Frances to William and others... In regard to the aesthetic beauty of an artistic work which property is sensed by a competent individual, and if this approach to the issue may be posed by a lurker in the wings, consider the Peircean pragmatist position on an expert doing the science of phenomenology by personally observing given phenomena and then expressing the feelings of whatever objective fleeting haze seems to be subjectively felt as posited by the given stuff. The expression of observation itself by the sole expert however is insufficient and inadequate to satisfy the pragmatist tenets of science. The expressions must be shared by some relevant collective community of similar experts who share such expressions of observations. It is this collection of expressions upon at least a tentative agreement that then goes to the scientific explanation and definition of the given phenomena. The individual in the communal is what conditionally works at being science. The seeming fleeting haze of phenomenal stuff assumed to be felt in the normal human mind simply cannot yield concrete samples needed for actual tests with utile tools in empirical labs, therefore some combined group of expressed reports by learned experts must suffice. That haze might be of stuff like deity or infinity or quality or beauty or purity or unity and so on. All the mind can do is make a good guess, and hope others share the opinion. The felt sense of haze furthermore makes the stuff real. The seeming haze and its stuff are therefore only as real as the feeling of sense. The phenomenon may indeed exist objectively and even as a fact, but if nothing of it can eventually be sensed in mind, then that phenomenal haze or stuff will not be real. There is hence in pragmatist science a clear difference to be made between quality and factuality and actuality and reality.
-----Original Message----- From: William Conger [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, November 13, 2009 9:55 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: If I say a thing is beautiful, how can I convince you that certain p roperties of that thing are in fact beautiful? What Miller now calls aesthetics is nothing but unexamined personal opinion. If the question of aesthetics is simply reduced to unexamined and therefore unarguable solipsistic opinions, then why even discuss the subject or even mention it at all? When something is so personal, so subjective, as to vanish as a topic of inquiry even as it's mentioned, then it really doesn't exist as something that can be discussed. But Miller goes even further to equate this unexamined personal solipsism as the only identifier of art (as opposed to his use of the term "fashion"), which, if we dare to apply logic, requires us to admit that art cannot be mentioned, let alone identified independently of the solipsist. The alternative to this dead-end sort of thinking is to argue that there is some sharable, something public, about both aesthetics and art. So what is that? One position is that the sharable elements are in the art object or contained by a definition of aesthetic experience. Another is that the sharable element is in some cultural experience termed aesthetic; and the third position argues for an organic relationship between the elements in the art object and the cultural experience of it. Miller's position is outside of any arena of discussion because its authenticity requires absolute isolation, absolute solipsism. But this is his position on many issues. He's quite content to defend it by simply demanding that he is right. A few others here, such as Mando and Boris, follow the same formula for credibility. They make aphoristic assertions. There's no logic, no argument, no evidence, no persuasion. In logic it's called the Appeal to Authority. It has its self-serving place, I suppose, in some fundamentalist religions, totalitarian regimes, slavery, prisons, advertising, but the whole tradition of intellectual civilization, it has no place. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Chris Miller <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Fri, November 13, 2009 7:58:35 AM Subject: If I say a thing is beautiful, how can I convince you that certain p roperties of that thing are in fact beautiful? But is this question really "a problem in aesthetics" (as Kate asserted yesterday) any more than "intelligent design" is a problem in biology? Biologists are never going to convince creationists about the validity of evolution, and they don't need to. And creationists don't need to concern themselves with biology. Their concerns belong in a church, not a research facility. Just as those who dispute the physical basis of beauty should be studying history or psychology or sociology or cognitive science instead of aesthetics. In Chapter 2 of "The Art Instinct" Dutton retraced the history of aesthetics from Aristotle to Kant, demonstrating that they all recognized the existence of the beautiful object or well-written tragedy, and that recognition continued into the 20th C. up until post-modernism, where objects no longer have qualities, they only have interpretations. But even our resident post-modernists believe that Mando is simply wrong when he denies the aesthetic quality of Manet's last painting. As you might recall, Wiliam's first reaction to Mando's apostasy was to suggest that after Mando had read the relevant literature (i.e. the interpretations) he would doubtless change his mind. But eventually, when it became clear that regardless of interpretations, Mando simply felt "Manet had lost it" , William could only deride Mando's response as "truly funny". So I have no doubt that aesthetics will survive post-modernist skepticism, even as it survived the extreme doctrines of formalism. It will just take people who are more interested in art than in following intellectual fashion.
