From: dliebman@terapin.com (David Liebman)
Newsgroups: alt.postmodern
Subject: Re: postmodern knowledge and beauty
Date: 1 Oct 92 17:18:17 PST
Organization: BBS

[gcf]
>> So about the most we can say about beauty is that it is a
>> relationship between an object, which seems to have some
>> kind of valence or activity in its form towards beauty, and
>> a receiver who has a corresponding valence,}xa lock for the
>> key or a key for the lock.  Beyond that, things get fairly
>> mystical, and we have to start talking about sublimation
>> and the like, or about parts of the True Being separated
>> at creation seeking one another, as the two sexes were
>> supposed by some Classical writers to be.
 
i dislike the lock-and-key metaphor.  it implies beauty as a static
potential, a pure cohesion, a conclusion, foreclosing consideration
of the aesthetic as participant in a dynamic, an effort -- perhaps a
grasping motion.
 
the other thing that intrigues me about these sorts of discussion is
that beauty is positioned as a singularity.  what's striking is that
we'd rarely consider 'beautiful' an adequate review when considering
the particular, yet -- through the shifting of subtle hormones, maybe --
we are every so often compelled towards this absurd gloss.  'sublime'
is indeed a better choice -- the transcendent, the empty.
 
[gcf]
>> Each requires somebody to experience its beauty.  Or so I 
>> think.  I'm one of those who would say that, if everyone in 
>> the universe died and "The Mountains above Ste. Remy" were
>> gathering dust in an empty museum, it would no longer be
>> beautiful, in fact, it would no longer be a painting.
>> (Unless there were a god who remembered what it was to be
>> human.)
 
[bh]
>When a ruin is buried under the earth it is beautiful.  For if I dig it up
>the ruin I find beauty in a culture that I have never seen before, that I
>had no way to form any judgement on,  where is the beauty,  where was the
>beauty before I dug it up?

as gordon mentioned, the object is not just a whole, it is a gestalt
of qualities, an interaction of (neurologically and culturally) bounded
forms, and it seems worthwile to consider that we do not perceive every
object as entirely unique.
 
>1.  Forms suck.
 
ah. i stand corrected.
 
>But it is important to distinguish external and internal relationships.  TO
>say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder says that the relationship is
>internal.  To say that it is a relationship "between" object [and a subject]
>IMPLIES an externalness to the relationship.
 
>You assert that the object doe snot posses the beauty without the self, 
>but I think that self is another class of objects of my experience.  That
>by positiong these powers to self that do not belong to other objects you
>are making an artifical distinction that gains you nothing.  Is the beauty
>in the book or in the self?  Either way it is in an object of my
>experience.
 
perhaps what is involved in apprehending the aesthetic is a perception of
the object, and a perception of the self, and a perspective of the relation
between self-object and art object.  but this hints at a third point,
where the self examines the relation between the object and its image.
this third point in turn requires its own objectification, and a fourth.
this progressively burdensome geometry demonstrates its _inevitable_
artificiality.
 
regards,
dave
 
Newsgroups: alt.postmodern,alt.cascade,alt.slack,talk.bizarre