From: mattb@ctron.com (Matt Brown)
Newsgroups: alt.postmodern
Subject: Re: postmodern knowledge and beauty
Date: 2 Oct 92 21:17:02 GMT
Reply-To: mattb@olympus.ctron.com (Matt Brown)
Organization: Cabletron Systems INc.

Just my 2 kopecks, but I'm not seeing some of the distinctions you are making.

(Gordon Fitch) writes:
>I think you're right in your criticism of my facile
>repetition of "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."  If
>that were the case, I could willfully project beauty onto
>anything in the universe, and the term would refer only to
>that act, and would be meaningless otherwise.  Yet I know
>from experience that some objects are beautiful to me and
>others are not.

The way I look at it, beauty is a concept. We each subjectively 
apply our understanding of this concept to our perception of an
object (or perhaps to another concept, or to a thought). If you
were to perceive any (or every) thing in the universe as participating
in beauty as you understood it, then your perception would have meaning
to you, and to anyone who could understand, share, or agree with your
application of the concept. This would not be meaningless, but neither
would it be universally accepted, necessarily. I guess what I am saying
is that I don't see it as projecting (or injecting, to get more physical).
The characteristics are part of the object already. You are noticing 
(perceiving or perhaps misperceiving) them.

>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.  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.)

I think that the object does not change in the least. It's characteristics
are just not perceived by anyone. To look at it a different way, we
may find beauty in a cave painting because it has survived, and because it
tells us something about man's ancestors, or echoes some urge we still
possess. The original painter probably found it beautiful for very different
reasons. It ceased to be beautiful for those reasons, but an understanding 
of those reasons could re-express or re-capture that beauty. But the painting
is still the same. We aren't that far apart here, I don't think, but agreement
isn't total either. But painting is just an identity we forced on the poor
thing.

>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.  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.

To me, an object is merely an object. It may have characteristics
that are perceived as beautiful, strong, fearsome, or some combination
of other concepts. I don't see the object as having a predisposition to
beauty, but that our minds have a predisposition towards characteristics
that reflect our concepts, for whatever odd associative reason.

>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. 

You leaped and I fell. I guess I would agree that an authority
could never control a concept absolutely, because a concept can
have infinite manefestations (universal pithing might change the
rules, but short of that...). However, if we step back from the
absolutes, an authority can exercise sufficient control over 
expression and perception to render a concept under virtual 
control. Not airtight, but strong enough suppression that a society
as an organism could be bent to the elites definitions of a concepts,
and not always merely by force. This does not imply that individuals
could not dissent, or see through the deception (or blinders, depending
on the form of suppression). But they might well find little support
when they cried "But look, do you not see the beauty in it?" In fact,
they might well be stoned for the discomfort they have caused, without 
the elites lifting a finger. 

Define a subset of "the rules", including a rule excluding all other
rules, and enforce those rules with enough vigor, and freedom will
be sufficiently restricted. Permanently? No. But with ghastly effect,
as we can see most vividly, and understand best, from the events of
this century.

Matt
Still a Platonist after all these years?