
	Many a great thinker has postulated an intimate connection between ethics and aesthetics, between truth and beauty. I believe that at a fundamental level there is a reason for this. As John Keats says in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty- That is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Much of what we know in life is learned via education or experience. However, we seem to appreciate ethics and aesthetics, as Keats implies, without being taught in these expected ways. Both ethics and aesthetics are an attempt to describe rather then prescribe. Our studies of morality and beauty are, for the most part, attempts to explain why a piece of art or literature is beautiful, or why an action is moral, rather than a set of rules for judging, or creating, good art or moral behavior. 
	More to the point, criticism of art or morals is never able to fully capture the essence of what is good or what is beautiful. A conversation about the worth of da Vinci's Mona Lisa, for example, may center around concepts like foreground, background, contrast, or cultural context, but in the end, these do not describe why it is good art. Rather, when one is asked about a favorite work of art or literature it is common to hear a phrase similar to, “There's just something about it” preceding a more complex or critical explanation. I believe that both art and morals can never be completely reduced to a description of their qualities. As Flannery O'Connor says, “A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way . . . you tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.” No matter how completely we describe the properties of a work of literature, there is something transcendent which is still left. I believe that ethics has this same property. As Wittgenstein says, “It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. / Ethics is transcendental. / . I suggest that it is this “something”, this je ne sais quoi, which is art and morality's most powerful attribute, and that this transcendental nature of both ethics and aesthetics provides a connection point between them.
	I believe that morality and art are so closely related because we experience both of them most powerfully at a noumenally, to use a Kantian term. They impact us at a level that can be experienced, but not fully explained. This link is even stronger when it comes to the art of literature. As McKean says, “What most distinguishes literature from the other arts, what is, in truth, unique about the art, is its moral quality. It may be that moral standards are inappropriate to other arts, music, for instance, but they seem to be as relevant to literature as they are to life itself. Living necessarily involves values. . . . Literature is important to us precisely because of the values we find there” .
