Is the beautiful moral? Lars von Trier, Schiller and Kant on morality of the work of art

Abstract

The point of departure is a film by Lars von Trier, The House That Jack Built (2018). The most striking aspect of this film is that Jack has grounds for his actions. By committing a serial murder he is creating a work of art. He has his own primitive philosophy and affirms two theses: firstly,that art is the highest type of human activity and, secondly, that to be moral means to belong to the human herd. In spite of the primitiveness of these theses it is hard to disprove them. The common thesis in the Enlightenment was formulated by Diderot, Shaftesbury, and Winckelmann who claimed that aesthetic education favours morality. Schiller in his work, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), espouses the same view but tries to ground the position in philosophy, showing that beauty is a balance between reality and form. We can explain modern art. If a painter is only interested in the formal aspects, he is producing art and not engaged in the moral aspects at all. Then I turn to Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment and reformulate his categorical imperative from the point of view of aesthetics: Create only according to the principle that the result of your creation will have universal acceptance! We can agree that it will not be achievable because the most important element for every artist is the freedom of creation. I insist that the most appropriate way is to analysegenius as the unifying form of human creative action.