On Mar 1, 2010, at 2:28 PM, William Conger wrote: > Free beauty resides in something with no concept of how the thing ought > to be made,or what purpose it ought to serve-flowers, Grecian arabesques or > music without words. > > Put it to the test. Try to make something for which there is no concept and no purpose. Impossible. I don't see how that can be. No matter what you begin to make, you can't avoid all sorts of associations, names, as-ifs, etc. That why I can't get the idea of purposelessness.
I took this to mean the natural form and appearance of things, which are (were) not made by humans with a purpose in mind. But I couldn't figure out why Greek Arabesques (fret?) are in that list, and why horses are in the adherent list. I am intrigued by how taste functions or is affected by both kinds of beauty. > Adherent beauty resides in things which come with a > particular purpose and concept-people,horses (or cars), buildings. > > Again, this is too static and suggests that a thing remains a particular thing. It fits Kant's logic I suppose, to long for a state of beauty that is free from utility. But it doesn't square with reality. No matter what you say a thing is, a horse, or house, anyone can see it as a metaphor, as if it were something else. I mean horse could be the aim but could also be the word, or the sound of the word, or the goal of a 18C dandy, or an object in middle ground of the landscape painter's picture. We could go on and on. I haven't got a good grasp of how you are using the term "metaphor." Sometimes it seems straightforward in the conventional sense of a thing taken as a symbol or representative of a different kind of thing. I grasp what I think you mean by its being a word or the sound of a word. But when you say the horse can be "an object in the middle ground of a landscape," I don't see the metaphor, I don't see the horse in the middle ground "as if it were something else." That is using the horse instrumentally, for example, to scale the scene and give the viewer a sense of distance and scale, or the tilting of the terrain. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
