Once-Told Tales (An Essay in Literary Aesthetics) || The Ethical, the Aesthetic, and the Artistic

Once-Told Tales: An Essay in Literary Aesthetics, First Edition. Peter Kivy.© 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2011 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

1 Structure Aesthetics

It will be recalled that the discussion of science and the aesthetic just con-cluded was motivated by the claim of Berys Gaut that beauty (and other aes-thetic qualities) cannot be thought of as solely perceptual qualities for the obvious reason that scientific theories and theorems are frequently described in aesthetic terms, with beauty as the favored one, whereas scientific theories and theorems are not, in any obvious sense, perceptual objects but, rather, “mental” ones.

The history and analysis of the concept of the aesthetic tells us that aesthetic properties of art and of the world were first conceived of by philoso-phers, and remain by and large perceptual properties, principally, of course, those of sight and hearing, although there is, I believe, no absurdity in the idea that there are aesthetic properties to be tasted, touched, and sniffed. And even in natural science and mathematics, where we clearly want to countenance aes-thetic properties of non-perceptual structures—structures that can be thought but not perceived—there remain still a large number of perceived aesthetic prop-erties as well.

It seems reasonable, then, all things considered, to think of aesthetic properties, wherever they occur, as perceptual properties, by and large, with an outer periphery of aesthetic properties accruing to “objects” thought but not perceived, such as mathematical equations or scientific models and theorems, not susceptible of visualization. Can we further characterize them?

Chapter 4

The Ethical, the Aesthetic, and the Artistic

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48 The Ethical, the Aesthetic, and the Artistic

My suggestion is, first, that aesthetic properties, whether perceived or thought, are properties of structures: either properties of a structure as a whole—for example, its elegance, unity, or variety—or a property of an individual part of a structure—for example, its vibrancy, garishness, intensity, or beauty. And, although aesthetic properties are possessed by objects other than artworks, it is the aesthetic properties of artistic structure with which I am mainly concerned.

It is another characteristic of aesthetic properties, as many have observed, that they are evaluative properties. And on my view they can be either positively or negatively valenced, but never neutral, although context or qualification can reverse the valence. Thus to call a painting “garish” would generally be to pass a negative judgment on it in that respect. However, if one called it “flamboyantly garish” it might well express a positive judgment. One might, I suppose, claim that “garish” and “flamboyantly garish” are two different properties, the former always negative, the latter always positive. And I have no desire to argue the point, as it is irrelevant to the argument I am pressing here whether or not the valence of an aesthetic property can be reversed.

One is tempted at this point—and I cannot resist the temptation—to sug-gest that the distinction between the aesthetic properties of artworks and their other art-relevant properties is just the good-old distinction between form and content, more precisely put. I say it is the “good”-old distinc-tion because it has been repudiated by various literary theorists in the recent and not-too-recent past, unfairly on my view. I have defended it elsewhere, as I said early on, and simply assume it here.1

Form, as I am broadly conceiving it, then, consists in the aesthetic proper-ties of an artwork, belonging to its structure and its structural elements. Content, since we are mainly concerned with silently read fiction, is the story, and whatever theses or points of view—psychological, political, moral, philo-sophical, and so forth—that the author may be intending to express through the story, including what might be termed the work’s “moral vision.”

And here another objection, or rather a set of related objections, material-izes from Berys Gaut’s direction. I shall be devoting the present chapter to an examination of them.

2 Form and Content

There is a distinction, to repeat, hoary with age, somewhat maligned in recent years, and yet, I believe, intuitively sound, between the form of a fictional narrative and its content. And I suggested early on that the form embraces

1 On this see Kivy, Philosophies of Arts, Chapter 4, and also the appendix to this book.


The Ethical, the Aesthetic, and the Artistic 49

what might reasonably be thought of as the work’s aesthetic features. Let me begin by suggesting what I take to be some non-controversial examples.

To begin with the most obvious, we might say that the characters and incidents in a fictional narrative are part of its content. And the way the charac-ters and incidents are presented, which is to say, for example, the plot structure and the literary language employed, are part of its form, or what I shall refer to more often as its aesthetic features.

But, to concentrate on content, for a moment, it is clear that character and incident may not, in a serious novel, be the only content. A serious novel may, for example, project an important philosophical thesis through its narrative content; or a thesis about human nature and psychology. It may project a religious world view. Or it may forward some political agenda or other social policy. In other words, in addition to its narrative content, a novel may also possess philosophical content, psychological content, religious content, political content, and so on. Furthermore, the question can now be raised as to the relevance of such content for the appreciation and evaluation of a novel that might possess it.

For starters, let us observe that the examples of extra-narrative content that have been adduced above seem to fall into two groups: those that can be evaluated as to their truth or falsity, such as a philosophical thesis or claims about human psychology; and those non-propositional forms of content, such as the recommendation of a social policy or the forwarding of a political agenda, that are to be evaluated in terms of their (let us say) “advisability” or “inadvisability,” or, perhaps, by their being “reasonable” or “unreasonable” policies and agendas. But for simplicity’s sake they may both be put under the same umbrella. I will just say it is either true or false that the forwarding of a certain political agenda is advisable (or inadvisable); likewise the recommen-dation of a certain social policy. So now to the question of relevance.

The question can be put in the following way. What I have been calling the “aesthetic” features of artworks are, uncontroversially, art-relevant features of them, which is to say, features of them that legitimately figure in our apprecia-tion of them qua artworks and features of them that legitimately figure in our evaluations of them qua artworks. The question is whether the philosophical, psychological, political, and sociological (and so forth) content of them is or is not art-relevant as well: that is, whether it too figures legitimately in our appreciation and evaluation of artworks qua artworks.

Suppose we answer in the affirmative. And suppose, furthermore, that we spell out the affirmative answer as follows. The closer to the truth a philo-sophical work is, the better it is qua philosophical work; the closer to the truth a political program is, the better it is qua political program. Why not say, then, that the closer to the truth the philosophical content is of a novel, the better that work is qua novel, qua artwork? And, the closer to the truth



is the political program a novel might be forwarding, the better that novel is qua novel, qua work of art?

