The premises of my argument3uGH7D4MLj wrote: (Nested quote removed.)
I've tried to consider your strongly held point but I'm not making much progress. Weren't belief in the four humours and the geocentric universe also archaic necessities? I haven't had much experience with the word truth used as a stand alone concept, and I'm having trouble getting a handle on it now. Can you talk more about truth or give me a link to what you mean by it? Does it refer to a reliable system of knowledge about reality?
I can see beauty as an attribute of art but not a requirement. It may even indicate a slide toward prettiness. We've all seen beautiful artworks, ok, but what about Anselm Kiefer? I see beauty as referring to such a wide and subjective spectrum of qualities, who can say? It's a useful word, but always qualified and personal. cultural, it doesn't seem rigorous enough to stand by itself.
When you talk about truth and beauty I don't know what you mean.
There are certain essential features of human consciousness, the way we organise and interpret experience, which are common to all cultures across all times. Variations of 'truth' and 'beauty' are two of these; 'god' is a variation on both. I don't mean that experience is the same across cultures, but the presuppostions of experience are; this amounts only to 1. accepting the influence of 'nature' as well as 'nurture' in human life; 2. positing that nature can have potential conceptual content.
The 'proof' of this, is that there is always a foundation underlying people's thought;
"If I have exhausted the justification, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned,. Then I am inclined to say 'This is simply what I do." - Wittgenstein.
The problem with Wittgenstein here is that no one is really inclined to say 'This is simply what I do', and that is where the categories of truth and beauty emerge; at the 'bedrock' of human experience.
So I am not saying 'truth' and 'beauty' are essential categories in themselves, but that the bedrock of human consciousness depends on some conceptual content, and 'truth' and 'beauty' are the general names for those concepts.
The proof for truth here would be the paradox of skeptical knowledge claims; 'Do you know nothing' - 'Yes' (there is no way to avoid positing truth).
The four humours are clearly cultural specific - that is why they seem odd to us; we feel the cultural distance, the cultural specificity. But all cultures have concepts of god, beauty and truth, though they are manifested in different ways. There are enough parallels to call them the same thing; if I have lots of apples of different shapes and sizes, I call them all apples. It is true that everyone experiences beauty in a different way, but by the same argument, everyone experiences beauty.