________________________________ From: Michael Brady <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Saturday, June 13, 2009 4:46:40 PM Subject: Re: inevitable and resolved
On Jun 11, 2009, at 9:20 PM, William Conger wrote: > I think the mountain is a quantity, not a quality of matter. But as Stalin once said, "Quantity has a quality all of its own." <g> > A quality is a valuing of some sort (chosen by humans). Perhaps this is how Boris meant it in his comment about how artworks "contribute to changing the quality of life," but generally in a conversation with philosophical dimensions, like this, "quality" is used to designate an essential property of the subject at hand. I believe your elastic use of this term unnecessarily clouds the issue. > Thus a mountain may have one quality for the miner, another for the > photographer, another for the landowner, etc., etc. But it has no quality > independent of a person defining it. The mountain is just there -- as stuff. You make a reasonable point, which, however, may be a misdirection to the less acute among us. too bad. The mountain may, *among its qualities (i.e., essential properties)*, present one that is of particular importance or relevance to the miner, and another that is important for the photographer, etc. In other words, the mountain exhibits (manifests, embodies--not "has," which suggests some sort of acquiring) many qualities simultaneously, and the importance given to one quality by one group of observers does not negate or eliminate the other qualities. You can't acquire what is not there. You can be urged, through some abstraction or direction, to project some quality onto-into something other than yourself. A miner is urges to look for something glittery and is told it's valuable, and so that's the projected quality he sees in gold. The photographer shows you the light and shadow complexity of a craggy mountain -- by emphasizing some visual patterns -- and you project that abstraction to the mountain and say, "wow, look at that craggy mountain, it's like a pile-up on the football field". In other words, we carry around in our heads all sorts of pre-packaged qualitative ideas we readily project into the world. And that world is without meaning (qualitative valuing) Which is not to say it is without substance (various quantities of this or that) . wc > Even the laws of nature are human distinctions for the sake of utility, > measuring, and valuing nature. I can go as far as your first two purposes, but "valuing nature" is not what I would regard as one of the purposes or final causes of studying (or promulgating) the laws of nature. Valuing nature, like appreciating it (a related term), designates the degree of relevance or importance we place on something, not on whether we can understand it clearly or whether that understanding is complete or satisfactory. We can't measure the utility of something, or even its substance, without valuing it -- as when we separate one mineral from another, or assign identities to cells, processes, etc. Perception, interpretation, categorization, and similar matters of studying and analyzing things are not--or need not be--completely utilitarian or exclusively instrumental. We can feel a proper sense of satisfaction and completion in just learning about and grasping the laws of nature--perhaps because the explanations conform to our direct experience of nature, similar to what Plato (I think) identified as the moment when our learning a fact became an act of re-cognizing (reknowing). What can satisfaction be except some sort of subjective valuing. Does the mountain care how you like it? If we grasp a law of nature, we feel that we have some control of it, that we can use it, even if we don't know how to use it. Some years ago, I read "Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory" (a PhD dissertation later published as a book), which traced the history of the perception and evaluation of mountains, from barriers that had to be laboriously traversed to places that contained sacred precincts, to vast natural marvels that gave us a gateway to the ineffable and sublime. An interesting book. Who gets a PhD for such dreamy stuff? The book sounds OK as far as the history of how humans regarded mountains in the past. But as humans gained technology and control of their environment, passing through the "sacred grove" phase which is simply a notion that the immutability of the mountain could be negotiated, as in obtaining favors, to the mountain as something to be used (from mining to irrigation to defense). But the conclusion dealing with the ineffable and sublime is all about poetry and can't be substantiated as history in the same way as the earlier sections of the book, as you describe them. If I were a member of the PhD committee on that one, I'd reject it and propose a rewriting of the last section. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite. By Marjorie Hope Nicolson. Reprint of the 1959 edition published by Cornell University Press. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997. xix + 4o3 pp. Notes, index. Paper $17.95. Aesthetics of The Infinite? How about the Infinity of the Aesthetic? In other words, what is the subject of the book? Is the thesis that humans must be overawed and bewildered and helpless in order to experience the aesthetic (or the sublime or the God/s) ? Not a new idea but plenty obsolete. It is the argument for magic as art. Anyway, I will look at the book and will eat my hat if it is good...so long as my hat is a metaphor of a piece of lemon pie. wc | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady [email protected]
