Ethics, the idea that governs many of our actions and omission of actions, is a very ambiguous concept. Its many sides can be seen with many perspectives. It can be seen as a product of evolution, where it’s a product of our instinct of preserving our genes extending to kin selection where we help others according to their genome’s commonality with ours. It can be seen as a commodity of accolades, where one with the license to “fish” for it, does, and, according to the magnitude of his catch, is prosperous in uprightness. It can be seen as something that prevents human nature from reaching its full potential, or something that prunes human instincts prematurely out of fear. It can also be seen from the Christian perspective, where it is based on God’s will, is absolute, is a view that goes beyond what is to what it ought to be, and is intolerant of having the ends justify the means. One other interesting perspective on ethics is seeing ethics through the lens of aesthetics. The famous Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, once said that “ethics and aesthetics are one.” But what has beauty to do with our morals? What has art to do with charity? These are the questions I will explore.
On the famous movie called Inglorious Bastards, Christoph Waltz, acting as SS officer Hans Landa, explains to Denis Menochet, acting as a French farmer who is hiding Jews, why Nazi Germany hates Jews. He uses an interesting analogy. He explains that people hate rats, and the farmer explains in an utilitarian spirit that he hates rats because rats spread disease. The SS officer, who is nicknamed the Jew hunter, explains that squirrels can spread the same diseases that rats can spread. At this point, Hans Landa states that rats are hated for a reason that is unknown. Most of us find rats simply repulsive for a reason we do not really know. One thing we do know, however, is that we find rats ugly. Maybe this is the key to why rats are not under the protection of our sense of ethics while other prettier animals such as kittens are.
In his book Wittgenstein Ethics and Aesthetics, B.R. Tilghman tells the reader that there is little work done that investigates “interesting connections between ethics and aesthetics and seeks to break down artificially rigid barriers between these species of human concern”. Medieval times saw a deceivingly integrated culture. That is, “religious, moral, political, and aesthetic values” were integrated to the point that it was not easy to distinguish one from the other. This can be seen at an ancient war scene where generals would be arousing soldiers through speeches drenched in ethos and beautiful images of the nation or people for which the men fight flash into the men’s imagination and they plead for the gods to help them. Here the men might think they are fighting for values of a certain type but might actually be fighting for values of a type they did not consciously intend to fight for. Part of the progress of history was to draw more lines between these values which separated them, related them and, most importantly, defined them. That was commendable progress because it would let us understand our and other’s values more accurately (clearly) rather than vaguely. We would know what we and our institutions truly stand for when we know the true nature of our values. The progress that has been made in this area is evident when we see how we have moved from the church colluding with the politicians of Medieval Europe to the effect of confusing the populace’s values to today where homosexuals are not subject to legal persecution because we now better understand the nature of our political and religious values.
I will try to continue this process in this paper, with the help of Tilghman, by seeking to understand the true nature of ethical values in the context of aesthetical values. Tilghman seems to be trying to do that in his book Wittgenstein Ethics and Aesthetics. In this book, Tilghman tries to define beauty. One approach he uses to do that is to refer to the definition of Immanuel Kant. According to Kant, beauty is that which causes disinterested satisfaction. Real beauty is an object that causes that satisfaction that you get when you perceive something without the guidance of your previous conscious interests/values. Therefore, beauty is a source of your values. Aesthetics is where at least some of your values are created and ethics is where they are asserted and defended. Here you can ascertain that something is purely beautiful only by your first experience of it since after that experience you carry an association of beauty with that object and other related objects, which makes it hard to see whether you like it the second time you see it before you consider your past bias towards it or not. Unfortunately, most assertions of values (ethical exercises) are not immediately preceded by the “first touch” experience of what the assertion stands for. It is therefore hard to say whether those exercises of, or tendencies toward, ethics come from experiencing true beauty or not. However, one can suspect that the origins of all values are “first touch” aesthetic experiences.
