My Son, the Aesthetic Philosopher

I got a chuckle this morning when I found a rock that Sean put in my pocket this past weekend at the beach. He was dutifully beachcombing and stumbled on this rock and said, "Da-dee, buuuuuuu-tiful."

Here it is on my desk:


I kept trying to figure out why I found that moment particularly satisfying. My guess is that I was proud that he just saw something for what it was. It wasn't candy he could eat, or a toy he could play with. Just something that he saw beauty in of itself. It was pretty cool.

I found it particularly amazing, given all the parenting books have me prepped for the terrible twos. That is to say, that most of child rearing and is based on trial and error, conditioning, and cause and effect. "Don't give candy for sitting nicely, don't cheer when he goes potty, etc."

While pragmatic for a new parent, it's disheartening for a(n ex-?) rationalist philosopher.

In college, I had to scrap an thesis based on the ideal of rationalist moral development in children, and this little rock sometimes gives me a glimmer of hope. I took very little aesthetics in school (very little = harvardspeak for "none"), but I recall hearing that Kant talking about the fact that beauty has to be disinterested. His position is well summarized here on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

[Beauty] “pleases,” certainly, but in a distinctive intellectual way. Pure beauty, in other words, simply holds our mind’s attention: we have no further concern than contemplating the object itself. Perceiving the object in such cases is an end in itself; it is not a means to a further end, and is enjoyed for its own sake alone

(So what, I had to look up a summary. Do you think I am cracking open the Critique of Pure Judgment (e-text, enjoy) at this stage of my life?).

This idea of aesthetics also opens up the philosopher to a little more interpretation that Kantian moral theory. Beauty isn't necessarily a property of an object, but rather the relation of the object to the observer, so long as the person is reasonable, Kant would hold that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." I tried to spend some time finding what Sean found in the pebble, and this was the best that I could come up with:


I get a glimmer of hope sometimes in that Sean is making value judgments that are innate and disinterested. This all works with the idea of empathy, consequence, and other more traditional ways of parenting. I think that a 2 year old can think and has reason in some capacity.

We just have to work to find it, and cultivate it in appropriate doses.

Anyhoo, it was damn satisfying as a parent philosopher.