The Lover of the
Beautiful and the Good:
Synthese
Abstract
Though
acknowledged by scholars, Plato’s identification of the Beautiful and the Good
has generated little interest, even in aesthetics where moral concepts are a
current topic. The view is suspect because, e.g., it is easy to find examples
of ugly saints and beautiful sinners.
In this paper the thesis is defended using ideas from Plato’s ancient
commentators, the Neoplatonists. Of
these the most interesting philosophically is Proclus, who applied to value
theory a battery of linguistic tools with fixed semantic properties –
comparative adjectives, associated gradable adjectives, mass nouns, and
predicate negations. All of these
varieties require a semantic theory that scales value in terms of
“privation”. In this paper the details
of such a theory for aesthetic adjectives is worked out in detail. It is shown how it is possible to interpret
value terms “Platonically” over what is mathematically a “privative” Boolean
algebras with the result that the predicates beautiful and good have
“extensions” that are disjoint while at “higher” levels in the ordering other
value terms have extensions that are coextensional. It is shown in short, how though the good and the beautiful
diverge at a mundane level, at higher levels aesthetic and moral concepts may
coincide. Considerations are offered that this structure conforms to actual
usage.