Aesthetics is heavily influenced by the legacies of both Plato and Kant. Plato assumes that beauty is the object of desire, while Kant insists that disinterested pleasure is the attitude which grounds a judgement of beauty. These two approaches may seem impossible to reconcile. How can one desire something passionately while being unbiased in favour of the object? A productive place to start searching for answers is a recent trend in ethics which has been motivated by the works of Iris Murdoch. …
Read moreAesthetics is heavily influenced by the legacies of both Plato and Kant. Plato assumes that beauty is the object of desire, while Kant insists that disinterested pleasure is the attitude which grounds a judgement of beauty. These two approaches may seem impossible to reconcile. How can one desire something passionately while being unbiased in favour of the object? A productive place to start searching for answers is a recent trend in ethics which has been motivated by the works of Iris Murdoch. This trend emphasizes ethical behaviour as a form of loving attention rather than rule of law. By tracing Murdoch-type views on ethics back to her inspiration from the work of Simone Weil, we can get the richest and distinctly aesthetic application of loving attention that Weil uses to reconcile desire with disinterest in her theory of beauty.
