From: hooker@aristotle.ils.mwu.edu ( BOB HOOKER)
Subject: Re: postmodern knowledge and beauty
Organization: ILS
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1992 20:29:14 GMT

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


> 
> 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.


1.  Forms suck.
2.  I do not know what is meant by "beauty residing".  

> 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.)

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?

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.

Just as you can concieve that others will percieve object selves in the
future,  thus you assert that these other selves will cause beauty to
continue,  I concieve that the beauty is in the object and will exist even
with the selves.

I think both asserts boil down to the same thing,  beauty is an attribute
of an object.  I say that it is in the beautiful thing and you say it is in
the self that see the thing.  

Both approachs are riddled with problems,  but I argue that your
preferencing the self over the object gains nothing in the question of
beauty.


> 
> So about the most we can say about beauty is that it is a
> relationship between an object,

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 IMPLIES an
externalness to the relationship.

 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.  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.

Before we go off into mystical misguided thinking about the objective
nature of the world we could try to define our terms a little and see what
kinds of language games govern the discourse on beauty.

> 
> 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. 




> -- 
>  )*(    Gordon Fitch    )*(    gcf@panix.com    )*(
> ( 1238 Blg. Grn. Sta.,  NY NY 10274 * 718.273.5556 )
> 
> 
Newsgroups: alt.postmodern