"Aesthetic Value as the Highest Good: The very Idea(s)" - Thursday, August 11 - 10 am PDT - 12 noon

In this talk we explore the idea of what we call ‘aesthetic suprematism’: the idea that aesthetic value has a kind of priority among goods -- namely, that it is the highest good. Versions of this kind of position have been associated with Plato, various Christian mystics, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wilde, and Vasconcelos, among others. Our goal here is to try to articulate the basic thought underlying aesthetic suprematism, and to then disentangle various ways of articulating it to see how aesthetic suprematism in various guises compares with more familiar non-aesthetic value suprematisms.

After a quick sketch of the basic idea of aesthetic suprematism and some of its motivations (§2), we outline the more general idea of value suprematism and also differentiate several senses in which a value can be claimed to be the ‘highest’ (illustrating these ideas through some of its non-aesthetic instantiations) (§3).  We then bring this broader framework to bear on a more careful analysis of aesthetic suprematism in order to illuminate how the claim that aesthetic value is the ‘highest’ can be seen likewise to come in these various grades (§4); here we also sketch some of the arguments that might be offered in support the various grades. In conclusion, we will take up some worries that will likely have arisen along the way, and signal some key issues that remain to be discussed (§5).  

Our hope is to lay the groundwork for making aesthetic suprematism both a serious and sophisticated contender in contemporary value theory (in general debates about meaning and value), and also a central topic for people working in aesthetics – who (we suspect) would be especially interested in the possibility that aesthetic value reigns supreme.