The
Transcendentalist Deduction of Goodness from Beauty
in Jonathan Edwards and, the
Environment,
The Relevance of the Thought of Jonathan
Edwards to Our Current Environmental and Ecological Concerns.
Richard Hall, ed.
Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press,
2016, pp. 57-85.
Abstract
The transcendentalists were nature lovers. They contributed to 19th century
romanticism, and ultimately to the followers of John Muir and modern preservationism. But
they were also unorthodox Platonists.
Unlike Plotinus or Augustine, who doubted sensation, Edwards, Emerson,
and Cole found moral instruction in natural beauty. If they were right,
aesthetic arguments for preservation would be possible.
But the view is problematic. Empiricism is inconsistent with
Neoplatonism, and deriving moral prescriptions from aesthetics is a category
mistake: some beautiful things should not be preserved, and some that should
are aesthetically repugnant.
I attempt to show how empirical enlightenment is
consistent with Neoplatonic knowledge, and how aesthetic properties can carry
moral value. Using evidence from
linguistics, I sketch how moral and aesthetic adjectives form families of
“scalars” associated with a comparative adjective and mass noun that admits of
degrees. In a given family the different adjectives describe different ranks,
each true of subjects that posses the relevant “mass”
to its degree. The aesthetic and moral mass nouns are “beauty” and “goodness”.
Thus knowing
what it is for a predicate of low degree hold entails knowing a sample of a
mass that in principle may hold to a much greater degree. Moreover, aesthetic
and moral scales may diverge at lower but coincide at high ranks. Thus there would be disjoint instances of
lesser beauty and goodness, but nevertheless it would be true that each lesser
predicate indicates a sample of a higher shared value. Natural beauty would then posses
to a specific degree the same sort of value characteristic of great moral
worth.