I am not sure if this made through before - it seems to have gotten lost
somewhere in JL's Seas of Language.
"I think the Mona Lisa is beautiful, but I don't like it."
Doesn't strike me as a paradox at all. It only shows that aesthetic
appreciation is different from (and not necessarily co-extensive with)
purely subjective liking, a point at least as old as Kant's Critique of
Judgment. (And perhaps as old as the Mona Lisa, if we grant that art can
express ideas.) I also might think that a real woman whom I met is
beautiful while not liking her much. On the other hand, I like squids while
I don't think that they are aesthetically beautiful.
On Fri, Apr 10, 2015 at 2:46 AM, Mike Geary <jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Philosophy has fascinated me since high school, through college and even
somewhat today. It has fascinated me because it seemed to feed into my
desire (need) to know if there is any reason or goal or purpose to our
existence or is it all just a phantasmagorical dance of electromagnetic
radiation? I had hoped that buried in the arcane propositions of
philosophy there might me a rational response to my need to know. I long
ago abandoned religion, that ancient dispenser of meaning as nothing more
than mythical deification of our ignorance. Like all human beings I stand
around scratching my ass and wondering why I'm here. Perhaps I haven't
been after philosophy so much as wanting something to fill the hole left by
lost religion. I kept hoping that some fundamental core truth would turn
up -- something like the old cogito, an indisputable starting point to
build a new moi-secular, moi-humanist moi-religion upon. But then old
cogito doesn't really get us anywhere at all, does it? So is there any
such starting point then? What can we look to that might open us up to
experiencing the essense of existence? The rock to build our Purpose on.
I notice that I used the word "experiencing" instead of "knowing" --
seeing that, I now think that "experiencing" might be most on target with
what now drives me. In respect to existence, maybe "meaning" is nothing
more than our emotional responses to our experiencing of existence. Maybe
"knowing" is nothing more that experiencing our own emotional life. Or so
I'm now wondering. If language is the dress of thought, as Johnson once
said, then maybe emotion is the nakedness of meaningful existence. So saith
I. Now I just need to build an ethics based on my aesthetics. I send this
as a kind of apologia for my inability to engage in 90% of the discussions
here.
On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 1:08 PM, Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I think that I can already see one of those causal theories coming,
something like:
X appreciates p iff:
1. x likes p
2. p is beautiful
3. x's liking of p is caused by the beauty of p
Something in those lines.
O.K.
On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 7:46 PM, Mike Geary <jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx
wrote:
JLS: "A science of aesthetics, Æsthetica, would be, for Baumgarten, a
deduction
of the rules or principles of artistic or natural beauty from
individual 'taste'."
"Rules or principles of artistic or natural beauty"
???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
"Rules or principles"? Ach, nevermind.
On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 11:04 AM, Redacted sender Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx for
DMARC <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
My last post today!
Perhaps we too easily think that Greek 'aisthesis' translates as Latin
'sensatio'. Just looking up 'sentio' in Short/Lewis's Latin dictionary
(below
*) makes one realise that there is more to Greek aisthesis than meets
the
eye,
sentĭo: I Physically. to discern by the senses; to feel, hear, see,
etc.;
to perceive, be sensible of. To perceive the effects (esp. the ill
effects)
of any thing; to feel, experience, suffer, undergo, endure. Of things,
to
be affected or influenced by. To feel, perceive, observe, notice. To
feel,
experience. To think, deem, judge, opine, imagine, suppose. To give
one's
opinion concerning any thing; to vote, declare, decide. Hence, sensa:
thoughts, notions, ideas, conceptions.
-- and one wonders which of these usages of Latin 'sentio' do
correspond to
this famous Greek 'aesthetic' sense that fascinated Kant.
On the other hand, one can then understand Gombrich's evasiveness if
that's
what it is about being an 'aesthetician':
On being asked about "how does someone such as yourself, whose expertise
and whose life's work has been in the area of ... aesthetics, find
Popper's
work of so much value?": "[A]esthetics is not really one of my main
interests
—I see myself much more as a historian than as a critic or
aesthetician."
But then he wrote "The Story of Art", which brought him recently to
Lit-Ideas, rather than an "Aesthetics" like Baumgarten.
Baumgarten appropriated the word "Æsthesis", which had always meant
"sensation", to mean taste or "sense" of beauty.
In so doing, Baumgarten gave the word a different significance, thereby
inventing a modern usage.
The word had been used differently since the time of the ancient Greeks
and
Romans to mean the ability to receive stimulation from one or more of
the
five bodily senses. In his Metaphysic, § 451, Baumgarten defined
taste, in
its wider meaning, as the ability to judge according to the senses,
instead
of according to the intellect.
Such a judgment of taste he saw as based on feelings of pleasure or
displeasure.
A science of aesthetics, Æsthetica, would be, for Baumgarten, a
deduction
of the rules or principles of artistic or natural beauty from individual
"taste".
Baumgarten may have been motivated to respond to Pierre Bonhours'
opinion,
published in a pamphlet in the late 17th century, that Germans were
incapable of appreciating art and beauty -- but the fact that
Baumgarten replied
in German (knowing Pierre Bonhours' German was rather poor --
implicating
perhaps 'incapable of appreciating innuendos and such') makes one
rather want
to FALSIFY that!
Sibley famously widened the term 'aesthetic' to include the conceptual
analysis of 'ugly'. His example is that of a toad, that, he says, some
people
regard as 'ugly'. (While Sibley preferred, unlike Baumgarten, to
restrict
'taste' to ONE of the five senses). But then, Sibley belonged to J. L.
Austin's Play Group, based in Oxford (aka Oxford School of Ordinary
Language
Philosophy) and surely you need a training in linguistic botany to
appreciate
THAT!
Cheers,
Speranza
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