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ABSTRACT
Aesthetics is one of the major branches of philosophy which deals with the appreciation of
beauty and the works of art. It also goes further to question fundamentally, the intrinsic nature
of beauty and art. These questions can be traced through the whole history of philosophy, from
Greek ideas of art, throught medieval and reformation debates about religious images (whether
they pointed beyond themselves or were in danger of being themselves worshipped in an
idolatrous way). In bid to address these questions, various philosophers have attempted to
investigate the nature of aesthetics. One of which is Elisabeth Schellekens- a contemporary
philosopher known for her passion in aesthetics viewed that aesthetics being an ontological
discipline is closely related to ethics in that for both of them, the notion of value occupies a
center stage. To her, the issues they address intersect with the same aspects of human life,
particularly those regarding how one should live, what sorts of goals one should consider worth
pursuing, and the kind of relationship one ought to build to one’s neighbors to ensure a
meaningful life. Given these apparent similarities between aesthetics and ethics, Elisabeth
Schellekens asks whether the attempt to distinguish these two branches of philosophy as distinct
fields of philosophy is even meaningful.
This paper elaborates Elisabeth Schellekens’ contribution to the study of aesthetics.
Keywords: Elisabeth Schellekens, aesthetics, ethics/morality.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Abstract

2. Table of contents

3. Introduction

4. Short biography of Elisabeth Schellekens

5. Definition of terms

6. Elisabeth Schellekens’ view of aesthetics and her contribution

7. Conclusion
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INTRODUCTION

Philosophical Aesthetics is a discipline with fewer natural friends than foes. From within the

academic world, it is regularly considered ancillary, charged with dealing merely with 'soft'

issues. Aesthetics, it is held, is hardly concerned with the central questions of Philosophy, such

as how we acquire knowledge of how the world and its contents are to be divided, and thus fails

to address those areas of investigation held to be of genuine importance. Conversely, from

outside the academic environment, Aesthetics is often considered either irrelevant or misleading.

For philosophical examination of everyday aesthetic phenomena, such as the experience of

beauty or the making of an aesthetic judgment, may seem unwarranted and uncalled for. On the

contrary, Aesthetics engages directly with issues central to Metaphysics, to the theory of

knowledge (or Epistemology), and the Philosophy of mind. Although it is certainly true that such

investigations are primarily directed at the study of aesthetic qualities, aesthetic perception and

aesthetic judgment - and can to that extent be said to target a relatively small and exceptional

category - exactly the same questions apply. In her book, Aesthetics and Morality, Elisabeth

Schellekens opined that aesthetics and ethics are closely related fields on a fundamental level,

since both deals with the notion of value and judgment. As such, she expresses Kant’s theory that

beauty is the symbol of morality 1. Schellekens begins her investigation of the relationship

between aesthetics and ethics by tracking the limits of the aesthetic. She goes through two

influential accounts of aesthetic experience, Monroe Beardsley’s view of aesthetic experience as

a unified, intensive, and complex mental state and Jerome Stolnitz’s aesthetic attitude theory,

however, finding them both unsatisfactory, at least as attempts to nail down the necessary and

sufficient conditions of aesthetic experience. However, Schellekens thinks there is a positive side

to these failures. That aesthetic experience cannot be neatly demarcated from other kinds of
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Ethics and morality
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experience and that the elements that have an effect on it cannot be exhaustively singled out in

her view actually provides a fruitful basis for exploring the ways in which the realms of the

aesthetic and that of the moral, might intersect and interact with one another.2

SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF ELISABETH SCHELLEKENS

Elisabeth Schellekens (hence written as Schellekens) is a Swedish philosopher and Chair

Professor of Aesthetics at Uppsala University (since 2014). Previously, she was Senior Lecturer

at Durham University (2006-2014). Schellekens is known for her works in aesthetics. Her

research interests include aesthetic cognitivism and objectivism, aesthetic normativity, Hume,

Kant, aesthetic and moral properties, conceptual art, non-perceptual or intelligible aesthetic

value, the relations between perception and knowledge, the aesthetics and ethics of cultural

heritage (esp. in armed conflict), and the interaction between aesthetic, moral, cognitive and

historical value in art. Schellekens was co-editor of the British Journal of Aesthetics between

2007 and 2019. She continues to serve on the journal's editorial board, and has served on a

number of journal editorial boards, including the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and

Estetika.

