Life and The
Beautiful
By Martin L. Cowen III
Readers of this newsletter will be aware of our quest
to understand “The Beautiful.” The spur to our interest in “The Beautiful” was
our one-year study during Fellowship of Reason Sunday School of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as translated by
Professor Joe Sachs of St. John’s University.
Professor Sachs translates the Greek phrase “To Kalon,” used frequently by Aristotle,
as “The Beautiful.” Other modern translations, including the highly influential
Loeb Classical Library translation (1926) by H. Rackham, have translated the
phrase as “The Noble.”
Aristotle says that the goal of ethical action is The
Beautiful. The advantage of The Beautiful over The Noble is that Aristotle uses
The Beautiful in its common sense meaning, as in: “She is a beautiful woman.”
Or, “That was a beautiful thing that you did.” Or, the opposite, “That was an
ugly thing you did.”
We understand The Beautiful. Saying that a thing is
“noble” is not so easy. Does it mean that the action is something that an
aristocrat would do? What does an aristocrat do? The meaning is not clear. As
an ethical guide, the noble is practically useless.
Longtime followers of the Fellowship of Reason will
know that our philosophy, Eudaimonism, draws upon Ayn Rand’s Objectivism.
Objectivists will know that Ayn Rand drew upon Aristotle, naming, for example,
the three sections of her monumental work Atlas
Shrugged after Aristotle’s categories, “Non-Contradiction,” “Either-Or,”
and “A is A.” Ayn Rand claims that the goal of ethical action is life.
My intention in this essay is to answer the question:
How can Aristotle’s claim that the goal of ethical action is The Beautiful be
reconciled with Objectivism’s claim that “life” is the goal of ethical action?
I have followed Objectivism for decades, since about
1972, that would be four decades. I
actually met Ayn Rand in person. I played Leonard Peikoff’s lecture tapes for
audiences in Atlanta in the 1970s, paying him fees. I have read all of Ayn
Rand’s writings, excepting her letters. My acquaintance with Objectivism is
above average.
Ayn Rand’s groundbreaking ethical claim, intended to
remove ethics from the realm of the subjective, is that the standard of ethics
is life. The ethical action is one that is pro-life. The relevant life is man’s
life, qua man. “Qua man,” means “as
man,” and refers to universal man properly conceived, in Ayn Rand’s case, man
as producer.
Even Objectivists are not in perfect agreement on what
“life” is the goal of ethical action. I have heard Objectivists debate over
whether life means life as survival or life as flourishing. If
the meaning is life as survival, then an individual is morally justified in
doing anything to cause himself to survive. That would include throwing a baby
under a bus if necessary to give the actor’s own body sufficient momentum to
get out of the way the bus. Most Objectivists claim that life means a
flourishing life. The person trying to get out of the way of the bus might
calculate that if he throws the baby under the bus that his life will be
plagued with guilt thereafter and not worth living. Therefore, he would not
throw the baby under the bus.
The bus example is useful because it relates to the
virtue of courage, Aristotle’s paradigmatic virtue. Here is Aristotle’s
definition of courage:
“So one who [who] endures or fears what [what] one
ought, for the reason one ought [why], as one ought [how], when [when] one
ought, and is confident in similar ways, is courageous, since the courageous
person undergoes things and acts in accordance with what is worthy and in a way
that is proportionate. Now the end of any way of being at work is what
corresponds to the active condition it comes from, and to a courageous person,
courage is a beautiful thing, and so its end is something beautiful as well,
since each thing is determined by its end. So it is for the sake of the
beautiful that the courageous person endures and does the things that are in
accord with courage.”
“Who, what, when, where, why, and how,” these six
ideas (Aristotle omits “where” in his definition of courage) are the elements
of the news story. These six ideas are a memory tool for storytellers to remind
them to include everything about their subject. Aristotle was thorough. “Where”
for Aristotle in the case of courage would be everywhere.
Readers of this newsletter will be aware that we have
addressed the objection that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” We have
said, “Yes, it is.” We have said that beauty is a perception. We have said that
proper training is necessary in order that a person be able to perceive the
beautiful. These questions arise when analyzing Aristotle’s definition of
courage.
My favorite example of courage is Todd Beamer, who was
the 9-11 (2001) hero who led the passenger revolt on United Airlines flight 93
against the Islamist terrorist hijackers. The flight crashed in a field near
Stonycreek Township, Pennsylvania, with the loss of all aboard, but none on the
ground. Realizing that his flight was doomed and headed toward an evil goal,
Todd Beamer determined to retake control of the flight with the help of some
fellow passengers, starting his charge with the phrase, “Let’s roll!”
There is satisfaction in contemplating the life and
death of Todd Beamer who acted with Aristotelian courage in the face of certain
death. The satisfaction is the perception of “The Beautiful.”