Some philosophers of art, sometimes described as taking an “autonomist” position towards the fine arts, maintain that the truth or falsity of an artwork’s content is completely irrelevant to its appreciation or value qua art, citing as evidence of their view the obvious fact that one can (say) be thoroughly committed to the falsity of the Christian religion (or any other), yet deeply appreciate and highly value The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, as artistic masterpieces. Others, in the non-autonomist camp, point out that this fact is not incompatible with their view, since a work of art may be faulted for its philosophical or religious falsity while possessing such a preponderance of positive aesthetic (therefore positive art-relevant) features as to be an admirable work of art in spite of that other fault, though fault it remains.

I will have more to say about this dispute later on, but, here, will simply state my allegiance to the non-autonomist camp and state very briefly what my version of the non-autonomist position is (for present purposes).

3 The Quick and the Dead

It seems to me to be too extreme a position for the anti-autonomist to take to frame his view in terms of the true and the false. Rather, it should be framed in terms of what William James called live and dead hypotheses,2 or, put in another way, possible or plausible versus impossible or implausible options, for a given reader (in the case of novels, which are, here, our major concern). Thus for someone who is (say) convinced that there is no freedom of the will, in any robust sense, but who thinks it possible she may be wrong and is open to persuasion, a novel pushing the thesis that there is freedom of the will would be pushing a thesis that is a living hypothesis, a possible option for her, hence a good-making feature of the novel, as it would be also for a convinced libertarian, whereas a dead hypothesis, not a possible option, for a convinced, inflexible believer in strict determinism, hence a bad-making feature for him.

Furthermore, as I suggested earlier and argued elsewhere—and this will become important in a moment—novels that project philosophical, psycho-logical, or other substantive theses, or press political or social agendas, do not customarily so much present arguments and evidence for them, in the manner of treatises and monographs, as, rather, stimulate the reader, as part of the literary experience, to think for herself about them in what I have called the “gaps” and the “after life” of the novel-reading process, which is to say,

2 William James, “The Will to Believe,” in William James, Essays in Pragmatism, ed. Alburey Castell (New York: Hafner, 1951).



the periods between novel-reading bouts—as the novel of any substantial length cannot be, and is not meant to be, read at one go—and the period after the novel has been read, when it is still being mulled over by the thoughtful reader.3 This, then, might be called my “modified artistic non-autonomy,” in brief, which I will return to again later on.

At this point, however, I am certain the astute reader will have espied a glaring omission. I have not yet mentioned, not to say discussed, what is surely the most prominent, most ubiquitous extra-narrative content of the modern novel, which is to say, its ethical content. The reason for the omission is that the ethical content of artworks in general, the novel in particular, raises a special problem for the distinction I wish to maintain, between the aesthetic features of the novel and its art-relevant content. It is now time to address that problem.

4 Good, Bad, Beautiful

Non-autonomism can take, really, two forms. It is agreed on all hands that the aesthetic features of artworks—and I will confine myself here to novels—are art-relevant features of them. That being so, the non-autonomist can try to show that there are features of novels besides their aesthetic features that are art-relevant as well; namely, their narrative and extra-narrative content (as described above). But a second alternative beckons. The non-autonomist may, rather, try to argue that the narrative and extra-narrative features are in fact aesthetic features, in some reasonably-worked-out sense, and hence clearly art-relevant in virtue of that (since it is agreed that all aesthetic features are art-relevant features).

The second strategy does not seem very promising for such content as philo-sophical and religious theses, or social and political agendas. How are they to be construed as aesthetic features of artworks in any other sense of that word than the broad sense of “aesthetic” as “art-relevant,” in which case the claim that they are aesthetic, hence art-relevant, becomes trivially true, by definition?

But ethical or moral content may seem another matter altogether. For there is a long-standing tradition, back to Plato, and perhaps before, for char-acterizing the morally good as “beautiful,” the morally evil as “ugly”; and those, surely, are aesthetic terms, if any there are: they are, indeed, one might want to say, the original ones; the aesthetic ur-terms. That being the case, construing ethical or moral content of artworks as part of their aesthetic character seems a promising possibility to pursue. And it is, in fact, the possibility

3 On this see Kivy, Philosophies of Arts, Chapter 5.



that is pursued with great skill and ingenuity by Berys Gaut in his admirable book, already cited, Art, Emotion and Ethics.

Let me begin by expressing my complete admiration for and acquiescence in Gaut’s basic project, which I take to be the unequivocal denial of artistic autonomism; in this particular instance, the denial that fine art’s ethical con-tent or significance is irrelevant to artistic appreciation and evaluation: or, in positive terms, the affirmation of the ethical in art as art-relevant. In this Gaut and I are in perfect accord.

Where Gaut and I part company is in the strategy chosen to assert ethical relevance against artistic autonomy. For, whereas he wants to establish the art-relevance of the ethical by conflating it with the aesthetic, which is art-relevant on everyone’s accounting, I want, rather, to insist on the art-relevance of the ethical while keeping it sharply distinguished from the aesthetic. Here is why I take that line.

I said earlier that on my view the extra-narrative content of serious novels is presented for the purpose of getting the reader to think about that content, in the gaps and after life of the reading experience. Furthermore, I think that is true of ethical content as of any other.

To be a bit more specific, ethical content, in the novel, comes, it seems to me, in two forms. It may come in the form of some specific moral issue about which the reader is supposed to think and come to some conclusion—or perhaps not come to a conclusion, if the novelist wishes the reader to see that the issue, or a character, is morally ambiguous. Thus, to take some obvious examples, the reader of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was meant to become aware of, think about, and come to the conclusion, Harriet Beecher Stowe hoped, that slavery is a horrendous moral evil. Whereas, the audience to a recent play about sexual harassment in the academy is meant to think about the issue, but leave the theater unsure whether the major protagonist is a sexual preda-tor or the victim of a hysterical graduate student.

The second form that the ethical content of a literary work could take might be called its philosophical form. Which is to say, some theoretical issue is broached—say, that of deontology versus consequentialism, or, as in the Antigone, personal morality versus obedience to legal authority. And again, the novelist or playwright intends his audience to think about the issue, but may or may not intend his audience to reach some specific conclusion.

The point, in either case, is that the ethical content of a novel (say) is “food for thought,” in something like the way it would be in a philosophical work. Our literary appreciation of—our enjoyment of—a novel’s ethical content lies in our intellectual satisfaction. We take pleasure in our thinking through the ethical issues raised to a satisfactory conclusion, if indeed that is the result, or, if not, the thinking itself. And that does not seem to me best described as “aesthetic” pleasure or satisfaction, unless one were simply using



“aesthetic” in the broad sense of “artistic.” I would no more describe it as “aesthetic” pleasure or satisfaction if elicited by a novel than I would if elic-ited by a treatise in moral philosophy.

