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 is, in the objective sense. So no matter how transported you are by Samuel Barber’s Adagio, your conviction of its inherent beauty is an illusion. So too the funniness, indeed brilliance of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, or of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove: It is nothing but your happening to react to them in a certain way. And on and on.

            On the third paw, there is also a major decision to be made about each realm of experience: It is always a choice whether to retain the old terminology for the subjective version of what heretofore had been taken to be objective. So for example: We could still call a story funny even though all we now meant by that was that it made us laugh in a certain way. But no longer would there be the implication that the story is funny in any “metaphysical” sense … no more than an apple is red (since the redness is something that arises from an event in the human brain. The apple itself only has some kind of surface texture or composition, which structures light hitting it and then reflects it into our eyes, which register this stimulus and thereupon convey information to the brain, where the response occurs and the experience arises. Although here again we could choose to take that surface texture as the meaning of red, rather than the color experience; and so the apple would be red after all).

            A great deal can hinge on this decision. The problem, as I see it, is that retaining the language even though we have de-objectivized the concept, will inevitably result in confusion and conflation, and hence sustain, more or less, the ills of objectification (which I have spelled out at length in many places). This is analogous to the concern that feminists have long expressed regarding the noxious influence male-dominated language has on our thinking and feelings and attitudes and actions and policies and institutions, even if we acknowledge, as one of my college professors once put it, that “‘man’ embraces woman.”

            I think the practical solution is to decide on a pragmatic and case-by-case across the various domains – morals, aesthetics, humor, epistemology, metaphysics …. So for example, it strikes me as usually harmless to speak of the beauty of a symphony or the funniness of a joke. Any objectivity that oozes through the cracks in these matters does little damage. But when it comes to something like morals, the damage due to objectification is so extensive that I recommend dispensing with moral language altogether (to the degree practicable). And, I must admit, even when it comes to things like aesthetics and humor, I am wary of admitting the old way of speaking into the brave new world of subjectivism because, even though relatively harmless in their own realms, it still sustains a lazy way of thinking that could seep into the realms where more is at stake. This is analogous to the way religious thinking, which might at first seem harmless if confined to personal reveries or even institutional delusions, can wreak havoc as it spreads into extra-religious realms, such as government policy.[1] 

For some practical suggestions on how to dispense with moral language, see my "Beyond the Surf and Spray: Erring on the Side of Error Theory" in The End of Morality: Taking Moral Abolitionism Seriously, edited by Richard Garner and Richard Joyce (New York and London: Routledge, 2019, Ch. 6, pp. 94-109).

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[1] I was once disheartened to sense that a certain lack of urgency regarding protecting Earth from an impact by a large asteroid or comet seemed to arise from a certain NASA administrator’s belief in prayer as a practical resort if we were unprepared.