She authored Aesthetics and Morality, and together with Peter Goldie, they published The

Aesthetic Mind.

DEFINITION OF TERMS

AESTHETICS

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that deals with art or more generally what the Oxford

English Dictionary calls that of “taste, or of the perception of the beautiful.” The term itself is

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derived from the ancient Greek aesthesis, meaning sensation or perception, in contrast to

intellectual concepts or rational knowledge.3

Most aesthetic philosophers construe the disciplines as applying more broadly to beauty and

ugliness in general. The term ‘aesthetics’ first appeared in a book by Alexander Baumgarten in

1735, yet philosophical discussions of beauty extend back thousands of years. Commentaries on

‘good’ and ‘bad’ music can be found in both ancient Greek and ancient Chinese sources.

Beginning in the 1960s, the field of cognitive science became increasingly influential in the

philosophy of mind. While much of this influence relates to the nature of thought, reasoning, and

consciousness, the impact of cognitive science has expanded to other areas of philosophy,

including aesthetics.

In the West, the most influential writer on aesthetics has been the German philosopher Immanuel

Kant (1724–1804). Kant laid out two pillars in Western aesthetics. First, he distinguished

aesthetic pleasure from other forms of pleasure. Aesthetic pleasure is not some other type of

pleasure in disguise: for example, art is not the sublimation of food, sex, warmth, companion-

ship, or some combination of other existing pleasures. Second, Kant argued that aesthetic

emotions are ‘disinterested’; when we experience an aesthetic pleasure, there are no utilitarian or

ulterior motives underlying thisd experience. A mother’s appreciation of the beauty of her

daughter cannot be regarded as a purely aesthetic appreciation, since her experience is apt to be

tainted by parental pride. Unlike garden-variety emotions, for Kant, aesthetic emotions serve no

practical purpose.4

ETHICS

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Lesley Martin, “Aesthetics,” https://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/aesthetics.html (accessed 25.05.2023)
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Ethics comes from the Greek word ethos meaning morals, character or custom. It is one of the

major braches of philosphy that deals with the rightness or wrongness of a human act. Its first

principle is “good must be done and evil must be avoided. Further, is called moral philosophy,

the discipline concerned with what is morally good and bad and morally right and wrong. The

term is also applied to any system or theory of moral values or principles. Ethics deals with

asking questions at all levels. Its subject consists of the fundamental issues of practical decision

making, and its major concerns include the nature of ultimate value and the standards by which

human actions can be judged right or wrong.

The terms ethics and morality are closely related. It is now common to refer to ethical judgments

or to ethical principles where it once would have been more accurate to speak of moral

judgments or moral principles. These applications are an extension of the meaning of ethics. In

earlier usage, the term referred not to morality itself but to the field of study, or branch of

inquiry, that has morality as its subject matter. In this sense, ethics is equivalent to moral

philosophy.

Although ethics has always been viewed as a branch of philosophy, its all-embracing practical

nature links it with many other areas of study, including anthropology, biology, economics,

history, politics, sociology, and theology. Yet, ethics remains distinct from such disciplines

because it is not a matter of factual knowledge in the way that the sciences and other branches of

inquiry are. Rather, it has to do with determining the nature of normative theories and appl 5ying

these sets of principles to practical moral problems.

KANT’S THEORY OF BEAUTY, MORALITY AND FREEDOM AS A PRELUDE TO

SCHELLEKELS’ AESTHETICS AND MORALITY RELATIONSHIP

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As earlier stated, shellekels was greatly influenced by the works of Immanueal Kant especially

his theory of beauty and good in his critique of judgments in which he argues for the relationship

between beauty (aesthetics) and morality (ethics). He opined that the works of art enforces its

moral value. As Kant sees it, beauty thus gives sensible form to ideas(2000: §60; 356); the

symbolic presentation of the idea of through the experience of beauty is the only form available

for the presentationn as to sense because, on Kant’s account, moral ideas cannot in themselves be

presented to the senses (because they are purely rational ideas). Through the experience of

beauty. In other words, we are given a sensible representation of the relation between reason and

feeling in morality. Ultimately, judgments about beauty are symbols of moral freedom itself.

Beauty is the symbol of morality for Kant, then, because the experience of beauty can count as

an experience of moral freedom, and that freedom lies at the very heart of morality itself.

