Daniel Quall King

Elsewhere, in trying to set out what I believe to be the principal value of the fine arts, I have approached the subject from the viewpoint that they are useful as certain sorts of cognitive equipment with their own unique features.  And ” ‘Useful’ means, that which persuades, assists or sustains us in the pursuit of our needs and desires.  Since these are invariably subject to natural or social constraints, usefulness entails ethics and morality.  It is in this very general sense that ethics and aesthetics are closely related”.

To what purposes are moral judgments directed?  Presumably, the ultimate moral purpose is the physical and mental growth and survival of the individual and the species; or of sentient life; or simply, of life.  But this is an extremely complex purpose, and our interpretation of its meaning changes with experience and with time’s passage.  From time to time, the manner in which we decide to pursue such purposes may become a matter for our urgent attention and action.  (“Style” is the word which refers specifically to this manner.)  But our ability to perceive what is in our interest toward this moral end often seems quite limited, so limited that our consequent frustrations can lead us to generate an  opposite viewpoint.  In this case, the ultimate moral purpose would be viewed as the disappearance of the individual, or of mankind, from the scene: a renunciation of life, or at least a non-interference, or a minimal interference with everything else around us.  It is, of course, in the conclusion of minimal interference that the two major viewpoints touch, since each extreme contains the seed of its opposite.

To what purposes are aesthetic judgments directed?  The ultimate aesthetic purpose is the sharing of mental gains of whatever kind through particular sorts of channels, to assist, persuade or sustain one another in whatever we take to be the ultimate moral purpose.   Since our ability to see what is in our moral interest, and our ability and inclination to pursue it correctly often seem to be more limited than we might wish, an attempt to clarify the relationships between ethics and aesthetics seems to be in order.

We can distinguish between the ethics of living, morals, and the ethics of the arts, aesthetics.  Ethics, here, refers to whatever can be found common to both.  All the disciplines essential to the arts are concerned with the finding, through discovery and invention, of choices, and with the exercise of judgement in synthesising them toward a desired end.  These disciplines are therefore ethical in nature.

But these assertions could be made of any discipline at all, including that of living.  So how do the arts differ?  In looking for significant differences, experience leads one in a certain direction.  The types of selection and judgement used in exercising artistic disciplines are not of necessity involved with conscious purposes other than what is demanded by the disciplines themselves.  They can be directed toward technically extraneous purposes if we wish, but we are not required to exercise the disciplines in terms of them as a condition of acceptance.  This is not to say that we might not do so unconsciously; merely that if we wish to make the effort, we can, within broad limits, have a conscious choice.  It would be interesting to consider from this point of view some of the differences between the fine arts and the decorative or applied arts, and with whatever analogies might be found with the distinctions between (for example) “pure” and applied mathematics.

The activities of making the objects of the fine arts have been observed to resemble play, and like games, they require a type of integrity.  Once we have set out the rules for a particular enterprise, they must be adhered to.  If we wish to break or vary the rules, we are free to do so, providing only that there is some coherence in terms of the enterprise.  On the other hand, we can change the enterprise and recast the rules with a different coherence.  This may be the sense in which art can be used as pure speculation.  But the nature of the enterprise is important and demands scrupulous consideration, since it will involve commitment.  We have still not quite succeeded in trivialising life, and therefore time, altogether, and as usual, we are in no way excused from action by the fact that choices are always circumscribed.

What is important is to realise that if we think of ethics as being equivalent to discipline, then it should be possible to understand more clearly the transfer of generalisations from life to art and art to life.  Correctly understanding the many varieties of artistic analogy and their limitations is essential to appropriate generalisation if transferring experience from one area to the other is to be useful.  One way or another, any training in the fine arts worth calling an education will incorporate such understanding.