From: gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch)
Newsgroups: alt.postmodern
Subject: Re: postmodern knowledge and beauty
Date: 2 Oct 92 11:42:47 GMT
Organization: mydog in exile

gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch):
|> 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.

hooker@aristotle.ils.mwu.edu ( BOB HOOKER):
| 1.  Forms suck.

"The form is empty, empty is the form."  So no doubt they
suck.  The void sucks.  This is probably the cause of
existence.  Nevertheless, we are stuck with forms.

| ...
| 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.

When I say "object" I am of course acting (linguistically) 
to distance it from my self, the "I" of the sentences I'm
making, and conceptually empty it of selfhood, of the
ability to say "I."  That may be the origin of some of the
problems we experience, but that corresponds to my present
experience.   I do not think of, for example, a painting as
possessing a consciousness similar to mine.  And I do not
think of the "self" as another object; although its
linguistic resemblance to one is interesting.

Now, following your thought-experiment, I dig up an object
from a forgotten culture which I find beautiful.  Where was
the beauty before I dug it up?  I am tempted to construct a
comparison: I dig up an object and find it green.  Where was
the greenness before I dug it up?  The nature of its
surface, and of my optic processes, gave the situation a
potential to lead to an experience of greenness for me.
Whether greenness was inherent in the situation before I
experienced it, or even before I decided to dig the object 
up, is something for philosophy students and addicts to 
argue about; it's really a matter of how one defines one's
terms.

However, I prefer to think that the beauty of the object 
had something to do with the self of the person who made 
it, and that her self and mine are in some way connected,
so that in finding the object I recognize a projection of 
a kind of common self that had been split.  Unfortunately,
this sort of thinking is rather mystical or poetic, and
while it's fun, must be very unsatisfactory to those who
don't happen to feel for it.  Also, I believe it's very
unpostmodern....

It does seem to me that if there were no more human beings
or at least beings who could experience things as humans
do, that objects would be devoid of beauty.  Or further,
they would perhaps cease to exist as objects, because 
there would be no one to objectify them -- cf. my first
paragraph above.  They could no longer be called "beautiful"
unless you postulate a god, etc. -- and again we are on
mystical territory.  

|> 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.

I thought it was clear that I had abandoned the assertion
that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder."

| 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.

I'm more interested in the political implications of
people's ideas about beauty than anything else.  I don't
need Wittgenstein to tell me what's beautiful, but 
Wittgenstein may help if someone's trying to use my 
experience of beauty to manipulate me and others, as the 
Athenians did in building the Parthenon.  
-- 
 )*(    Gordon Fitch    )*(    gcf@panix.com    )*(
( 1238 Blg. Grn. Sta.,  NY NY 10274 * 718.273.5556 )