in Aesthetics. It was titled "Art the Higher Ethic,** and while the "poetry" left something to be desired, the ideas were potent. They began to relate my undergraduate work in art to my graduate work in philosophy. The relationships have un folded through years of study and teaching art, philosophy, Bagllsh and the Humanities. They have also expanded into the growing affinity which I have for oriental thought, one that rooted itself in eighteen years of living in China and is reviving with my interest in aesthetics and mysticism. I have struggled with the hope that ethical principles could be made more systematic and therefore objective if they could be related to systematic thought in other fields. Art seemed to have the closest relationship, and I found much support for this idea among philosophers, though not among artists. My own experiments with the idea in teaching these subjects were stimulating but not conclusive. Art was too amorphous a medium in which to anchor ethics. The principles of order in language seemed more solid, and those in logic inflexible. If ethical rules could be made like logical rules, how firm they would bel But Kant did this, and his rules be came so inflexible that they were, by his own admission, im practical and unrealistic in application. The solution seemed still to be somewhere in the arts where sensitivity and design meet— where feelings of hunger and thirst are given form in a process that creates order in the self and communication among persons. Then I read Cassirer’s Essay on Man. with his theory of symbolic forms as the basis of culture, and Susanne Langer's Philosophy in a New Key, with her reinterpretation of the mean ing of all thought in terms of the creation of symbols for the expression of feeling. This theory of Symbolism, with its order based on need for meaning, was for me the "key" that opened the door. Through it I could see all significance as creation, whether by the inflexible rules of logic or the amorphous prin ciples of art. Miss Langer's later book, Feeling and Form, elaborated the relation of "virtual" forms to "actual" life in the various arts: painting, architecture, music, dance, and vli literature* Each one was shown to present a "semblance” of reality, making experiences clear and ideas about them "negotiable.” Here at last was the vista that offered me hope. X had found the level at which my search made sense. What re mained for me to do was to abstract from various arts the pattern which made for clarity and significance, to view this design as a universal system, and then to relate ethics to it. Thus my myth began to take shape. CHAPTER I ETHICS IN THE "NEW KEY" The redefinition of man as "animal symbolicum" opened up a new world in philosoohy. Ernst Cassirer, in An Essay On Man,'*" declared that man's distinctive quality is not his ra tionality so much as his capacity to invent symbols. Other studies have been exploring the implications of the definition. New sciences, like semantics and semiotic, are now pioneering in the logic and psychology of symbols. Old familiar fields of science are being surveyed from a new perspective. Experiments in perception have brought about reinterpretation of sense data p as the transaction of sttmulae with formulated experience. These experiments prove that the senses are not primary, accu rate sources of knowledge about "reality," as often assumed by the sciences, but highly selective instruments, reflecting previous symbolic orientations of the mind. The problem of observation which was the crux of empirical philosophy has, by such studies as these, been overlaid with the problem of inter pretation, for there has been discovered, in the words of Suzanne Langer, "the surprising truth that our sense-data are primarily symbols." -*-Ernst Cassirer, An Essav on Man. New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1953 (originally published in 19l+1+ by the Yale University Press). ^See experiments at the Visual Demonstration Center of the Institute for Research in Vision, the Ohio State University. 2 Here, suddenly, It becomes apparent that the age of science has begotten a new philosoph ical issue, inestimably more profound than its original empiricism;...and all at once, the edifice of human knowledge stands before us, not as a vast collection of sense reports, but as a structure of facts that are symbols and laws which are their meanings. A new philosophical theme has been set forth to a coming ages an epistomologlcal theme, the comprehension of science. The power of symbolism is its cue, as the finality of sense-data was the cue of a former epoch. 3 The new philosophical theme, the concept of symbolism, has and is continuing to produce far-reaching changes in the whole realm of modern thought. Especially is it revolutionizing the study of man.