The kind of pleasure we associate with the perception of the aesthetic proper-ties or features of an artwork is pleasure or satisfaction that might be described as “savoring,” as when we savor the taste of a fine wine or subtle sauce. Of course “contemplation” is another word that comes to mind in this regard, as when we contemplate the aesthetic features of a sculpture or painting; but it is not “contemplation” in the sense of mulling over some proposition or argument or theory. It is, rather, again, a kind of pleasurable “savoring” for which the aesthetic features of visual or aural objects are the usual features savored. In brief, then, my argument for not construing as aesthetic the ethical content of artworks in gen-eral, novels in particular, is that the artistic experience it generates is just not the kind of experience that we naturally associate with core aesthetic features. The former is the experience of satisfaction or pleasure in thinking to a conclusion, or at least in thinking itself, the latter experience of satisfaction or pleasure in savoring or contemplating a feature for whatever distinctive quality it offers to that end.

I do not pretend that this is a conclusive argument. For in the end I am really relying on some kind of intuitive pull. And that there is this intuitive pull against construing the ethical content of art (at least as I construe that content) as aesthetic is attested to by the need of Gaut to argue for the aes-thetic status of the ethical. To the core (but surely not the entirety) of that argument I now turn.

5 Goodness and Beauty

So, to start with, here is Berys Gaut’s position in nutshell. Gaut avers that “the morally virtuous person does indeed have a kind of beauty of character, and the vicious person exhibits an ugly character.”4 Furthermore:

If the manifested author has a morally good character, it follows from the moral beauty view that he or she has, in this respect, a beautiful character. Since the manifested author is the author as he or she manifests herself [sic] in the work, it follows that the work has a beautiful aspect, in so far as the author has a beautiful character. The beautiful is undeniably an aesthetic value. So, in so far as the manifested author has a morally good character, the work has merit in this respect; and mutatis mutandis for a morally bad manifested author, whose presence contributes an aesthetic flaw in this respect.5

4 Gaut, Art, Emotion and Ethics, p. 127.5 Ibid.



Finally, to complete the picture, “The manifested artist [or author] is ascribed the qualities that are possessed by the artistic acts performed in the work. The manifested artist [or author] is, then, the artist [or author] as manifested in the artistic acts performed in the work.”6 And in the present case the “acts” are “ethical acts.”

But why should we think it appropriate to describe the moral in aesthetic terms, in terms, that is to say, of the beautiful and the ugly? In brief, here is Gaut’s answer: “the idea of moral beauty has a good deal of intuitive plausi-bility, as witnessed by much linguistic usage, by common experience and by the idea’s recurrent appeal in the history of philosophy.”7

It appears to me that there are two separate but intimately related sources of evidence for the belief that the morally good is literally the morally beauti-ful, cited in the above quotation from Gaut. The first source is simply ordi-nary usage. People do say things like “She is a beautiful person” or “That was an ugly act,” clearly intending them as moral evaluations. And, second, there is a long tradition in the history of philosophy of conflating the morally good with the beautiful.

To start with, I am going to be working with the methodological first principle here that the issue cannot turn on the truth or falsity of a specific moral theory that may or may not have as one of its conclusions the aesthetic status of the moral. Rather, I will be trying to reveal some theory- independent consensus in the matter. But this is not to say, of course, that what philosophers have had to say on this matter is irrelevant. It is a datum to be taken seriously that some philosophers have found it plausible to conflate the moral virtues or the morally good with the beautiful. That having been put on the table, I intend in what now directly follows to tell a highly speculative story about the moral use of the term “beautiful,” and its opposite, the conclusion of which, I hope, will lend at least some support to my intuition that the moral and the aesthetic be kept separate, although I hesitate to call it in any way a conclusive argument.

6 A Short History

In his well-known comedic masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde has the Reverend Canon Chasuble, D.D. say to Cecily Cardew, “You have done a beautiful action today, dear child.”8

6 Ibid., p. 72.7 Ibid., p. 127.8 Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (New York and London: Samuel French, n.d.), p. 49 (Act II).



Anyone who knows the play will know that the Reverend Canon Chasuble is a rather pompous, old-fashioned prelate, prone to various archaisms in his speech, of which the above is a fair example. And of course I have put empha-sis on “archaisms” with purposeful intent, to call the reader’s attention to the fact that Wilde could put the expression “beautiful action” into the mouth of a character, even in 1895, with the assurance that it would be immediately recognized as pompous and archaic. So by the second half of the nineteenth century, if not before, “beautiful” as a term of moral approval had pretty much fallen into disuse. If, then, we mean by an appeal to ordinary linguistic usage an appeal to modern linguistic usage, our linguistic usage, appeal to it will not support the use of the term “beautiful” as a term of moral approval, except, perhaps, in what R.G. Collingwood called a “courtesy meaning,”9 as when we praise (say) a pastry chef’s creation as “a veritable work of art.”

But that “beautiful” is no longer in use as a term of moral significance is not the totality of my argument, by any means. Rather, it is just the begin-ning. For it is my story of how and why the term ceased to be used in a moral sense that, I hope, will give the appeal to current linguistic usage its teeth and, I hope, convince my reader that the moral and the aesthetic, in the form of the beautiful, should be kept distinctly apart.

So here is my story. It begins, naturally enough, where most philosophical stories begin, with Plato. As is well known, Plato, in the Symposium and other of the dialogues, described the morally good in terms of the beautiful. But of course “beautiful” is how English translators customarily render the Greek word kalon. And, as every beginning student is (or should be) warned, Plato’s kalon does not map accurately onto our “beautiful.” For it does not have the specific aesthetic function of the latter term. Rather, it is a general evaluative term, something perhaps like “excellent,” that can be used to refer to excel-lence or goodness wherever it might be found.

