Are values like goodness merely a matter of taste? Is a rose in full bloom really no more beautiful than one torn apart? Are all opinions about what makes a place worth living in equally valid? Can judgements about what is good, true, or beautiful ever stand on solid ground?
The latest issue of Seeds of a Second Renaissance introduces the work of Christopher Alexander, who makes the radical argument that value is an objective reality… Seeds of a Second Renaissance Issue 10 (Nov 2025) – Christopher Alexander on matter and meaning
In Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor details the evolving history of “moral sources” in the Western tradition from Plato through the modern age. For Plato, the good, the true and beautiful were metaphysical ideas, and right reason (not to mention good taste) had simply to align with them. For Augustine, reason was flawed and to properly align with the good, the true and the beautiful, one needed to encounter God through an inward journey and conversion of the wayward will. Early modern thinkers like Descartes and Locke took that inward journey in the direction of detached reason, separating the observer from the observed. From that era, Christopher Alexander would have gotten on well with the Cambridge Platonists. He would not have gotten on nearly so well with Jansenists or Puritans. In any case, the hallmark of the modern era is for moral sources to spread to the four winds and for no given moral source to be obviously self-evident to any definitive portion of society. We can thus anticipate both hearty agreement - and disagreement - with Alexander’s views on the beautiful.
The challenge for a metamodern aesthetic is to seek a “both/and” pathway through this historical thicket. “Sincere irony” sums up the initial attempt. Can something like that work? Or is Second Renaissance really a back to Plato movement (not at all dissimilar to the First Renaissance in that regard)?
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