' Exceedingly stupid as the idea is ...'

Wittgenstein

'People still have the idea that psychology is one day going to explain all our aesthetic judgements, and they mean experimental psychology. This is very funny, very funny indeed.'

—Wittgenstein (Lectures and Conversations, § 19)

Therefrom, therefore ...

They say there was a time when artists were simply artisans. Nobody cared very much about an artist's name, background, upbringing, personality, appetites, political views, chest measurement, hat size. What did all of that matter, so long as the artworks were good? We don't ask after the personal minutiae of other hirelings, do we? That was back then. (And already by classical times artists had become names.) Nowadays we're at the other extreme. What does it matter if an artwork is good? (And what does 'good' mean anyway? Hah!) All that matters is a name, famous or infamous. An artist may exhibit a bag of garbage so long as he has a name. (However, that bag of garbage may be thrown out by the night cleaner—a truly newsworthy story.) Well, 'good' means what it has always commonsensically meant. And it is time that we put again some distance between the artist and his artwork, though not too much.

All too often we say that bad artworks are good, because we take the artists themselves to be good, not qua artists, but in some other way. Then we say that good artworks are bad, because we take the artists to be bad, not qua artists, but in some other way. Tsk, tsk. We may be ashamed of an artwork's parenting, of its birthplace, its provenance, of the rundown carriage that carried it to us—no matter. The artwork is its own standalone thing. How it came cannot change what it is (ex post facto). And if we can't see the what for the how, for the wherefrom, then so much the worse for us. Yes, if you're looking at a painting in a gallery, and a fellow gallerygoer tells you of the painter's turpitude, that he was vicious qua man (though virtuous qua painter), then what you see will probably change, though that at which you look is unchanged. And that's OK. We're not superobjective thingamabobs, after all. But don't let's visit the sins of the father on his children. Don't let's go searching for what isn't there, lest we find it, as hypochondriacs find diseases, diseases that aren't there but may as well be. (Wagner's 'Gesamtkunstwerks,' for example, have been constantly maltreated in this way.)

Note: The 'genetic fallacy' is the go-to fallacy these days. It's a real workhorse. For example, biological taxonomy is now phylogenetical, rather than morphological, and so genetic fallacies run roughshod over it. (Some Animalia are classed as Plantae, etc.) Moreover, Darwinists are forever telling us that we're really no greater than other animals. Why? Because we all have common ancestries and we all came by way of natural selection on random genetic mutation! But what we have here is another textbook genetic fallacy. Suppose the evolutionary anthropologist's just-so story is true, the story about humankind's wherefrom and whereby. Do we then become something other than what we here and now are (viz., rational animals)? Is phylogenesis morphology? Is efficiency formality? No, no, no.

Both beautiful AND ugly? ...

The Philosopher

The Aristotelian-Scholastic (hereafter A-S) philosophy of beauty was my gateway into Aristotelian metaphysics. And here was a very welcome spelling-out of what was hitherto unspellable. Yet not everybody feels the same way. (Meiosis.) And that's what I want to talk about.

But first a high-speed run-through. Ex hypothesi, beauty is a transcendental, standing alongside truth and goodness—that is to say, it is something over and above the genera, supra-categorical. (Whence the fact that beauty finds its way into all ontological categories: concretes and abstracts, subjects and objects.) And being modes of being (or Being), the transcendentals are interconvertible. But how can such very different things—truth, goodness, and beauty—interconvert? The answer (ex hypo.) is that they are not as different as they seem. Consider an analogous case from the philosophy of logic. Necessity, analyticity, and apriority are separate notions. But they all look at the same thing from different viewpoints: those of metaphysics, semantics, and epistemology. To use the Fregean jargon, they differ in sense but not in reference. And so it is with the (similarly coextensive) transcendentals.

Ye be warned: the terms are used extendedly. For example, truth is not here to be understood propositionally, not as a "truth-value," but rather as realness or genuineness. (Truth with an uppercase "T".) For classical thinkers, both Platonists and Aristotelians, something is true insofar as it is an exemplar. The triangle drawn with a straightedge is truer to triangularity than that drawn freehand. A tree with a strong root-system is truer to treeness than a root-fallen tree. Etc. Further, the well-drawn triangle is good, whereas the poorly-drawn triangle is bad.  A strong-rooted tree is good, whereas a weak-rooted tree is bad. Turning to mankind, trueness and goodness finally comprehend morality. The virtuous man is more true and more good than the vicious man. So if you want to be a real man, a manly man, then be virtuous. (Why do the classical philosophers use the terms so oddly? They don't—we do.)

Anyway, it follows from all the above that if something is beautiful, it must thereby be true and good. But most find this troubling. Roger Scruton, in his wise—if overmuch Kantian—book on beauty, writes the following (about Aquinas specifically):

If that [A-S transcendentalism] is so ... how can there be dangerous beauties, corrupting beauties, and immoral beauties? ... I don't say that Aquinas has no answer to those questions. But they illustrate the difficulties encountered by any philosophy that places beauty on the same metaphysical plane as truth, so as to plant it in the heart of being as such.

Here Scruton puts forward the most common objection to the A-S philosophy of beauty. And it seems to me rather weak, even point-missing. After all, what the traditional thinkers are saying, using the terms in the traditional ways, is that just insofar as a thing is beautiful, it is true and good. Take, say, a beautiful sophism—more correctly, a beautifully-phrased sophism. Objectors will say, 'Look, here's something beautiful that's also false and bad. So there!' Well, yes, but really we are talking about two things. For just what is it that's beautiful? Answer: the phraseology. And insofar as it is beautiful, it is true and good. What is it that's false and bad? Answer: the sophism. And insofar as it is false and bad, it is ugly. Put it this way. The beautifully-phrased sophism is both beautiful, re its form, and ugly, re its matter. (And there is always some such multiplicity in these cases.) Ergo there is no contradiction.

Socks

Let's keep going. Take the puckish Socrates, a short, fat, fubsy, snubnosed, popeyed, potbellied baldhead. His friends likened him unto a flatfish (Plato's Meno). (Oh, but as a contrario, see ch. 5 of Xenophon's Symposium, in which Socrates enters a beauty-pageant.) Unshod and unwashed, it didn't help that his fellow citizens beat him and pulled at his beard (Diogenes Laërtius' Lives, Book II). Socrates was the ugliest man in Greece, let's say. Must we then add that he was the falsest and the baddest man in Greece? No, that would be a fallacious athroposcopy (à la the physiognomon Zopyrus). For it was Socrates' body that was ugly, whereas his soul was true and good. Yes, his soul was exemplary. Crito was so struck by it that he took him from his father's sculpturing workshop and saw to his education gratis (see Diogenes L. again). 

Note: nothing here calls for a substance dualism or treblism. It is enough that the analysanda be separable in some way, not necessarily ontologically.

If it turned out that something good was eo ipso ugly, or that something bad was eo ipso beautiful, then goodbye transcendentalism. But I can't see how such a thing would be at all possible. Can you?