Plato, I am suggesting, did not have a term like “beautiful” to describe that particular aesthetic excellence we use it to describe, and I think with good reason. For although I insisted, earlier on, that Plato certainly had some kind of a notion of what we would call the aesthetic properties and pleasures of art, poetry in particular, surely that category was not firmly and sharply in place, and was not to be, I do not think, until the eighteenth century, when the word “aesthetic” was coined (ironically enough, from the Greek). Thus I think we cannot conclude from Plato’s use of what our translators render as the term “beautiful” to refer to moral goodness that Plato was evaluating the moral “aesthetically,” in our sense of that term. It is merely an anachronistic artifact of translation that offers us the temptation; and it is a temptation that

9 See R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), pp. 8–9.



should be resisted. If kalon simply means “excellent,” then a “beautiful” soul, if it is a kalon soul, is excellent—morally excellent, one presumes—but we cannot go from there to its being “beautiful” in the modern aesthetic sense that Gaut requires.

Of course “moral Platonism,” if I may so call it, does not end with Plato. There are the Greek New-Platonic tradition; Augustinian Christian Platonism; Renaissance Neo-Platonism; and, in the early modern era, the Cambridge Platonists and Shaftesbury—not, I am sure, an exhaustive list. Nor am I suited, either by learning or by inclination, to even begin to tell that story. What I have to suggest is a mere conjectural “history.”

The first point I want to make concerns what might be called an aspect of Platonic “moral metaphysics.” Moral judgments, in the Platonic tradition, tend to converge on something most translators render as “soul” when trans-lating into English; and this is true even with translators of pre-Christian texts, including, of course, Plato. (See the Symposium for the most familiar example.) The bearer of moral properties, the moral virtues, if you will, is reified: it is an object of perception; not, to be sure, an object of sense perception—as Plato makes plain in the Phaedo and elsewhere—but certainly an “object” of intellection.

Now at some point in its history, moral Platonism does take on “aesthetic” overtones; and, presumably, that would be in lock step with the entrance of beautiful, beaux, bella, and schön into the modern European languages, to express not merely excellence in general, as kalon for the Greeks, but a par-ticular kind of aesthetic excellence that those words pick out. Thus, surely, the Renaissance Neo-Platonists, when they wrote of beauty of soul, were making moral judgments that must be taken to be conflating the moral with the aes-thetic. So what are we to make of this? Shall we take it as support for our conflating them? I rather think not.

Remember, I am assuming as a methodological principle that we do not want to be in thrall to a particular moral theory—especially not a “moral metaphysics”—that mandates an aesthetic morality. We want, in other words, some theory-neutral way of reaching the conclusion that beauty and virtue, or beauty and the morally good, are to be equated; not appeal to a theory that, if true, vouchsafes the equation. And the latter would be exactly what we would be doing if we adduced Renaissance New-Platonism as support for an aestheticized morality.

We should, of course, be particularly wary of soul-talk, which is the stock-in-trade of Renaissance New-Platonism, just because it is, I think, what provides the plausibility, in the form of an “aesthetic object,” for an aesthetic morality. It makes “soul” the plausible “object” of moral/aesthetic appreciation, in its Platonized Christian form, and bears, for its proponents, features such as “har-mony,” “proportion,” and “reflection” of, or “emanation” from, the Godhead



that can plausibly be construed as “beautiful” in the truly aesthetic sense of the term. But of course only for its proponents: only for the true believers. Those, however, who are looking for a naturalistic, theory-neutral support for an aes-theticized morality will rightly shun metaphysical commitment—as does Gaut—to anything like a Christian soul, or even Plato’s pre-Christian version of it.

7 Aesthetic Morality Naturalized?

The point is well taken, the aesthetic moralist will perhaps reply; but the various versions of moral Platonism, Christian and pre-Christian, are not the only philo-sophical evidence for the plausibility of an aesthetic morality. For the eighteenth-century British moralists of the moral sense school, Hutcheson and Hume, to instance two prominent cases in point, also tended at times to use “aesthetic” language to describe moral goodness and virtue.10 And even though Hutcheson, unlike Hume, did provide a theological underpinning for the moral sense, the moral sense school is rightly thought of as in the empirical tradition of a “naturalized” moral theory, certainly in stark contrast to the Renaissance and Cambridge Platonists, as well as Shaftesbury (even though he is credited with having coined the phrase “moral sense”). Thus the presence of aestheticized moral talk here can hardly be ascribed to Platonic or Christianized Platonic metaphysics of the soul. It is talk that all secular, “soulless” speakers of the lan-guage, moral philosophers and lay persons alike, should share with Hutcheson, Hume, and their brethren, whether they share their moral theories or no.

But no: I have a story to tell in this regard as well, that, if near the truth, should make us wary of taking the references to moral beauty in Hutcheson and Hume at face value (although I will confine myself here to Hutcheson). There is less here, I think, than meets the eye.

Hutcheson’s project in moral philosophy—and later Hume’s—was to, loosely speaking, “subjectivize” moral “properties.” Which is to say, following the Lockean model of perception, moral good and evil were not to be thought of as anything like Lockean primary qualities: more, rather, like either a species of secondary quality, or a “sentiment” of pleasure or displeasure, approval or disapproval felt towards actions and actors. Furthermore, against the moral rationalists—Balguy, Price, et alia—it was urged that moral judgments are made, not as the conclusions of deductive arguments, but as the deliverances of a “moral sense,” albeit an inner, “reflex” sense whose “objects” were com-plex ideas already delivered by the external senses, not deliverances of the external senses themselves.

10 Another prominent case in point is Adam Smith. On this, see Robert Fudge, “Sympathy, Beauty, and Sentiment: Adam Smith’s Aesthetic Morality,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 7 (2009).



Now clearly the moral sense school was proposing an ethical theory that would be likely to encounter stiff opposition both among moral philosophers and the laity. For to argue that the morally good and the morally right are essentially a function of our subjective states, rather than “objective” facts in the world, that they do not refer to “real constituents of the world that exist independently of our modes of thought,”11 would have been to buck both a long rationalist tradition and firmly entrenched moral intuitions. It would have seemed, and rightly so, yet another “devaluation” of the natural world: another step towards the scientific world view that Alfred North Whitehead once described as “a bloodless dance of categories” and that Shaftesbury deplored in his tutor John Locke’s philosophy.

When Francis Hutcheson, then, in 1725, introduced the concept of a moral sense, as a “subjective” determiner of virtue and vice, he must surely have real-ized that it was going to be a hard sell, and, I believe, hit upon a strategy to make the product more palatable: namely, he worked his passage to the “subjectivity” of the moral through the far more commonly held “subjectivity” of the beautiful. For, after all, it was part of the folk wisdom then, as now, that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and that, therefore, “there is no accounting for taste.” Thus, I suggest, it is that strategy that motivated Hutcheson, in his ground-breaking work of 1725, already alluded to, to make of it two treatises, the first, a treatise Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design, as a prelude to the second, a treatise Concerning Moral Good and Evil.