In the case of the bus and the baby, the explanation
that the actor analyzes the situation and concludes that he would live his life
in guilt if he throws the baby under the bus is inadequate. The true
explanation is that a courageous actor instantly perceives that the
beautiful thing to do is to save the baby and he does so. There is no analysis.
Beauty is a perception. The perception is instantaneous. Obviously, not
everyone will act the same way. Some will use the baby to save themselves. You,
dear readers, will have an opinion about the actor who uses the baby to save
himself. His action is not the beautiful thing to do. It is not likely that you
will do business with him or associate with him in any way. He will be shunned
by those who know of his actions. He will be ashamed of himself.
Therefore, Objectivist theory fails to account for
courage in life and death situations.
This conclusion, though, does not necessitate a
complete break from Objectivist theory. Consider the relationship between a
flourishing life (Objectivism’s moral target) and The Beautiful (Aristotle’s
moral target). Rarely will there be space between a “flourishing” life and The
Beautiful. Flourishing and The Beautiful often have the same referents.
Flourishing is a part of The Beautiful in cases in which flourishing is a
relevant category. In order to be beautiful a life must be flourishing (a
necessary condition), though flourishing alone is not sufficient for a life to
be beautiful. A tyrant (e.g. Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad, Kim Jong-un) can
flourish without being beautiful.
Let us think about this some more.
We all seek the following, yes?
1.
A beautiful life
2.
Beautiful people
in character and body
3.
The beautiful in
action
4.
The beautiful in
thought
5.
The beautiful in
art
6.
The beautiful in
music
7.
The beautiful in
literature
8.
The beautiful in
architecture
9.
The beautiful in
nature
10.
A beautiful death
If we do seek a beautiful death, then the Objectivist’s
moral target, a flourishing life is merely slightly off the true target, the
true target being The Beautiful, including a beautiful life. The issue is analogous
to Sir Isaac Newton’s physical science and Albert Einstein’s Relativity. Newton’s
science applies at slower than light speeds very well. At speeds approaching the
speed of light, Relativity is the more useful scientific model. In the same
way, targeting a flourishing life will get you morally where you want to go in
normal circumstances, but in life and death circumstances The Beautiful is
required as the standard. (Comparing Ayn Rand (as Newton) to Aristotle (as
Einstein) will not ruffle too many Objectivist feathers.)
My favorite fictional depiction of the thoughtful moral
targeting of a beautiful death (and longtime readers and auditors will remember
this fact) is the Clint Eastwood film Gran
Torino (2008). In the film Clint Eastwood’s character, Walt, befriends a
teenaged neighbor, Thao, who is having trouble avoiding a neighborhood gang who
seeks to recruit Thao. In the film’s climax, Walt seeks his own spectacular death
in a hail of bullets in order to take out the gang by legal process. (The gang
kills the unarmed Walt in public and the thugs are taken away by the police for
murder.) I will not take the time to “explain” The Beautiful in this scene
here, because a properly “trained” viewer can see for herself by watching the
film.
So returning to my list above of ten beautiful things
we seek, we can easily see that the list can be expanded indefinitely by adding
more categories (the beautiful in science, for example) and by subdividing (the
beautiful in opera, for example, as a subcategory of music) the existing
categories.
The Beautiful is therefore an aspect of life, death,
people, action, thought, art, music, literature, architecture, and nature. It
is the morally relevant aspect. The Beautiful was one of Plato’s famous Forms. We
do not embrace Plato’s Forms. Rather, the Forms are, in our philosophy,
abstractions from other categories, ideas, and objects. An “abstraction” is
something isolated in thought and to which one’s mind attends. Take “white” as
an example. When considering a “white” coffee cup, one “abstracts” the
experience of whiteness from the “white” coffee cup in question. One “abstracts”
out aspects of objects for a variety of purposes. In the case of a “white” coffee
cup, one might attend to whiteness in order to successfully complete her
collection of “white” coffee cups. But that is enough of Epistemology for the
moment.
The goal of this essay has been to reconcile the claim
of Objectivism that a flourishing life is the object of moral action with the
claim of Aristotle that The Beautiful is the object of moral action. We have
argued that a flourishing life is certainly part of the moral picture and
applies to many normal moral situations. At moral situations at the margin of
life and death, the proper standard is The Beautiful.
We might say, too, that just as the translation of “To
Kalon” as the noble or as The Beautiful matters to a clear understanding of
Aristotle’s ethics, so too does a statement that the standard of morality is a
flourishing life versus The Beautiful matters even in normal moral cases. In
order to avoid confusion and possible error, I choose always to hold The Beautiful
before my mind’s moral eye.
So, we conclude where we began with the claim that The
Beautiful is the object of moral action.
