Aesthetic Materialism

  I dreamed I met Jean Cocteau. He told me, "'Beauty and the Beast' is about the conflict between two aesthetics: the classical aesthetic, the aesthetic of beauty, that is, composition, proportion, completeness, meaning - and the modern aesthetic, the aesthetic of absurdity: incompleteness, fragmentation, pastiche. The Beast is modern man in his absurdity: life without God, without soul, without purpose, without any given meaning for his existence, a mere animal. Beauty is humanity’s self-image, its ideology so to speak, its self-justification, the way it lies to itself about itself. Obviously, absurdity includes beauty, embraces it as it were, but in a fragmentary, pastiche style, out of place, like the armless Venus de Milo next to a pair of rubber gloves, an automobile and a urinal. Beauty is absurdity’s prisoner, as we are prisoners of the modern world. The life of the beast - the life of modern man - is entirely circumscribed by time, entirely tem...

  Some are tempted to say that there is no meta-ethics – that is, that one can judge whether something is right or wrong according to a specific, culturally-determined set of moral values, but one cannot say whether one culture's set of moral values is morally better than another culture's set of moral values. But this is false. What this implies is that within a given culture, those who determine the moral values of that culture cannot be wrong – that they are infallible. But of course they can be wrong. They can make mistakes, like everyone else. It makes no more sense to say that moral authorities are incapable of making mistakes than to say that scientists or judges or parents or anyone else who makes decisions cannot make mistakes. Consider the case of victim-blaming. It is wrong for a culture to blame a victim for the harm done to that victim by an aggressor. Blaming the victim is a mistake . It is wrong. Yet, of course, many cultures blame victims for all kinds o...