Virtue Aesthetics
Hello Aesthetics Friends!
Ethics and aesthetics fall under a broader heading about value in philosophy as an academic discipline. While they deal with value and thus overlap, they focus on distinct aspects of human action and nature. Sometimes, the lines between ethics and aesthetics become blurry or even unwarranted, but one connection that seems underdeveloped involves applying Aristotle’s notion of virtue to ideas and practices in aesthetics.
Aristotle on Virtue
People have always wanted to know how to live the good life. This desire finds strong roots in Aristotle, who believed life's goal was eudaimonia. This Greek word has been translated as happiness, but that pales compared to his intent. It’s more like a state of well-being or flourishing. To achieve it, we need to live a virtuous life.
Virtues for Aristotle are things like courage, friendliness, and generosity. People develop these virtues through habit. While many people might want to claim that they are courageous or friendly, Aristotle explains that calling oneself by one of these names is not sufficient actually to be virtuous. In other words, you can’t simply describe yourself as courageous if you have never been in a situation to test whether you would act courageously.
You may wonder if Aristotle suggests that we must throw ourselves into extreme situations to demonstrate our courage. Surely not! To avoid this conclusion, he adds another aspect of developing virtue that we might call the goal toward which we strive. He calls this the mean (as in average). There are two vices for each virtue: excess and deficiency. And the mean comes between these vices. If courage is the virtue, then rashness and cowardice are vices (excess and deficiency, respectively). The list of virtues applies to each person, but how each person acts virtuously will differ. For example, someone prone to rashness may need to rein it in a bit to get to the mean. Meanwhile, someone else who is prone to cowardice might need to push themselves more to become courageous. As the mean is a moving target, these adjustments continue for one’s whole life.
Toward a Virtue Aesthetics
The above was the briefest of introductions to Aristotle’s notion of virtue. It highlights that virtue is the attempt to achieve the mean through habit. What might it look like to apply Aristotle’s idea of virtue to aesthetics? We can approach this possibility from two perspectives: creating and appreciating objects or spaces.
What makes something beautiful? While we likely agree with Immanuel Kant that there is no formula to guarantee the creation of something beautiful, we can appeal to some guidelines. To explain, a prominent characteristic of beauty since Ancient Greece is proportion, which involves harmony among the parts. Virtue is the mean between excess and deficiency, so, similarly, proportion is the balance between too much and too little. Too much of a good thing, like a particular color, can make an object gaudy. Too little, and it might be boring. As Francis Hutcheson succinctly claimed, beauty comprises uniformity amidst variety.
When considering specific components that make an object or space beautiful, such as light, shape, or color, we can apply the idea of the mean to these particular elements. Avoiding excess or deficiency requires us to consider how much or little to add. This process has no exact science, but that isn’t an excuse to think it doesn’t matter. We should consider the mean between excess and deficiency when designing or creating. Like virtue, the mean will apply to different objects and situations uniquely.
What about from the perspective of appreciation? We often unexpectedly and immediately appreciate beauty, like a sunset. People are sometimes captivated suddenly by beauty. But we also miss a lot of beauty in our lives. Think about the notion of taste. If someone puts food in their mouth, they will technically taste it. Sometimes, they will thoroughly enjoy it. We can also cultivate better appreciation by expanding our capacities.
Are you someone who has a habit of attending to beauty? If not, you could nudge yourself to develop a habit of noticing things. It is possible to have an excess of attending to beauty, where you can’t go two steps without seeing something beautiful, but it seems more common for people to be less attentive to aesthetics. Most of us need to develop habits of seeing. We can do this by stopping and specifically asking ourselves what we like (or dislike) about different objects and spaces. By consciously making this effort, we begin to develop the habit.
Conclusion
While more is certainly needed to develop a theory of virtue aesthetics, I wanted to offer some basic ideas as another framework to think about aesthetics. In the same way that people want to continue learning through books, podcasts, and other sources, we should also want to expand our capacity to appreciate beauty. It takes intentional effort to develop habits of noticing and attending to aesthetic features around us. We can easily be distracted and ignore these things, so we must develop good habits.
Beyond the individual, we can apply this approach to communities or organizations, such as asking whether a business is beautiful. A beautiful business achieves harmony in operations, interactions, and locations (among other things). One example is communications. A lot of business communication is boring. Suppose someone wanted to spice up their communications by adding a lot of synonyms that pack a punch. Rather than making the overall writing exciting, it likely overshadows the message with too much flowery language. Communications require balancing excitement with elegance.
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My colleague, Bella Zhang, and I created a new course, “Aesthetic Paths to Flourishing.” It will be held in two online sessions (Nov 3 and 17). Registration is open.
Digital Fashion: Theory, Practice, Implications, edited by Michael R. Spicher, Sara Emilia Bernat, and Doris Domoszlai-Lantner, is available for purchase!
It makes sense: nurturing a virtue requires practice, constantly judging if your actions are meeting the mark. Otherwise you are likely to drift towards your default vice. Design mimics this process: you judge the rightness of each step along way, using reasoning as you go. If you shortcut this process, you’ll drift towards ugliness instead of beauty.