[lit-ideas] Re: Science as Aesthetics?
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 8 May 2009 19:37:40 EDT
In a message dated 5/8/2009 4:30:51 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx writes:
doesn't that make physics
-- or superstring physics anyway -- a branch of
aesthetics?
--- Nide gesture, ... coming from a poet!
I want to be the nasty philosopher here and query, query, query...
In the torture of my education, I had to undergo if that's the word _two_
seminars in aesthetics: neither the professor seemed to have an idea of what
he was talking about, although I fell in love with the _second_ professor.
Anyway, 'aesthetics', I found ("Aisthetik", I think is the German spelling)
was coined by Baumgarten, I forget what for!
For the Greeks, though, and we discussed elsewhere this with R. Paul (vis a
vis Sibley, once of Ithaca), it's all about _aisthesis_.
Apparently, consider
(1) It's cold in here.
(2) It's warm in here.
(3) It's hot in here.
(4) It's freezing in here.
All those are reports of _sensation_ (of one particular _sense_, actually
-- see Urmson, The Object of the Five Senses). Baumgarten, I think, was
into (I've just coined this), 'kallologia', the science of 'to kallon', or
beauty. Beauty is a Latinate, artificial concept in English, best translated as
'nice'.
(5) It's nice in here.
Does _not_ report an aesthetic phenomenon, but what I call (to tease Yost)
a 'meta-aesthetic' phenomenon. For surely if the point of (5) is a
commentary on the room temperature, I would understand it as being short for
(6) If "It's warm in here" then "It's nice in here"
one scare quote more or less.
-----
In other words, aesthetics, as understood by Baumgarten, but not the
Greeks, started with 'meta-sensational' properties:
(7) Warmth is a pleasant, nice, sensation.
The addition of 'pleasant' (Gk. 'hedone') makes for a complication I'm
always ready to buy.
In my scheme (followed by C. Lord in "A Gricean Account of Art", British
Journal of Aesthetics" -- and no, I'm not instilling Gricean formula on P.
Stone!) then:
-- it's all about _pleasure_
and _a posteriori_
-- all about niceties.
--- So, I buy the argument that 'the beauty in mathematics' is an ideal,
and even in string-theory. I'm just not sure if we want to say of this that
it constitutes an 'aesthetic' if by that we are going to understand
_another_ science, this time of _beauty_.
Etc.
J. L. Speranza
Buenos Aires, Argentina
**************Remember Mom this Mother's Day! Find a florist near you now.
(http://yellowpages.aol.com/search?query=florist&ncid=emlcntusyelp00000006)
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