So when early in the first treatise, as we saw, Hutcheson made the not-too-shocking pronouncement that “in the following Papers the word Beauty is taken for the Idea rais’d in us …,”12 it was a preparation; it eased the pas-sage to the far more startling pronouncement, at the outset of the second treatise, that “The Word MORAL GOODNESS, in this Treatise, denotes our Idea of some Quality apprehended in Actions, which procures Approbation ….”13 In other words, the association of moral goodness with beauty, the moral with the aesthetic, has no deep significance as a characterization of how we experience moral qualities. Rather it is an attempt to make more palatable a subjectivist epistemic and metaphysical claim about moral qualities by begin-ning with the same, less controversial, subjectivist epistemic and metaphysical claim about beauty. Hutcheson is saying: Since it is a familiar, undisturbing discovery that the word “beautiful” is not the name of a quality in the world but a subjective reaction to the world, an “idea,” why should you be perturbed by a similar discovery about value (and disvalue), moral good, and evil?

11 Noam Chomsky, “The Mysteries of Nature: How Deeply Hidden?,” Journal of Philosophy, 106 (2009), p. 195. I have appropriated Chomsky’s description from another context; but it fits the present one perfectly.12 Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, p. 7 (I, ix).13 Ibid., p. 105 (Introduction).



What I am suggesting, then, is that there is no justification for making a big deal over Hutcheson’s (and Hume’s) occasional use of “beautiful” as a term of moral approbation. Hutcheson is not saying that the quality of our experience of the moral is (as we would say) “aesthetic” in any other sense than, like judgments of the beautiful, judgments of moral good and evil are about our own conscious states, not about the external world. And, by intro-ducing his moral theory with a theory of beauty, he was doing no more than sugar-coating a bitter pill.

Furthermore, when Hutcheson does, on occasion, refer to moral “beauty,” he makes it pretty clear that he is not using the word in what we would call an “aesthetic” sense but, rather, more like the way Plato used the word kalon. Thus, for example, Hutcheson writes in one place that “we have a distinct Perception of Beauty or Excellence in the kind Affections of rational Agents.”14 I take the “or” here to be the “or” of equivalence, and I therefore take Hutcheson to be saying “Beauty or, in other words, Excellence.” There is no reason at all, then, to take “beauty” here, or elsewhere in Hutcheson’s writings, as enfranchising the view that moral good is an “aesthetic” category, or experi-ence of it an “aesthetic” experience. As far as I can tell, moral beauty for Hutcheson is moral kalon; that is all.

Now there can be little doubt that during the eighteenth century the “mixing,” so to speak, of aesthetic and moral terms became a common practice. As Robert E. Norton has put it, in his carefully researched history of “aesthetic morality” in the eighteenth century, “This deliberate mixing of what had commonly been viewed as properly distinct modes of discourse seemed so persuasive, or at least so attractive, that after the 1750s some version of moral beauty appeared in almost every eighteenth-century dis-cussion of morality ….” But the theme of his book, as a matter of fact, is not the defense of this “deliberate mixing”; rather, its ultimate demise: the “tracing of the fortunes of this forgotten figure,” which is to say, “the beautiful soul,” “and discovering the reasons for its initial success and sub-sequent decline ….”15

8 Beauty of Soul: A Contemporary Version

Another defense of what its author calls “aesthetic morality,” and a philo-sophically deep and initially appealing one it is, is to be found in Colin McGinn’s book, Ethics, Evil, and Fiction.

14 Ibid., p. 112 (I, i).15 Robert E. Norton, The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. x.



McGinn begins his defense by adducing a distinction originally made by Bernard Williams between “thin” and “thick” moral terms: “very general and abstract terms of moral appraisal that describe little or nothing about the object in question … and … terms that are specific and descriptive while also carrying evaluative force.” An example of the former would be “good,” of the latter “brave” or “generous.” He then goes on to call the reader’s atten-tion to a third kind of term of moral appraisal, in his case for an “aesthetic morality”: “terms of moral approval that have a strongly aesthetic flavour,” providing some instances of what he has in mind. “There are many terms of this type,” McGinn writes: “for example, on the positive side, ‘fine’, ‘pure’, ‘stainless’, ‘sweet’, ‘wonderful’; and on the negative side (which is richer), ‘rotten’, ‘vile’, ‘foul’, ‘ugly’, ‘sick’, ‘repulsive’, ‘tarnished’.”16

McGinn’s account of aesthetic morality is essentially a version of what is called by moral philosophers “virtue ethics.” It is, accordingly, McGinn’s thesis “that virtue coincides with beauty of soul and vice with ugliness of soul.”17

Now it may appear that, in identifying virtue with beauty of soul, vice with ugliness of soul, McGinn is committing himself to the kind of soul-metaphysics that would make his position, for that reason alone, unacceptable from the get-go for the vast majority of contemporary analytic philosophers. But his view cannot be dismissed so peremptorily. For he makes it pretty clear, in more than one explicit statement of his thesis, that it can be expressed without reference to the “soul” at all, however that concept might be con-strued. Thus McGinn writes: “The idea is that for a person to be virtuous (or vicious) is for a part or aspect of him—his soul or character or personality—to have certain aesthetic properties: these are necessary and sufficient conditions for personal goodness.”18 Thus, for the remainder of this discussion, let us understand by “soul” a person’s “character,” eschewing any religious or met-aphysical connotations that the word “soul” may possess.

Returning now to the claim that our moral appraisal language is, as McGinn puts it in another place, “thoroughly saturated … with aesthetic notions …,” McGinn writes

we may say of a person we morally esteem that she is fine, pure, stainless, of high quality, unblemished, flawless, lovely, delightful, inspiring, simple, natural, spontaneous, sweet, wonderful; while the person we morally disapprobate may be described as rotten, bestial, swinish, stinking, foul, vile, crooked, monstrous, grotesque, sick, sickening, flawed, corrupt, ugly ….

16 Colin McGinn, Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 92. And see Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985), pp. 143–145.17 McGinn, Ethics, Evil, and Fiction, p. 93.18 Ibid., p. 97.



