I wrote:
> Now, either your "beauty" is a
> mind-independent object like that physical painting and that car, or
> it is solely
> notional, and therefore idiosyncratically different in each mind.
In fact I should have amplified that to address alleged
"properties/qualities". But first here's Michael Brady's query about what I did
write:
"I'm not quite sure what's in your mind when you say "notional": can
you explain? My quick conclusion is that, for you, notional denotes
things held in the mind. Do you use that term in a more specific or
precise way?"
No, I don't. My notion of 'notional' is the entire flow of consciousness --
and even the "unconscious". The "ideas", images, and feelings in our minds are
"notional". The iron structure in Paris that we call the Eiffel Tower is
non-notional. Our mind's "idea", image, of the Tower is notional. (This
position is
based on what just about all of us believe, as distinguished from what we can
"prove" to a confirmed solipsist. For instance, I have an unshakeable belief
there are minds and bodies other than mine, and I feel certain every other
lister feels the same way. Philosophy is interesting to me only when it starts
there, rather than with a square-one skepticism that none of us actually holds
by.)
Brady's further query:
"Moving on, consider this question: Are proportions and various other
descriptions of the relationship of one thing to another part of the
object "out there" or are they exclusively in one's head? I believe
that, if there is an "out there" there, then the relationships are out
there in the objects. However, they are known to us "in here," as
matters of knowledge or cognition."
I was just yesterday reading in a book by Van Quine, "Ontological Relativity
and Other Essays" in which he was musing about the tendency of our minds to
reify things. That is, it's a peculiar tendency of our minds that the more we
"think about -- entertain notions of --sets, classes, categories, qualities,
properties, relations, meanings etc, the more we eventually come to think of
them
as "out there". But like the other estimable philosophers of the twentieth
century -- Wittgenstein included -- Quine seemed to refuse the ultimate
hurdles. Since he was perhaps the leading mathematical logician, when Quine
began to
suspect there are no non-notional sets -- a key element in his logic -- he
shied away. I believe lots of things those guys accepted as mind-independent
entities are chimeras, and "relations" are one of them . The alleged class
they've called "relations" has confounded philosophers for millenia. Aristotle,
in a
baffled bit of waffling, called "relations" the most "minimal" of beings.
(And you may recall my early observation that those who believe in relations
have to accept the almost comic implication they are the most numerous objects
in the world -- far more numerous than stars and sub-atomic particles,
because there has to be an infinity of relations not just between each of those
particles and other objects but between each of those relations and other
relations, and each of THOSE relations must be related etc. The implications of
a
belief that relations are some sort of non-notional entity are, if we think
about
them, so ludicrous I'm the one who is baffled: by how anyone can believe in
them.)
Brady:
"Thus, the properties that we deem to comprise beauty are resident in
the objects, in some way that can be perceived by us and reduced to
our understanding."
Well, by now I hope I've conveyed that what you call the "properties" in any
object neither comprise nor constitute "beauty" (or "art"), any more than I
believe the constituents of Grandma's stew constitute "deliciousness". When
Grandma took the stew back into the kitchen and added something to make a guy
like
it, she didn't add "deliciousness", she added salt. The "deliciousness" is
notional, in us, not non-notional in the stew.
When Mabel got her nose "fixed", and began getting modeling jobs, it wasn't
because the surgeon added "beauty" to her face. He added a different-shaped
nose. The combination of her "new nose" with her eyes, mouth, etc. prompted
photographers to say, "Beauty!" But all that Mabel brought to the studio was a
collection of specific elements -- the reaction to those elements -- "Beauty!"
--
was in the minds of the observers. What they saw was the elements; the
"beauty" was their name for what they felt.
When philosophers have encountered non-notional objects, and the result is
"sense data", the "thinkers" have called the "capacity" to occasion those
sensations the "properties" of the object. "Beauty" and "deliciousness" are not
sense data. They are the results of the mind's reception and processing of
sense
data. The same holds for what some people call "artness".
Beginning way back in Plato's day, thinkers -- and the rest of us -- have
tended to "universalize" these specific capacities of objects to occasion
specific sense data. Plato spoke of them as "qualities"; Aristotle said its
"properties" are what "make a thing what it is" -- a remark that has led to
2,500 years
of philosophical blunders.
Take the "qualities" of color and, say, softness. They vary in "degrees" from
one individual object to another. "That apple has geenness!" "No -- it's more
like blue-greenness!" "That object is soft." "How soft? When would you say it
no longer has 'softness', and you'd call it 'hard'?" I don't question that
each object does indeed occasion infinitely varying sense data, nor do I deny
that univeralizing and unitizing makes for a handy, serviceable way to talk
about the objects and the sensations they are said to "cause", but the
subsequent
reifying has been philosophically disastrous -- especially when the reifying
of alleged non-notional entities is of inherently notional "reactions" like
"deliciousness", "beauty", "evil", "good luck", "holiness", and "art".
But, for the sake of fellow listers, I should stop there. In theater, it's
notoriously dangerous to choose to have an extremely boring chap as your
central character. The more faithfully you portray him, the more boring your
play
will be. Similarly, the more one describes the tedious confusions of, say,
phenomenologists or analytic philosophers, the more tedious and
incomprehensible
one becomes, except, perhaps to other nerdy philosophers like them.
"The human figure that stands 8 heads high is out
there; we perceive that person or drawing, make the measurements that reveal
those proportions, and pronounce that particular ratio beautiful or not."
If by "pronounce" you have in mind the likes of your shouting your personal,
"Hurray!", okay. But if, like Frances, you believe that "deeming" makes for an
"is-ing" "out there", I'm not with you. The familiar line, "Beauty is in the
eye of the beholder," is on the nose.
**************
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