Beauty Does Not Exist
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Re: Beauty Does Not Exist
- Apeman
- Posts: 155
- Joined: January 22nd, 2010, 10:52 pm
Re: Beauty Does Not Exist
Seemingly intelligent individuals have been preoccupied with the search for all brands of universialities. The things they learned along the way provided effectively for the usual (unsplendid) march of facility. But 'fathoming', the task - or obligation - of a separated thinker, requires that one AVOID the dull mean of meaningfulness that arrives by a cross-conceptual unity. Such is a fiction - regaled by only little language. They all left this world far from what they might have been. "beauty" is insignificant...it is a judging, a comparison, a bigotry, a predudice or an UNoriginal and uninspired and spoonfed resolution. only a sucker would buy into beauty. Significant forces abound, hand made...man-made...they are out there for every individual's assessment/appreciation/rejection; and they dont deserve the disrespect of being called just "beautiful". For shame.
Si
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Re: Beauty Does Not Exist
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Beauty Does Not Exist
First: If beauty does exist, it is an abstractum, like a quantity or ratio. Whether abstracta have objective existence is debatable, but I believe that they do exist, because denying the existence of such things as quantities and ratios makes a needless mystery out of why mathematics, an a priori discipline, is so useful to physicists.
Second: I don't know of any arguably extant abstracta that aren't either universal (like pi) or relative in a universally determinable way (like the distance over time ratios that define velocities lower than that of light in a vacuum). I believe that all abstracta share said universal character.
Third: Since beauty does not, I believe that beauty is not an abstractum. (I use the word "believe" here because I know that my position is debatable, and don't have time to take on Plato right now.) So I agree with the thesis that to affirm beauty's "existence" is to reify a subjective correlate of states of affairs that are situated in human brains, and not in the objects that a given person calls "beautiful."
Fourth: This does not preclude the idea that different brains might be moved to call the same things "beautiful." People can be socialized to share some of their judgments about what constitutes beauty. But individual and cross-cultural differences are bound to make judgments of beauty vary irrationally from person to person or culture to culture.
Fifth: Everything connected with the discussion of beauty's ontological status constitutes a metaphysical discussion, not an aesthetic one. In my opinion, this thread has suffered from a confusion between these two types of issues. So let's get back to aesthetics.
A1: Even within a given community, in which many people share judgments about what constitutes beauty, art need not conform to such judgments in my opinion. Goya's picture of Saturn eating his son is not beautiful to anyone I know, but it is fascinating--not only because of its form but because of its subject matter. It is an artifact that fascinates us with its form and stirs our emotions with its subject matter, if the artifact has one, merely by existing within the range of our senses and attention. (For the present, I'll call this last sentence my tentative definition of a work of plastic art, even though I'm sure that better minds have come up with much better definitions. Color me unsophisticated.)
A2: I understand that beauty *can be* irrelevant to our judgment of a work of art, but I do not understand why it *must* be. One might just as well say that significant form is irrelevant, and that all works of plastic art should engage their viewers with their subject matter. Ayn Rand was one a number of people who share this view, which is reactionary in my opinion.
A3: However, I don't believe that philosophies of aesthetics are any less subjective than our actual aesthetic judgments. To me, the assertion that beauty is never relevant to judging fine art and the opposite assertion that beauty is always relevant to judging fine art are just as subjective as the judgment that stained glass windows are more beautiful than any self-portrait by Rembrandt.
- Zatoichi
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- Joined: December 8th, 2011, 10:22 am
Re: Beauty Does Not Exist
2023/2024 Philosophy Books of the Month
Mark Victor Hansen, Relentless: Wisdom Behind the Incomparable Chicken Soup for the Soul
by Mitzi Perdue
February 2023
Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature: How Civilization Destroys Happiness
by Chet Shupe
March 2023