And he concludes,

In fact, our vocabulary for describing character in morally evaluative ways is rather impoverished if we do not include these sorts of terms; and it is remarkable, once one attends to it, how common it is to hear moral appraisals expressed in these kinds of aesthetic terms.19

In the discussion directly following, I will consider what I take to be an implication of McGinn’s proposal, and explore some of the problems I think it presents. Whether I am correct in seeing this as an implication of what McGinn is saying I will leave an open question.

I am going to assume, to begin with, that, if a substantial number of the positive terms on McGinn’s list are correctly applicable to a person’s soul, which is to say, that person’s character, then that soul or character would be correctly denominated, on his view, as “beautiful,” or, as others might want to say, “virtuous”—“of good character.” Contrariwise, the assumption is that, if a substantial number of the negative terms on McGinn’s list are correctly applicable to a person’s soul, which is to say, that person’s character, then that person’s soul or character might correctly be denominated, on his view, as “ugly,” or, as others might want to say, “vicious”—“of bad character.”

But before we proceed any further we have to determine whether “beauti-ful” and “ugly” are being used here in a thick or a thin sense, for, as it happens, the distinction does indeed apply to them both, the context determining, in any given case, whether it is the thick or the thin sense that is intended.

“Beautiful” and (less often) “ugly” are sometimes used in art evaluations in their thin sense, simply as terms of general evaluation, devoid of descriptive content—synonymous, more or less, with “good” and “bad,” or “successful” and “unsuccessful.” But sometimes, as well, they are used in a thick sense that describes artistic character as well. Thus, for example, we might say of Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik, Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn, and Paradise Lost that they are “beautiful” works of art, mean-ing simply that they are “good” or “great” or “highly successful” works of art. This would be a case of using “beautiful” in the thin sense of the word.

We might, however, want to insist that, although Eine kleine Nachtmusik and Ode on a Grecian Urn are indeed correctly characterized as “beautiful” works, the mighty Eroica and Paradise Lost are, rather, “sublime,” or “awesome,” or something like that, but certainly not “beautiful” or “lovely.” And in that case we would be using “beautiful” as, in Bernard Williams’ sense, a “thick” evalua-tive term with definite descriptive content. Likewise, I imagine, we might say in the thin sense of “beautiful” that both Seneca and St. Francis had “beautiful”

19 Ibid., p. 99.



souls, but that, in the thick sense, St. Francis may have been a “beautiful” person, Seneca, rather, a “sublime” one (if the stories of both are true).

Returning to McGinn, with the distinction in place between the thin and thick senses of “beautiful,” I want now to argue that McGinn has not made out a convincing case for “beautiful” being an aesthetic predicate when used to morally evaluate character, in either its thick or its thin sense, if, that is, the implications I draw from his stated position are correct.

Suppose that a goodly number of positive evaluative terms on McGinn’s list apply correctly to someone’s character. If enough of these terms apply—how many being “enough” left an open question—then, presumably, I am justified in calling this person’s character “beautiful.” And I am going to assume, first, that “beautiful” is being used in its thin sense. But the question is: Is it being used in its “aesthetic” sense? For, as we have seen, the term “beautiful” can, and has been, used as a general term of approval in contexts where it clearly has no aesthetic import whatever.

I will presume the answer implied in McGinn’s account—although, in fairness, I will not attribute it to McGinn—would be that, since the terms used to describe the person’s character are, McGinn thinks, positive aesthetic terms—as McGinn puts it, terms with “a strong aesthetic flavour”—it trivially follows that, in calling the character in question beautiful because those terms correctly apply, one is using “beautiful” in its (thin) aesthetic sense. In other words, the aesthetic flavor of the describing words transfers to the evaluative word that they support.

Going on, now, to the use of “beautiful” in its thick sense, the same con-siderations would apply pari passu. Let us postulate only those terms on McGinn’s list correctly apply to a given character that count towards beauty, not sublimity of character. Suppose, further, that enough of them apply to warrant the judgment “beautiful” (in the thick sense) on the character so described. The answer, then, to the question “Is ‘beautiful’ being applied in its aesthetic sense?” is going to trivially be in the affirmative, since all of the terms applying, that count towards the judgment are, by hypothesis, terms with an “aesthetic flavour.”

Suppose, though, we scrutinize McGinn’s text for an argument or justifi-cation for counting the terms on his list “aesthetic” terms, or, as he puts it, “terms that have a strongly aesthetic flavour.” So far as I can make out, there is no such argument or justification in the text for his claim. Rather, it appears to me that we are meant to share some sort of intuition with McGinn that these are aesthetic terms. But my intuition, or whatever else you want to call it, is quite opposite to that of McGinn.

Let us confine ourselves, for brevity’s sake, to McGinn’s expanded list of terms expressing “moral esteem,” which he claims possess “a strongly aesthetic flavour”: they are, it will be recalled, “fine, pure, stainless, of high



quality, unblemished, flawless, lovely, delightful, inspiring, simple, natural, spontaneous, sweet, wonderful.” Now, so far as my “intuition” goes, of the fourteen terms listed, only one, “lovely,” possesses what I would call a palpable aesthetic flavor. The rest are simply terms that are customarily used in a wide variety of evaluative contexts, some of which might very well be aesthetic. But, in order to get a handle on what we are really talking about when we talk about “aesthetic terms,” we must go back to the fons et origo of the contemporary discussion, adduced before: namely, Frank Sibley’s “Aesthetic Concepts.”

One thing, vital to our discussion here, that Sibley makes clear from the beginning is that “aesthetic term” is something of a misnomer. As he puts the point, “I shall speak loosely of an ‘aesthetic term’, even when, because the word sometimes has other uses, it would be more correct to speak of its use as an aesthetic term.”20

Given this qualification, Sibley then divides aesthetic terms (so-called) into three classes. Many such terms, perhaps most,

do double duty even in everyday discourse, sometimes being used as aesthetic expressions and sometimes not. Other words again, whether in aesthetic or daily discourse, function only or predominantly as aesthetic terms; of this kind are graceful, delicate, dainty, handsome, comely, elegant, garish. Finally, to make the contrast with all the preceding examples, there are many words which are seldom used as aesthetic terms at all ….21

To be noted straightaway is that, with the exception of “lovely,” all of McGinn’s examples of positive morally evaluative terms fall into Sibley’s first class of aesthetic terms: terms that “do double duty even in everyday dis-course, sometimes being used as aesthetic expressions and sometimes not,” which is why, of course, they do not have an especially aesthetic ring to them, at least to my ordinary language ear. Therefore, it is necessary to determine whether, when applied to human character, these terms are being used aes-thetically or not. For it is by no means obvious that they are; they are not in Sibley’s category of primarily aesthetic terms, and to simply assume they are being used aesthetically is to beg the question at issue.

