AESTHETICAL DEONTOLOGY Nathan Coppedge SCSU ABSTRACT: Deontology is a term which has come to mean predominately concepts of will and obligation. In this piece I argue that deontology primarily signifies art, with implications for the metaphysics of logic. ------------------------------------------------------------------ There has been a long-standing clarification of metaphysical ontology which states that deontology, which is sometimes associated with the will ala Kant, is in fact a general category for forwards development ala History, and that ontology, which has often come to mean metaphysics in general, is in fact a category specifically for metaphysical discovery. While this may be trivial to assess for those in the know (and I take it to be un-trivial as a truth statement), I have rarely found any references to the idea that deontology is an aesthetic discipline. Aesthetics, I state, is an important lemma to the idea that a given thing is forwards-minded. Perhaps this lack of an aesthetic comparison is because it implicates theological pretensions. After all, seeing life-as-art has been taboo ever since Plato declared there was a divine craftsman. But so far as logic is concerned, my view is that the craftsman is a syntactical anomaly. That is not to say that terms such life-as-art have not gained some cachet in circles of the avant-garde. Indeed, they have. And, I argue, the avant-garde is presently the only measure of real intellectual ambition, since Communism (or at least Communism in the non-Capitalist sense), has been in part defeated by Post-Modern ideals. And, in my view, Post-Modernism is defeated by any new idea. Now, it may be seen as significant that deontology concerns aesthetics, as that ontology concerns criticism, as neither such discipline has been widely accepted under those conditions of terms. Thus, it becomes highly significant to combine aesthetics and criticism if there is to be any coherent idea of onto-deontology. Yet, although this claim is somewhat latent in the simple use of those words, it is evident by the use of the respective metaphysical and willful associations that that has not been accepted as the common ground for their definitions. If it were, it might be said, there could be a coherent idea of what is meant by onto-deontology. But if not, there could be no such coherence. And, given the relatively recent and ongoing obsession with the proof of incompleteness in mathematics, philosophers could hardly be consoled with anything short of this singular standard, which, because of the direct translation between the mistaken terms and the appropriate ones, serves as the only basis for any further development. That is, unless philosophy is assumed to be more corrupt than mathematics, a tenet that I may add, I am highly unwilling to believe. What is the extent of development for this golden calf of an idea, the aesthetics of deontology? For one thing, it may be rooted in ontological criticism. For another thing, it may be a reflection of aesthetics, or deontology as it is already known, or even further developments of these fields. In the sense of aesthetics of further development, it is entirely future-oriented. It could, in that sense, be expected to fall under the category of a ‘platform’ or else a ‘heuristic.’ In the sense of the ontological, it may be expected to concern ontae (classes), therefore categories, and therefore modalities, or it may be said to concern the logical, and therefore syntactics, exceptions, or categories of functions. However, the intuition is somewhat different. Starting with aesthetics, someone might deduce that it concerns value-judgments, therefore synthetics in the sense of artificial scenes which meet criteria. In the sense of the ontological, someone might expect that logic is a function of persons, or heroes which demonstrate a certain type of character. The result is a largely amoral network, a correspondence theory, which so to speak, falls prey to exceptionalism of any type, including morality. Morality becomes arbitrary. The other type, it may be said, does not fall prey to the same assumptions. Instead of ending in exceptionalism, it begins with exceptions and adduces what is NOT coincistantial or artificial. It finds a logic which succeeds or fails to meet the criteria of the arbitrary. Such a theory is more coherent, but runs the risk of missing some definite point of correspondence. It is authentic, however, so long as its own criteria are accepted. This is the so-called tautological view, which is like a director that does not always have the ability to run the performance (I have spoken about the value of the applications-based approaches in other papers, as a way of responding to this argument). Now, let us focus more obviously on the concepts of aesthetics and criticism. Remember that I treat aesthetics as a practical, largely coherent interpretation of the concept of deontology as a work of the will. Criticism, in the sense of a body of criticism, on the other hand, is a practical, largely coherent, yet perhaps overdrawn interpretation of the meaning of metaphysical ontology. The way to unify onto-deontology is to unify aesthetics and criticism. If aesthetics concerns the artificial view (what I call synthetics), then it also concerns the intuitive view, because the intuitive view is the view that creates scenes. Thus, if our method is exclusive, the critical view must be the view that is ontological, and hence seeks coherence. The aesthetic view seeks deontological correspondence. Now that we have these two primary comparisons, it becomes evident that ontology and deontology involves combining or conjugating not coherency and incoherence, but coherence and correspondence. This becomes clearer when it is associated that coherence signifies criticism and correspondence symbolizes aesthetics. Here are a number of lemmas: *Correspondent-aesthetics could be intelligence, providing a lemma for Idealist philosophies. *Coherent-criticism could be a lemma signifying the necessity of a standard of perfection in philosophy. *These previous lemmas symbolize things missing from philosophy. *The implications of these preceding lemmas involve the relationships already mentioned. *Those relationships are (coherence-correspondence, aesthetics-criticism, and onto-deontology). ---Nathan Coppedge 1/ 21/ 2014