The Lover of the Beautiful and the Good:

Platonic Foundations of Aesthetic and Moral Value

Synthese, vol 164:1, Novermber 2008,  pp. 31-51.

 

 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.