An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art

help us remain alert to life’s possibilities and our own potentialities. This is a

benefit that is neither merely aesthetic, nor solely moral: it is both at once.^105

That art helps us to honor in our imagination commanding moral ideals that

we cannot wholly honor in our present conduct is a way, even the central

way, of keeping alive our full humanity in its complex directedness toward

and by those ideals. Without art morality becomes either emptily abstract or

conventionalistically rigoristic; with art morality becomes complexly legible

as fundamental to the complicated textures of our lives.

(^105) Hanson,“How Bad Can Good Art Be?,”p. 222.
252 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art