From: msmorris@watsci.UWaterloo.ca (Mike Morris)
Subject: Re: SF + PC
Organization: University of Waterloo
Date: Wed, 30 Dec 1992 20:54:13 GMT

                                      Wednesday, the 30th of December, 1992

I'd said:
  Consider making furniture [ . . . ] we have all the ingredients
  necessary for the propagation of a cultural form, and for the setting
  up of extra, artificial (artificial here means man-made---possibly
  though man-discovered---, not necessarily subjective) standards on top
  of simple utility for the judging of beauty in chair making. An art
  form develops, and a standard of judgment for that art form along with
  it. Artist and critic.  Objectivity can still be found even if the art
  form itself and the critical standard of beauty by which it is judged
  were completely arbitrary. Objectivity can be found in so far as
  experts agree.

Jim Kalb responds:
  I don't think you claim enough here.  Although you refer
  parenthetically to the possibility of "man-discovered" standards, your
  account seems to show only that people who do something together for a
  long time and pay a lot of attention to what they're doing they will
  develop a common way of thinking about that thing, and judgements based
  on that common way of thinking will have a sort of objectivity because
  they will be interpersonally valid.  That's fine, but the issue is why
  anyone outside that little community should care whether judgements
  have that kind of objectivity or not.

I well agree that I did not go very far at all. It is a further step
to ask whether aesthetic standards of judgment are wholly arbitrary,
are attached necessarily to human nature, or attain to some sort of
transcendence.

I wanted to make the point only that ``literary merit'' can have
real, objective meaning.

I said:
  Ezra Pound said Sappho and Dante, Guido Cavalcanti and Arnaut Daniel and
  the Shih King are important. He actively disliked Milton. Somehow (and
  however much I like Milton, and however idionsyncratic Pound's
  tastes were) this simply weighs more than any pronouncement I am likely
  to make on the subject.

Jim responds:
  It appears that Pound thought Sappho's lyrics and the Confucian Odes
  were things of the same general kind that could be judged by common
  standards even though there was no connection in antiquity between
  poets on Lesbos and poets in China.  So it seems likely that he thought
  judgements of poetic value could be objectively valid without reference
  to their acceptance by any particular community of people concerned
  with poetry.  Can I assume you agree with that view?

I'm not sure I follow your sentence beginning with ``So''. I think Pound
liked Sappho and the Confucian Odes. I think Pound was a knowledgeable
critic and great artist in his own right. So, this means that I weigh his
expertise highly. I suspect he found something commonly poetic about
Sappho and the Shih King. If there are other experts who are
as widely read as Pound who think the same (an example might be Kenneth
Rexroth), then I would say that there is something quite objectively
beautiful which is common to Sappho's poetry and to the Shih King.

Whether this beauty is transcendent or not, or universal (recognizable,
say, to poets of all thinkable schools of poetry), is another question.
I'm willing to try to discuss this further question, but I was much more
interested here in refuting the simplistic dismissal of all assertions
of literary merit as circular (or as mere reflections of political
bias).

                     Mike Morris
             (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)

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