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.