Pure aesthetics is divorced of biases. It is not immediately affirmed or condemned but immediately appreciated. In doing so, such aesthetics is able to birth a new value in the man/women (a value that is new to him/her that is). Therefore true aesthetics does not merely challenge or affirm your ethics but creates a new part of it and, in that way, shapes it. So beauty shapes one’s values differently from logic since it does not synthesize an argument from the fundamental premises of some person’s views; rather, it simply creates a new value in the person and leaves the person to decide what that means for his/her old values. Also, since values are the source of our survival (we survive because we value something), beauty is a source of our survival. Therefore one can say that man does not live by bread alone but what he/she values and, indirectly, by the beauty that he/she finds.
Despite the above dignified view of beauty, art, which is a popular medium of beauty and the beauty it carries, has been rendered useless or ominous by some thinkers. Plato thought that the poetry of his time was corruptive to society. He thought that it was made by artists that did not know what true morality was and so the protagonists they created that are looked up to are not actually moral, and therefore are unworthy of being emulated or their stories being disseminated. This view partially comes from the fact that Plato lived in a society where many sources of values are integrated into one utilitarian perspective and that society did not know the concept of reading simply for reading sake or, more generally, having art for art sake. We also see that Plato sees a legitimate risk in the propagation of poetry. If we see a landscape painting, we see that the painter uses visual illusions such as railway tracks coming together at the horizon. However we know through science, the exact reality pertaining to those renderings of reality and are therefore not being fooled by the illusions the painter is creating. This is not the case for poetry since we really do not know what the exact reality is when it comes to morality. According to Plato, this reality is hidden from the poets of his time and can only be revealed by a Philosopher King. In fact, according to Tilghman, the Republic by Plato can be seen as mostly being the establishing of the science for revealing this reality. This brings back the problem that is created when pure aesthetics simply creates a value in us independent of our fundamental premises of ethics or their logical constructions and consequently leaves us confused.
Another thinker that pointed out the ills of pure aesthetics was Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy did not disapprove of art itself. He thought that the art created by early Christians was a manifestation of the early Christian’s view of devotion and ethics. However, he thought that as Christianity became institutionalized, art lost its way through people in the church who have lost religion and were maintaining the church because it justified their privileges. These people created the sense of pure aesthetics, not by being unbiased or objectively stripping themselves from their previous values so as to appreciate true beauty but by being devoid of religious feeling and callously opting for their personal pleasure to tell them what beauty is. In this sense, pure aesthetics is not so pure. Rather, it is a manifestation of what pleases reprobates. However, I think that pure aesthetics should not be reduced to vain entertainment even though it is divorced from considerations and values. Being the originator of values it is too powerful to be rendered just entertaining.
Concerning ethics, Wittgenstein states that “the absolute good…would be one which everybody, independent of his tastes and inclinations, would necessarily bring about or feel guilty for not bringing about”. Absolute ethics is that which one perceives its lack in oneself by feeling guilty independent of one’s previous goals and values. For example, an Ethiopian soldier might feel guilty for killing an Al Shabab soldier even though all his goals and values tell him that he did the right thing. This is a hint at the very elusive concept of absolute ethics.
Using the above definition of absolute ethics, we find a striking resemblance of it with pure aesthetics. Pure aesthetics is the one divorced of biases. It is not immediately affirmed or condemned but immediately appreciated by the observer. They are both immediately apparent. They both hit you before your biases guide and influence you. What is amazing is that it seems to me that both of these pure forms point to the same thing. Judging from experience, it seems to me that what is immediately beautiful to us is immediately right to us and what is immediately ugly to us is immediately wrong to us.
A broader way of defining ethics is as the subject that tries to solve the riddle of life. It is what brings out the meaning of life for us to see. It is therefore that which tries to solve the question “what is the meaning of life or the world?” Wittgenstein uses this definition to reach another parallel between ethics and aesthetics. He first solves the riddle of life by dismissing it. He does that just like we get rid of/avoid questions of style and technic when watching a movie. If we thought about these things, then we would not enjoy the movie as we perceive its artificiality and its imperfectness. Likewise we solve the riddle of life by effectively ignoring it. Effectively solving the riddle of life being the objective of ethics, we are very ethical when we get rid of the riddle. However, Wittgenstein does not mean to say there is no problem. His problem is how to live so as to get rid of the problem of life. He wants to find out the way he can see the world to the effect that he is not incited to conjure up a problem in it.
