1 Introduction
The question I posed in the first week of this course had to do with the relation between aesthetics and community.
- Roelofs talks about ‘the promise of the aesthetic’ as the ability of the aesthetic to create binds between us that are formative of community. We see E.T. and by connecting with it connect with each other.
- Kant claims judgments of beauty are universal, and universal owing to the fact that the cognitive capacities at work in the experience of beauty are universal. We might put that idea this way: that the perception of beauty is a way in which I am brought into connection with my humanity.
Edwards is going to claim that beauty is agreement with a whole, with the whole as such, as it were, and it is tempting, of course, to read that thought in connection with this claim; to think of Edwards’ aesthetics as an aesthetics of community.
But Edwards’ community is not a complete one, and an incomplete community asserting ‘consent to the whole’ is an antagonistic one, and in the excerpt here I want to think in particular about how punishment demonstrates a sort of antagonism at the heart of Edwards’ aesthetics of harmony.
Just so we understand what punishment looks like in the middle of the eighteenth century in Massachussets: In the year that Edwards wrote The Nature of True (1755), a pair of enslaved people, named Phillis and Mark, were punished for poisoning their enslaver, John Codman. Phillis was burned to death, and Mark was hanged and his decaying corpse displayed in public. Punishment in Edwards’ world is a violent and cruel spectacle. Public whipping, branding, and hanging were common. These are the things we’re to see as ‘beautiful’. There is no long-term imprisonment for contemplating your wrongs; there is no ‘reform’. Edwards himself, as a minister, would have personally administered ecclesiastical forms of punishment: public confession, excommunication.
It’s important we have this sort of spectacle in mind when we consider Edwards’ discussion of punishment. Pain, bodily mutilation, humiliation, the restoration of social hierarchy—these are the sorts of appearances of order and unity that constitute the ‘beauty’ of punishment in Edwards’ schema.
And undoubtedly Edwards was a participant in and defender of the most coercive institution of them all, being an enslaver himself and a defender of enslaving. Evidently there is nothing about “[loving] beings in proportion to their dignity” that excludes buying and selling humans. Edwards wrote The Nature of True Virtue in 1755. In 1756, he purchased a three-year-old boy named Titus, as a slave. They even have the receipt.
2 Virtue and beauty
Virtue, Edwards claims up front, is a sort of beauty. It is “beauty belonging to beings that have perception and will” (p. 1). Specifically, “it is a beauty that has its original seat in the mind” (ibid.). And Edwards then defines virtue in a way that connects directly to the ‘divine light’ sermon: Virtue is not a beauty associated with speculative thinking but with ‘the qualities and exercises of the heart’. See pp. 1–2 and p. 3.
What is a “benevolence to being in general”? Edwards seems to want to contrast it, above all, with particular forms of affection. See pp. 4–5. “Love of benevolence” he defines on the next page as a desire for the well-being of others; see p. 6. Hence “benevolence to being in general” might be thought of as a desire for the well-being of all.
Beauty is consent, agreement. Something is beautiful for Edwards when it ‘agrees’ with the whole of which it is a part. Virtue is a way of exemplifying beauty. When we are virtuous, we “consent to” being.
3 Secondary beauty
The first two chapters of True Virtue describe “benevolence to being in general” not only as virtue but as an ideal instance of beauty, and “benevolence to being in general” turns out to be love of God. Fine.
Then in this third lecture Edwards discusses other forms of beauty. He first draws the contrast on pp. 27–28. And what is interesting about this as a theory of beauty (such as you and I might actually encounter it) is that:
- What counts for Edwards as beautiful in the everyday is a sort of echo or (imperfect, perhaps) instance of some more ideal form of beauty
- That trace can be encountered directly in the everyday
Notice how for example he uses the language of ‘consent’ in a highly metaphorical way here, transferring the concept from the more conspicuously morally inflected case of beauty as benevolence for all to the deeply unobviously morally inflected case of the beauty of body parts or other things.
He extends this ‘secondary’ model of beauty to utility also. See p. 29.
Beauty for Edwards is the agreement of things as parts of some whole. That whole is accessible to us owing to a capacity that is at once entirely (or relatively) simple but also infused with a sort of complexity and depth, in particular owing to a sort of transformed capacity.
In that way, we might think of Edwards as a sort of proto-transcendentalist or proto-romantic. (I say “proto-” because ‘officially’ Transcendentalism and Romanticism don’t emerge for another few decades.) All or most of the features of what we call romanticism and transcendentalism are there:
- Beauty is something we come to know intuitively and sensibly, and only through a trained sort of sensibility
- Nature’s beauty is, we might say, symbolic, inasmuch as it serves as an echo or bears a trace of divine or spiritual beauty
- Beauty is organic unity
Beauty as perceived has moreoever a sort of moral power; see p. 31.
At the same time, beauty in the ‘secondary’ sense (the beauty, say, of everyday things) is something perceivable entirely without perception of the underlying harmony, or of God’s love, or whatever. Someone can just find a tune beautiful without understanding anything about music. This doesn’t mean that what makes it beautiful isn’t the proportion etc.; but that it is possible—to put it differently than Edwards does—to perceive beauty (in this secondary sense anyway) without knowing what it is. See pp. 32–33.
Beauty is perceivable, Edwards goes on to claim, just about everywhere: in the everyday, in spiritual things, in artificial things. It is perceivable even in punishment. See p. 38. Punishment is beautiful because, in Edwards’ model, it is a “harmonious corresponding of one thing with another,” an integrated whole of parts contributing to that whole’s unity.
In Edward’s theory of the beauty of punishment, we begin to see the sort of inversion that is characteristic perhaps specifically of the puritanical ethos of the time, but also that is characteristic of being in the grips of ideology in general. I mean the thought, in short, that punishment is actually a form of love. Edwards’ aestheticization of punishment is a familiar ideological and perhaps philosophical maneuver: Aestheticization—converting non-aesthetic qualities into aesthetic qualities; appraising and judging those qualities as if they were merely aesthetic ones—is a prototypical way of masking social, political, or other realities.
Of course, Edwards himself would not think he has ‘aestheticized’ punishment by claiming an aesthetic justification for it. He might say instead he has merely discovered its beauty. For Edwards, moral order really is beautiful, and punishment is an essential mechanism of maintaining that order.
Nevertheless, with two rather different sorts of consequence, Edwards reminds us at the end of this chapter that the appreciation of ‘secondary’ beauty has no essential connection to virtue. See p. 41. Aesthetic experience thus appears in the end to be capable of a sort of independence from moral consideration. I can just like a tune, for example, without this having any particular meaning for me; without it being a perception of the wholeness of creation. There is an autonomy of the aesthetic from the moral—a more or less radically contemporary view Edwards is espousing. But, secondly, to look back at the question of punishment, for example, it also means that ‘secondary’ beauty has no intrinsically moral salience. The fact that it is beautiful does not wholly justify punishment or any other act.