World Without Beauty
My subjectivist turn began with the revelation that morality is a myth. There is no such thing as morality, that is, objective right and wrong. Soon enough I realized this extended to good and bad as well; these too were banished from reality. So ethics itself ceased to be, or to be like theology, a discipline devoted to studying a fiction, or to be prized apart from morality (a realm of fictitious truths and imperatives) and conceived simply as the inquiry into how to live. I chose the third option. I then proposed the ethics of desirism, which is the recommendation to rationalize our desires. However, other dominoes began to fall. Ultimately I bit the bullet and rejected even truth as something real. Along the way there were eliminations less radical or controversial, and yet even with these it could be a shock to confront them “in the flesh.” Consider, for example, that beauty ceases to exist (as also ugliness)—that...