Beauty And Ethics: Three Relations by Susan Emma Sinclair A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Philosophy Department University of Toronto © Copyright by Sue Sinclair 2014 Beauty and Ethics: Three Relations Susan Emma Sinclair Doctor of Philosophy Philosophy Department University of Toronto 2014 Abstract After years of neglect, a renewed interest in beauty developed among many Western art critics, art practitioners and theorists of aesthetics in the 1990s. Beauty had fallen from favour in part because it was deemed politically and ethically suspect, both as complicit with the sociopolitical structures that yielded WWI and as a tool of oppression wielded against women and minorities. One wonders, however, whether the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. Even granted that beauty has been damaging in the ways alluded to, can it yet be ethically helpful in ways that were lost when we ceased to attend to beauty (at least in the realms of institutional art and aesthetic theory if not in the day to day)? What ethical benefits might we have overlooked? The answer to this question depends partly on what one takes beauty to be. Beauty is a complex concept; there exist many competing and frequently contradictory accounts, often with deep roots, making the concept rife with internal contradictions. Rather than either attempt to reconcile conflicting accounts or address only one aspect of the concept, I will show that different sorts of relation to ethics emerge depending on how we approach beauty. I will present three different ways in which we can see beauty as related to ethics: beauty qua motivator of ethical relation, qua formal cause of ethical relation, and qua analogue of ethical relation. ii The kinds of relation we see between beauty and ethics also depend on what style of ethics we consider. Despite the variety of approaches to beauty discussed, the connections I found tended to link beauty to particularistic versions of ethics. This may be due to beauty’s longstanding association with the realm of particulars, making for an easy fit with ethics that emphasize attention to particulars. iii Acknowledgments For their guidance, I am deeply indebted to my supervisors, Sonia Sedivy and Amy Mullin. Stories circulate of supervisors negligent, inflexible, unreasonable and aggressive; I am pleased to be able to tell my own story of unfailingly helpful, supportive and responsive supervisors. I would also like to thank Rebecca Comay for her work with me as part of my oral exam committee and Lambert Zuidervaart for his willingness to participate as my reader, engaging enthusiastically with my thoughts. Thanks to Jenny McMahon for the time and care she put in as external examiner and to Mark Kingwell, my internal examiner, for his probing questions. Thanks are also due to Jan Zwicky, Warren Heiti, Alayna Munce, Karin Nissenbaum and George Sipos for discussions and support both inside and outside the academy; also for their love. Thanks, as ever, to my family, especially to Nick Thran, who has lived with this project as long as I have and has been unflagging in his belief in me both as a philosopher and as a human being. iv Table of Contents Contents Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ v List of Plates ................................................................................................................................ viii Chapter 1 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1 1 The Neglect of Beauty ............................................................................................................... 1 2 Why Care About a Beauty-Ethics Relation? .............................................................................. 4 3 What Beauty? ............................................................................................................................. 5 4 The Current Project .................................................................................................................... 7 5 Beauty’s Relation to Moral Particularism ................................................................................ 10 Chapter 2 Experience of Beauty and Decentred Attention ........................................................... 17 1 Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 17 2 Decentred Attention ................................................................................................................. 19 3 Intrusion ................................................................................................................................... 23 4 Beauty’s Broader Ethical Influence ......................................................................................... 28 5 Counter-Examples .................................................................................................................... 34 6 The Ethical Significance of Experience of Beauty .................................................................. 41 7 Conclusion................................................................................................................................ 46 Chapter 3 Experience of Formal Beauty: the Problems of Distraction and Rhetoric .................. 48 1 Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 48 2 The Disconnect Between Appearance and Being .................................................................... 52 3 Nehamas: the Appearance of Character .................................................................................. 55 4 Hickey: the Virtue of the Form/Content Split ......................................................................... 58 5 Responding to the Ethical Danger ............................................................................................ 63 v 6 Why Stay Open to Beauty’s Effects ......................................................................................... 67 6.1 Against Deadening ............................................................................................................ 67 6.2 Against the Habitual Disconnect of Form and Other Aspects of Being ........................... 70 7 Conclusion................................................................................................................................ 72 Chapter 4 Beauty as Formal Cause of Ethical Relation ................................................................ 75 1 Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 75 2 Translating To Kalon................................................................................................................ 77 3 To Kalon and To Prepon .......................................................................................................... 80 4 Beauty and Ethics in the Nicomachean Ethics ......................................................................... 84 5 Eaton’s Approach to Form in Relation to Ethics ..................................................................... 92 6 Objections to Thinking of Virtue and Virtuous Action as Beautiful ....................................... 96 6.1 Counter-Examples ............................................................................................................. 96 6.2 Alterity-Based Ethics ........................................................................................................ 99 7 Conclusion.............................................................................................................................. 104 Chapter 5 Beauty: Analogue of Ethical Relations ..................................................................... 106 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 106 2 Kant: Beauty as a Symbol of Morality .................................................................................. 107 3 Scarry: Beauty as Analogue of Justice .................................................................................. 111 3.1 First Answer .................................................................................................................... 114 3.2 Second Answer ............................................................................................................... 119 3.3 Third Answer .................................................................................................................. 120 4 Synecdoche and Nested Wholes ............................................................................................ 123 5 Symmetry and Injustice .......................................................................................................... 127 6 Asymmetry and Justice .......................................................................................................... 131 7 Overall Evaluation of Scarry’s Account of Beauty as Analogue of Justice .......................... 133 8 Beauty as Analogue