From: rooney@cheshire.oxy.edu (Michael Sean Rooney)
Subject: Re: postmodern knowledge and beauty
Followup-To: alt.postmodern
Summary: A difficult problem
Keywords: Kant aesthetic 
Organization: Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA 90041 USA.
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1992 17:57:22 GMT

In article <1992Sep30.032632.23734@panix.com> gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:

[Gordon observes that the dictum `beauty is in the eye of the beholder'
 is a poor distinction in the face of aesthetic experience.]

>
>On the other hand, in spite of much philosophizing from the
>Greeks, and probably before, to the present day, we can't
>say for sure that beauty resides in objects or in forms.  
>Each requires somebody to experience its beauty.  
>
>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, a lock for the
>key or a key for the lock. 

	This is where that "philosophizing" of the past few centuries
comes into play.  Kant's basic problem which he broaches in the Critique
of Judgment is just how we perceive some things as `beautiful' (Kant's
word of choice is "sublime"), when there seems to be neither rational 
nor practical reasons for this relation.  Immanuel situates the aesthetic
sense ("judgment") as a faculty constructed by both human conditions of
understanding (e.g., awe before great size) and our cultural situation.
Between these Kant felt there was a "free play" (which is where Derrida
gets the term; it definitely does not mean "all interpretations are equally
valid") molded by the conditions of both.  Gordon's valences seem to
correspond.  Admittedly, over the years, opinion has leaned towards
favoring our contingent acculturation as skepticism about the transcendent 
conditions of the understanding has increased.  One might consider the
aesthetic a function of a dialectic of cultural agreement/disagreement
(a constructivist approach -- not so much in the relativistic sense used
in the social sciences but maybe closer to mathematical intuitionism).

> 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.
>

	Well, that's something like Schelling's line, but in the broad
sense that would be acceptable to most people such "existential" approaches
to aesthetics are just too general to help anyone agree whether, say,
the Iliad is a truer realization of Being than Gravity's Rainbow.  
Attempts to narrow such existential aesthetics, like Heidegger's,
introduce all sorts of problematic and questionable notions of the
`ground' of Being in particular cultures, and again tends to dissolve
into pure relativism or arbitrary and incommensurable distinctions.
But such approaches do have a certain intuitive, "gut feeling" appeal.

>Politically, this formulation still frees both object and
>person from the control of elites, because, until shown
>otherwise, there can be indefinitely many, perhaps
>infinitely many, such valences.  For an authority to be
>set up to control The Beautiful, it would be necessary to
>know all the valences and know that one knew them all.
>Then, rules could be made up about them and taught in school
>by the credentialed -- a manifest absurdity. 
>-- 

	I think I agree wholeheartedly on this important detail.  But
the problem remains that aesthetic discussions, in academe or Internet,
tend to wander in night and fog, even if we can agree that beauty is not
merely in the eye.  From a "postmodern" perspective, Lyotard's sublime
as a "differend" strikes me as singularly unhelpful, but pending reading
more JFL, I'll withdraw that summary judgment.        

Cordially,

Michael S. Rooney