Biting the Bullet: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Violence

THE BULLET'S SONG: ROMANTIC VIOLENCE AND UTOPIA, by William Pfaff. New York. Simon & Schuster, 2004, 368 pp.

REGARDING THE PAIN OF OTHERS, by Susan Sontag. New York, Picador, 2003, 131 pp.

In the nineteenth century a broadly influential branch of Romantic philosophy insisted that goodness and beauty were intimately related. The goals of ethical and aesthetic education were taken to be one and the same—the cultivation of the kalokagathos or "noble-and-beautiful" individual. This robust view of the relation between ethical and aesthetic education is now rarely defended; it was dealt a mortal wound by the inconvenient fact that highly cultured or Gebildete individuals have been implicated in the twentieth century's worst political crimes.