In section 59 of the third Critique Kant famously states the point that much of his previous

discussion has been leading up to, namely that beauty is the symbol of morality. In general, the

relation between the aesthetic and the moral takes two main expressions for Kant: one is focused

on moral feeling and the way in which beauty can attune us to such feeling; the other is

concerned with moral and aesthetic judgement and the so-called ‘autonomy’ thereof.

Kant indicates. First, a propensity to take an interest in beauty (especially beauty of nature) is

said to suggestive of ‘a good soul’ and a‘mental attunement favorable to moral feeling’ (Kant

2000: §42;298-9). Experiencing beauty thus serves as a ‘propaedeutic’ or preparation for

morality, in so far as it encourages the ‘development of moral ideas and the culture of moral

feeling’ (2000: §60;356). The beautiful, Kant states, ‘prepares us to love something, even nature,

without interest’ (2000: §29; 266-7). That is to say, the admiration of beauty teaches us to love

things for themselves, or without referring to what they can do for us. This idea that things in
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themselves are the objects of our moral and aesthetic perceptions is crucial to Kant’s approach.

Second, beauty serves as the symbol of morality in that an aesthetic judgement ‘legislates for

itself and is not ‘subjected to a heteronomy of laws of experience’ (2000: §59; 353). That is to

say, judgements about beauty are not governed by rules; they are not the result of inferential

reasoning. Instead, they are always based on the subject’s individual experience of a certain kind

of pleasure. The idea that judgements about beauty must always be based on the subject’s own

feeling of pleasure does not necessarily restrain its epistemological reach: for Kant, aesthetic

judgements demand universal assent (2000: §59). An aesthetic judgement is thus not merely one

individual subject’s report of her purely idiosyncratic experience of a thing’s aesthetic character.

Instead, such a judgement reflects how subjects in general respond aesthetically to a certain

object, for an aesthetic judgement’s claim to universal agreement is grounded in the idea that we

all have the same mental abilities and that those abilities operate in very similar ways in

comparable circumstances. So, it is in virtue of having the same mental make-up, so to speak,

that my aesthetic judgement of a particular object demands your and all other subjects’

agreement too: if I experience a certain thing in a specific way, then so will you and everyone

else because our minds all function in the same fashion. Aesthetic judgements, in this way, have

the same normative scope as moral judgements for Kant.

Elisabeth Schellekens’ view of aesthetics and her contribution

Schellekens did not set out to define aesthetics neither did was her goal to define ethics/morality.

In her book Aesthetics and Morality she endorsed the traditional thoughts on aesthetics which

began from Plato theory of the two worlds, and his position that true beauty lies in the realm of

forms. However, beauty still exists in the world of becoming but it is just a copy of the true

beauty that exist in the world of form. Such beauty is experienced through perception by the
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senses. Thus, Schellekens opined that the works of art reflects beauty that has an ontological

basics. Nevertheless, her goal was to reconcile aesthetics and morality. To her, both are the same

and they need no distinctions. Her contribution to the study of ethics will be stated in succeeding

paragraphs

In her book aesthetics and Morality, Schellekens begins her investigation of the relationship

between aesthetics and ethics by tracking the limits of the aesthetic. She goes through two

influential accounts of aesthetic experience, Monroe Beardsley’s view of aesthetic experience as

a unified, intensive, and complex mental state and Jerome Stolnitz’s aesthetic attitude theory,

however, finding them both unsatisfactory, at least as attempts to nail down the necessary and

sufficient conditions of aesthetic experience. However, Schellekens thinks there is a positive side

to these failures. That aesthetic experience cannot be neatly demarcated from other kinds of

experience and that the elements that have an effect on it cannot be exhaustively singled out in

her view actually provides a fruitful basis for exploring the ways in which the realms of the

aesthetic and that of the moral, might intersect and interact with one another. Despite finding it

impossible to list definitive criteria for aesthetic experience, Schellekens nevertheless believes

that it is tightly connected with the notion of aesthetic value. Aesthetic experience is primarily

the experience of aesthetic value. Schellekens hopes that by extracting this variant of value, and

by investigating the position other kinds of value have within the realm of art, we will achieve a

better grasp of how aesthetic value is related to them, particularly to moral value. 6

