Can the Experience of Beauty Make Us Better People? Thinking Otherwise About the Aesthetics/Ethics Connection

In this chapter, I argue that the experience of beauty can, in fact, make us better people. In claiming this, I am not asserting that the experience of beauty necessarily makes us better people. Some aesthetes are haughty, self-absorbed jerks, and while it can plausibly be asserted that their experience has “rubbed off” on their ethical and moral concerns in some way, there is no reason to assume, or posit, that this rubbing-off culminates in becoming morally better. How, then, might we understand the connection between the aesthetic and the ethical? More to the point: Under what conditions can the experience of beauty make us better people? A first task in answering these questions is to say what exactly is meant by “beauty.” A second task is to address what is meant, or what might be meant, by “better people.” With preliminary answers to these two questions in hand, we may be better poised to address the aesthetics/ethics connection. Drawing especially on the work of Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, I suggest that undivided attention is at the very heart of this connection and that it requires “thinking Otherwise” about both the experience of beauty and the (neverending) challenge of becoming better people.