Furthermore, one cannot argue that, since when these terms are correctly applied to human character we conclude the character is beautiful, and since “beautiful” is being used in its aesthetic sense, they are being used aesthetically as well. For we have begun with the question of whether the term “beautiful” is being used aesthetically or not when applied to human character. We cannot

20 Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts,” in Sibley, Approach to Aesthetics, p. 1n.21 Ibid., p. 2.



then use the purported fact that it is being used aesthetically to determine that the terms in question are being used aesthetically. For that purported “fact” is the very thing in question from the beginning. And that question is made all the more pressing when we remind ourselves that “beautiful” has non-aesthetic uses, as well as that one person might call a character “beauti-ful,” another “good”—not a palpably aesthetic term—and both be saying the same thing of that character.

Of course, if we had some independent criterion for determining, out of context, whether the terms we are using to describe a character’s moral status are being used aesthetically or not, we might then non-circularly, and without begging the question, be able to determine whether the terms we are using to describe a character morally, are, indeed, being used aesthetically, in any given case. But what now looms darkly on the horizon is the daunting pros-pect of trying to “define” the “aesthetic,” a task that has stymied philoso-phers since 1735, the year the term was coined by Alexander Baumgarten, and shows no signs yet of a successful outcome.

Sibley himself, as we have seen, has, if not a “definition,” at least what might be described as an informal criterion for a term’s being aesthetic. “It would be natural enough to say …,” Sibley avers, “that the correct applica-tion of terms in their aesthetic use requires the exercise of taste, perceptive-ness, or sensitivity of aesthetic discrimination or appreciation ….”22 But, whatever its merits outside of the moral realm, which are themselves of some doubt,23 applied to moral assessments it immediately raises questions. It seems very odd, to begin with, to speak of exercising “taste” in moral evalu-ations. And, as for “aesthetic discrimination or appreciation,” the term to be defined occurs both in the definiens and the definiendum, rendering the criterion either question-begging or circular. What remains is “perceptive-ness,” a benign enough candidate. But to say merely what, surely, everyone would acquiesce in, that making sound moral judgments requires “perceptive-ness” of a kind, does not tell us what kind of perceptiveness it is, beyond the trivial conclusion that, since the context is a moral one, it is a moral percep-tiveness. Whether it is an aesthetic perceptiveness the criterion does not reveal. And so we are right back where we started, with our original question.

I said, it will be recalled, at the outset of this discussion, that I was drawing what I thought were correct inferences from McGinn’s stated position, rather than dealing with what McGinn explicitly laid out as the relation between what he takes to be “aesthetic” terms of moral evaluation and the judgment that a soul or character is “beautiful.” But, as a matter of fact, McGinn does have a specific suggestion of his own about the relation between a character’s

22 Ibid., p. 1.23 See Kivy, Speaking of Art, Chapter II.



moral “elements” and its purported beauty. McGinn writes in this regard: “No doubt it is a mistake to try to define beauty, but we could do a lot worse than thinking of beauty as consisting in a harmonious whole composed of discrete elements. We might accordingly conceive of a virtuous person as composed of a number of ethical chords, as it were, that blend together into a pleasing whole.”24

Of course the notion of the moral human being as one the “elements” of whose soul are in a “harmonious” relation is a very old one, dating back, perhaps, to the Pythagoreans, and fully formulated in Plato’s Phaedo, Republic, and elsewhere. But I am inclined to think that it raises similar prob-lems to the proposal rehearsed above. For, although “harmony” and “har-monious” should certainly be terms on Sibley’s list of “predominantly … aesthetic terms,” with, as McGinn puts it, “a strongly aesthetic flavour,” they have non-aesthetic uses as well.

If I say of a couple that they have a harmonious marriage, or that in the aftermath of the Civil War it took a long time to finally restore harmony to the country, I have no real inclination to call my judgments “aesthetic.” And, indeed, to make my point more emphatically, if I were to describe the couple as having a beautiful marriage, I still would not be inclined to call my judg-ment an aesthetic one. And, if it were suggested to me that it was, I would reply, first, that “beautiful” has, as I have argued above, other uses than its aesthetic one, and, second, that the satisfaction I may gain from the contem-plation of a beautiful marriage does not seem to me anything very much like the satisfaction I gain from the contemplation of a beautiful artwork or other object of a paradigmatically aesthetic kind.

But, furthermore, I am very skeptical of the notion that harmony of char-acter implies beauty or goodness of character. Imagine two persons in Hitler’s Germany, one a devoted, unconflicted Nazi, the other someone drawn strongly to the National Socialist movement but harboring doubts as well. In the latter, we might say, the better angel of his nature is at war with the worse, each battling for supremacy: a conflicted, inharmonious soul indeed. In the former, on the other hand, a perfect harmony of wickedness prevails. Is there any doubt about which of the two possesses the “better” character? Harmony of character, I conclude, is no reliable criterion of beauty of character, whether or not “harmony” and “beauty” are being used in their aesthetic senses.

It may, perhaps, be suggested that, even though the harmonious is not always the beautiful or the good, the beautiful or the good is always the har-monious. But I am skeptical of the weaker claim as well. For one can easily think of cases, both in aesthetics and in morality, where it makes perfect sense to say of an artwork, or a character, that it is “beautiful” or “good” in spite

24 McGinn, Ethics, Evil, and Fiction, p. 102.



of its being unharmonious in one aspect or another. It is certainly a common remark in criticism of the arts.

These, then, are some of the doubts I harbor concerning McGinn’s attempt to conflate the moral with the aesthetic. But I hasten to add that I have scarcely done full justice to the richness and complexity of his argu-ments. There is no better defense that I know of, in the contemporary litera-ture, for the “aesthetization” of the ethical than McGinn’s. And there are many more arrows to his quiver than I have had the time to try to deflect.