Schellekens offers a more detailed examination of the effect a work’s moral content can have on

its aesthetic and artistic value by going through the different positions that have been presented

in debates on the issue within analytic aesthetics – autonomism, moderate moralism, ethicism,

sophisticated aestheticism, immoralism, and most moderate moralism – as well as discussing

some historical theories, mainly Bell’s formalism and Tolstoy’s moralist theory of art, that have

a direct bearing on the issue. As noted, the position Carroll supports, that is, “moderate

moralism” has been an important initiator in the current debate. Carroll famously holds that in

some cases the moral value of a work can have an effect on its aesthetic value. This is

particularly so in cases where a work prescribes an attitude from the audience to its characters

and events portrayed in the work that the audience cannot take on because of the morally

reprehensible character of the proposed outlook. In these kinds of cases, the moderate moralist

claims, the reprehensible moral content of the work will reduce the work’s aesthetic

value.7According to Schellekens, there is a set of artworks that occupy a particularly vital

position with respect to the question of the relevance of an artwork’s moral outlook to its overall

value as art. These are cases where a work seems worthy of artistic praise because of the morally

reprehensible outlook it prescribes audience members to take on. She lists some concrete

instances of artworks in which this arguably is the case, In other words, in which, the work’s

artistic success is explained by the work’s morally reprehensible character. These examples fly in

the face of the moralist’s view of the effect of a work’s moral reprehensibility on its aesthetic

value.

The third part of her book on Aesthetics and Morality addresses the relationship between ethics

and aesthetics from the perspective of art’s and aesthetic experience’s capacity to function in

moral education as a means to an improved moral life. This discussion is set up in the final

chapter of the previous part of the book with an illuminating discussion of what it might mean

for an artwork to convey moral knowledge. Some of the reflections found on the educational

power of art and the aesthetic are developed on the basis of an assumption seeming to imply that

ethics and aesthetics are indeed one and the same. Aesthetic experience’s, or to be more exact,
7
Ibid.
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beauty’s ability to improve moral perception serves for some as a sign that beauty and moral

goodness are, in fact, tied to each other on a metaphysical level. They are, in other words, two

instances of the same thing. Beauty of a soul is a mark of a virtuous person and the love of

beauty is identical with the love of the good. In the history of aesthetics, Plato and Thomas Reid

can be singled out as holding some variant of this view, but it also receives a contemporary

expression in Colin McGinn’s 8aesthetic theory of virtue.

EVALUATION OF ELIZABETH SCHELLEKENS’ RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN

AESTHETICS AND MORALITY

After an intense study of Schellekens’ contribution to aesthetics i.e her relationship between

aesthetics and ethics, I found her work commendable because it portrayed scholarliness and deep

reflection. According to Kalle Puolakka her attitude towards these conceptions of beauty and

moral goodness seems to be a bit of two minds. She believes they embody some important truths,

but simultaneously Schellekens finds the metaphysical underpinnings of these views

objectionable. For her, they are primary examples of views where ethics and aesthetics are

considered to be one and the same, and this of course squares rather badly with Schellekens’

skeptical attitude towards universal conceptions of that relationship. In other words, the views

emphasizing the essential connection between beauty and moral goodness are right in drawing

attention to the positive impact that art and other aesthetic objects may have on moral perception

and on moral life, but the metaphysical package they bring into the explanation just needs to be

dropped. The relationship between the aesthetic and the moral should in this case be understood

in more pragmatic terms. Aesthetic and moral perception are united in that they require the

utilization of similar mental capacities and Schellekens rounds up her investigation of this topic

8
Ibid.
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with a nice discussion of the role the imagination occupies in both aesthetic and moral life and

how they can mutually reinforce one another.

In my own view, I do not think aesthetics is totally the same as morality/ethics. The concept of

good, which is crucial to ethics can be predicated on a work of art (aesthetics). However, ethics

goes deeper into making judgment from the point of view of rightness or wrongness of a human

act which the scope of aesthetics do not cover. Hence, to me, ethics or morality as the case my be

flavours aesthetic judgement rather than equates it. They are not totally the same.

CONCLUSION

This paper has been able to expose schellekens’ contribution to the study of ethics which is

hinged on the fact that both aesthetics and morality are the same because the question of value

occupies a centre stage. To make this work more scientific, I was able to give a brief biography

of schellekens, delve into kants theory of beauty, morlaity and freedom which was a motivating

factor to schellekens’ thoughts on aesthetics being connected with morality.