Philosophy East and West

Elegant is the junzi he is as if cut, as if filed; as if chiseled, as if polished; how freshly bright; how refined. . . .

The Book of Odes 55

The good, of course, is always beautiful.

Plato, Timaeus 87c

[The Spartans] sense that the virtues are like music. They vibrate at a higher, nobler pitch.

Steven Pressfield, Gates of Fire

To "give style" to one's character—a great and rare art!

Friedrich Nietzsche

To become a work of art is the object of living.

Oscar Wilde

Feminist and postmodern critics appear to have placed the final nail in the coffin of the traditional idea of ethics as obedience to a moral code. For postmodernists, universal moral laws are the ethical expression of logocentric and essentialist thinking and are more intelligibly conceived as abstractions from particular moral decision making. Feminists are more specific in their claim that this type of morality represents one of the most pervasive forms of patriarchy—to wit: the tyranny of the divine father who created the rules and the earthly fathers who have enforced them. Both deontological and utilitarian perspectives also assume a disembodied, impersonal self, which is a pale and misleading shadow of our own engaged personal agency. In his book From Morality to Virtue, Michael Slote criticizes Kant for his moral asymmetry —for example, the failure to help is wrong only when applied to others and not to the self. He also critiques utilitarianism for its reductionism and, at least in its Singerian form, its unreasonable moral demands such as the voluntary equalization of living standards.

The most constructive response to the crisis in moral theory has been the revival of virtue ethics, an ethics that has the advantages of being personal, contextual, and, as I will argue, normative as well. In this essay I will also propose that the best way to refound virtue ethics is to return to the Greek concept of technē tou biou, literally "craft of life." The ancients did not distinguish between craft and fine arts, and the meaning of technē, even in its Latin form of ars, still retains the meaning of skillful crafting and discipline. In Greco-Roman culture these techniques were very specific, covering dietetics, economics, and erotics. In ancient China moral cultivation was intimately connected to the arts, from the art of archery to poetry, music, and dance such that virtually every activity would have both a moral and an aesthetic meaning.

A Chinese poet of the Book of Odes conceives of moral development as similar [End Page 280] to the manufacture of a precious stone. At birth we are like uncut gems, and we have an obligation to carve and polish our potential in the most unique and beautiful ways possible. Using R. D. Collingwood's distinction between craft and fine art, I propose that the fine arts, particularly the performing arts of music and dance, can serve as a model for virtue ethics in our times. I will also demonstrate that Confucian philosophy has much to contribute to this project, although I want to emphasize that I am making a contemporary appropriation of an ancient view that did not recognize the full range of individual creativity that the fine-art model allows. Furthermore, I will argue that a contemporary virtue aesthetics need not assume the identity of goodness and beauty, one that leads to the classical conundrum of the evil artist.

The first section will use Michel Foucault's insightful study of Greco-Roman ethics and compare it to Confucian philosophy. The second section will propose a comparison between Confucius' concept of appropriate action (yi) and Aristotle's concept of practical reason (phronēsis). The third section will demonstrate that phronēsis is a form of synthetic reason, which is then related to the distinction between rational and aesthetic order. The fourth section is a discussion of virtue aesthetics in the history of Confucian philosophy. The fifth and final section will return to Aristotle and argue that the fine arts model for virtue ethics essentially undermines Aristotle's distinction between artistic making (poēsis) and moral practice (praxis).