It is not only effective to get rid of the problem but also truthful if the world is a sum of independent facts. If we see the world as a sum of independent facts, then we know that there is no meaning and therefore no ethics in the world for there are no causative relationships. Even though such a view is debatable, by assuming it we can avoid the danger or risk of seeing value or meaning in the world. The risk in seeing the world in such fashion becomes apparent as we see history and the many discordances in it. Sartre, the famous existentialist philosopher, has a character in his novel Nausea who complains about how his life does not have the structure of a novel, where one situation almost demands a consequential situation such as is common in cliché plots both in the literature world and the real world. Such complaining is parallel to what we experience when we think about the flaws of a movie or another work of art and there by cease enjoying it. The risk of finding meaning in the world is that the meaning won’t add up and upon realizing that we would be left in unhappiness.
Despite his assertion that there is no meaning in the world, Wittgenstein does admit that there is meaning outside the world. He explains that meaning, ethics, logic, and aesthetics are all limits of the world found outside the world of facts. He calls them the limits of language for there are no propositions that can be made about them because they are not facts or fact-based. The world being the total sum of facts, Wittgenstein says that ethics is not in the world but rather a limit of the world. Ethical will is, like ethics, a limit of the world since nothing can be said about it. Hence, the right way to have an ethical will is the right way to “shape” the world by the limit of the world, that is, ethical will. It is the right way to perceive the spirit of the world. It is the way to see the “face” of the world so that it is aesthetic to us.
This idea can be likened to how one assigns the right character to a painting or sculpture. If we insist that the painting is meaningful and try to look for that meaning in the painting, we will eventually find the lack of that meaning in that painting, and then the painting would be ugly to us since it did not fulfill the meaning we had for it. It would be better to look for a meaning for the painting rather than the meaning and from that search reach a meaning that will make the painting pleasant to us and then abide in that pleasure. Be mindful that this beauty we perceive at reaching our final meaning is not based on our will or personal preference. When we see beauty we cannot escape it because, by definition, pure beauty leaps over your previous interests and values and writes on a new page of your mind. The right way to see the painting and, by extension, the right way to have an ethical will towards the world is therefore not a matter of choice.
This ethical will which Wittgenstein speaks of seems to be what we call a worldview. Hence, what Wittgenstein is saying is that we should look for a worldview that will cause us to perceive the world as beautiful. From a Christian perspective, a worldview can be altered through experiences and education, but the level of maneuvering of worldview that Wittgenstein seems to be talking about is quite unconstrained since it is based on a parochial criterion of beauty. Christian worldview maneuvering is based on the criterion of seeing the world the way the Bible shows it to us. Wittgenstein’s view is also based on the assumption of the absence of meaning in the world, which is clearly not a Christian view. It is therefore clear that Wittgenstein’s view is not consistent with a Christian worldview. However, it might be that Wittgenstein’s criterion for the selection for a worldview might lead to choosing a Christian worldview, but the very method used to reach these Christian worldview makes it decidedly unchristian. The meta-narrative with which Wittgenstein’s view seems to be consistent with is the one that flows into and from Friedrich Nietzsche’s call for creating noble values out of the meaningless world and overcoming nihilism.
The reward of seeking and finding the worldview Wittgenstein speaks of is finding a way of seeing the world that makes the world look back at us with a beautiful face. Therefore, the goal of Wittgenstein’s ethics is a form of aesthetic satisfaction. This satisfaction can be likened to the pleasure we get when we see a beautiful baby smile or when we see chicks with their mother but only bigger and stronger because this beauty is concerning our sight of all facts and does not go away as that baby dies of malnutrition and those chicks lose their mother to the kitchen table. When you find aesthetic satisfaction from seeing the whole world in an aesthetically pleasing way, you assert that view of the world at least to yourself by what Nietzsche called the proof of pleasure, and that assertion will cause you to see the world that way again and then the cycle continues living you in happiness.
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