Frances to William and others... The term beauty as an umbrella for aesthetic objects like natural finds and artistic works is clearly a problem. That thing of an object which seems felt for its own sake alone, and that gives any object an aesthetic state or some object an artistic status, is likely found in the form of the object, and thus this thing of the form is its ideality. The ideality of form can include the ugly and beauty as well as any infinity and continuity and sublimity and ambiguity and purity and unity and surety and so on. This umbrella of the ideal hence allows for the beauty of the unbeautiful, to include say the ugly and feral and horrible and evil and wicked and demonic and satanic. Furthermore, the label of abundance may be better then radiance as an alternate global substitute for beauty, because abundance implies immediacy and sufficiency and efficiency and adequacy and holism and closure, yet it also implies an appropriate purpose for the sake of some other sake, which contradicts the need for an intrinsic being of ideal aesthetic or artistic form; and many ideal forms of pure decay felt to bear nice beauty are hardly radiant. The rational key here to justify such an ideal approach to art would perhaps be the logic of relativity where the object and the subject are related together in a common ground of conformity. An ideal world of even pure perfect beauty, but without a normal sentient human to feel it, would after all be pointless and meaningless and useless. The objective and the relative and the subjective therefore are likely all needed together in order to form a real ideal aesthetic whole. This logic may not offer a final definition of say form or beauty or art, but it will identify them and may even tentatively explain them to some agreeable degree.
William wrote... I don't think pleasing is a synonym for for beauty. I think beauty is a complex and paradoxical concept. It includes the displeasing and the discomforting, the sublime as well as the charming. I am turning away from my former thinking about the ultimate subjectivity of concepts, a subjectivity that leads us further and further into the ever-narrowing linguistic fish traps that Cheerskep has anchored and from which there is no escape. Maybe we can think again about the ISNESS of other. I mean the awarenss of something independent, a substance, quality, essence, lies dormant until we apprehend it. This is what Aquainas and Maritain called radiance, that which permeates us as well as other and enliven, enlightens or reveals subject and object. This radiance is beauty. It's ontological. Sounds sappy, I know, but that's only because we're so affected by scientific, materialist positivism. Nevertheless I am not so sure that concepts like beauty and art can be defined in terms of positivism. Their necessary and sufficient features cannot be found. This is where we need to agree with Derek's position that beauty and art cannot be defined except in very, very limited ways and are therefore useless terms. He is taking the hard positivist's position. He dismisses other approaches to those terms as vague, unproveable, "lyrical" and non-exclusive. I do think we can describe beauty and art, aiming at the Scholastic's radiance, mainly by means of metaphor and perhaps always limited to specific examples or types of examples where "kinships" can be noted. This, then is the divide that separated me from Derek. I am more and more drawing away from a materialist, empirical, positivistic way of thinking about art and beauty, a position always as odds with my fundamental notions as an artist. Derek is not. He may admit to some "inner necessity" that cannot be measured when he claims such and such as art but refuses to define its necessary, proveable conditions. He could simply describe them but descriptions are one to one type transferences, as-ifs, and therefore metaphorical translations, and never universal. A definition must be universal and that's why it must be positivist, scientific, excluding the intuitive. So, ok, I agree. We can't define art or beauty unless we narrow the terms to nearly useless and unexceptional, to the commonplace banality. Why not settle for describing? Why not try to state the ends of art as distinguished from purposes. What is the end of art as in what is the end of man? Aristotle said the end of man is happiness. That is why he exists. What is the end of art? I'll say beauty. Purposes are subjective and thus individual. My purpose as an artist may or may not be to prove the end of art. The purpose of art is not its end. So when we describe art we should aim to describe a specific case(s) where the end of art is manifested (as in my new best friend word, radiance). Derek will complain that we can say anything at all about art when describing it metaphorically. I'll agree and respond that it's the quality and the enlightenment of what is said that matters and how it helps to enliven us and the art in question and how it may serve as a bridge to other art and further our self awareness. If we can know the end of art, beauty, we can also know the end of man, happiness. The best philosophy is poetry, music, art. Now, what monastery should I flee to?