9 Ethics, Art, and the Aesthetic

The arguments I have given above to the effect that we should be wary of appealing to lay or philosophical usage in support of conflating the moral with the aesthetic have been informal, to say the least, and hardly, I think, conclusive. Perhaps more important, to me anyway, is the strong intuition that the moral “properties” of artworks in general, novels in particular, are part of their (non-aesthetic) content, not their (aesthetic) form, and that separation of the moral from the aesthetic should be preserved. But this leads to a problem the consideration of which will conclude the present chapter.

Berys Gaut and I share the anti-autonomist belief that the ethical value (or disvalue) of artworks—what I prefer to call, in the sense explained above, their ethical truth (or falsity)—is not irrelevant to their value qua artworks: baldly stated, that an ethically flawed, ethically false artwork is the worse for that, as an artwork, and an ethically praiseworthy, ethically true artwork is the better for that, as an artwork. The problem is how the ethical value (or dis-value) accrues to the artistic value (or disvalue). And it is not a problem for Gaut, because he gets a free ride. Since, for him, moral goodness (or as I would say truth) is beauty in the robust aesthetic sense of the word, and beauty in the robust sense of the word is agreed on all hands usually to be a good-making feature of artworks, it follows directly that ethical merits of artworks are merits of artworks qua artworks, ethical demerits demerits of artworks qua artworks.

But anyone who, like myself, wants to keep the ethical and the aesthetic in art separate, and also wants to insist that the ethical content of art matters to its value qua art, does seem to have a problem. For, the autonomist will insist, it is not at all obvious that ethical value imparts artistic value, and ethical dis-value artistic disvalue. There are, after all, numerous cases of artistic master-pieces universally valued and appreciated, their morally repugnant content to the contrary notwithstanding: The Merchant of Venice; Oliver Twist; Bach’s St. John Passion and St. Matthew Passion, with their repellent anti-Semitism; and The Triumph of the Will, with its repellent Nazi ideology—surely evidence



enough, it will be argued, of the total irrelevance of ethical value to artistic value and appreciation.

Of course the anti-autonomist is not claiming that artistic value is com-pletely beholden to ethical value, to ethical truth or falsity, by any means. Obviously The Merchant of Venice, Oliver Twist, Bach’s Passions, and Triumph of the Will have other redeeming features, both aesthetic and non-aesthetic, that cause us to esteem and appreciate these works, in spite of their highly objectionable moral content.

However, that is not the issue, the autonomist will doubtless respond. It is obvious, so the argument will go, that and why aesthetic features of artworks are relevant to their evaluation qua artworks. That’s just a no-brainer. And it is obvi-ous that (and why) ethical content is relevant to the evaluation of moral trea-tises. Furthermore, for that matter, it is obvious why (and how) philosophical content is relevant to the evaluation of philosophical treatises in general, why (and how) psychological content is relevant to the evaluation of psychological monographs, and so on. But tell us, please, why (and how) ethical content should be relevant to the evaluation of artworks, if it is not aesthetic content.

What I want now to suggest is that this argument would only seem com-pelling, if compelling at all, to someone living after 1900 who had already embraced some form of artistic autonomism, probably a formalism, and so already begged the question against the art-relevance of ethical content. For most of their history the fine arts have been understood as moral instru-ments: as major sources of moral knowledge and moral improvement. A statement to the contrary would surely have much surprised Plato and Aristotle, or, for that matter, anyone in the eighteenth century—where the cradle of artistic autonomism was supposed to first have been rocked—or, a fortiori, the vast majority of nineteenth-century philosophers of art, for whom the moral and epistemic status of the fine arts was in apogee.

It is, then, only in the twentieth century that artistic autonomy reared its head, early on in the formalism of Clive Bell and Roger Fry, at mid-century and beyond in the aestheticism of Monroe Beardsley and the New Critics.25 Thus, whether you bought into the notion that form, not content, is all that matters; or the notion that the so-called “aesthetic experience,” not the experience of content, is all that matters; or the notion that aesthetic properties, not properties of content, are all that matters, it had become “obvious,” after two and one half millennia of its being unobvious and absurd, to claim that the ethical content of artworks is irrelevant to their evaluation qua artworks. It took a host of bad philosophical arguments to do the job. And I suspect philosophers were the only ones convinced. Ask the intelligent, literate lay person, untainted by philosophical theory, if

25 With Oscar Wilde, perhaps, and the art-for-art’s-sake movement as precursors.



ethical content matters to artistic value, and I predict that the answer will be, one way or another: Obviously yes.

How and why artistic autonomy, to the exclusion of ethical content, came to be in the twentieth century is a twice-told tale that there is no need to rehearse yet again. Nor do I intend to canvas well-known objections to it. I will simply close this chapter by reiterating what would have seemed obvi-ous to anyone in the long history of Western high art until the advent of twentieth-century formalism and aesthetic autonomism. Works of art, like many other modes of human communication, have ethical content and ethi-cal import. And, like those other modes of human communication, their ethical content and ethical import, from Plato to the present, have figured persistently and deeply in their appreciation and evaluation. That so many, for so long, have been mistaken in this is of course entirely possible. I am not foolish enough to argue vox populi. But the point is that, for all of this time, and for all of these people involved with the creation, criticism, theorizing about, and just plain appreciating and enjoying the fine arts, that ethical con-tent matters to artistic value has been held obviously true by almost common consent. It seemed obviously true, and seems to me now obviously true that ethical truth makes an artwork the better for expressing it, when the express-ing of it is an intended “working part” of that artwork. That is a no-brainer, in need of no philosophical defense. Its denial is what stands in need of defense and explanation. I will, at this point, leave it to future artistic autono-mists to provide them. Those of the recent past have come a cropper.

10 Suppose I am Wrong

Let me conclude this chapter, then, with the following observation. Suppose Berys Gaut is right that the morally good in art is “beautiful” in the robust aesthetic sense of that word. Suppose he is right in conflating the moral with the aesthetic. What would follow for the argument I am running in this book?

Simply this. I am arguing that the novel is less of an aesthetic art than is traditionally thought. If, as Gaut believes, what I have been calling the nov-el’s non-aesthetic ethical content is part of its aesthetic content, then in that particular respect the novel will be more aesthetic than I am making it out to be. The rest of my argument will remain unaffected. And to the continuation of that argument I turn in Chapter 5.


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Once-Told Tales (An Essay in Literary Aesthetics) || The Ethical, the Aesthetic, and the Artistic