Frances to William and others...
The initial topic on the organic orchard as an analogy to art has raised many intriguing issues for me to address. It might however be better to approach any such issues with other topical threads, to prevent undue wandering. The idea of classifying combinations of stages or levels in the arts according to the phenomenal categories as set out by anglomamerican pragmatism seems to be a good place to start threading this thorny snarl of twine. The categories of phenomena have been found by pragmatists to exist as trichotomies that consist of monadic qualities and dyadic facts and triadic laws. It seems to be a reasonable finding. My tentative task therefore is to attempt an application of those categories to the arts. The essence of laws is held by pragmatism to be derived from habits of conduct that are repeated regularly and routinely, and the essence of habits in turn is held to be derived from traits of action, which are inclined bents and disposed tendencies that are prescriptively driven by nature. All phenomenal things have this engrained leaning or purpose to grow in the direction of a goal. The agent of such telic design is simply this grounded determination. Through the process of evolution the drifting disposition often becomes a custom or rite or norm or rule, but it must always remain tethered within the natural cosmic state of things. The presence of existent phenomenal laws as habitually disposed tendencies implies an evolutionary rite of passage among growing generations. This is especially so for advancing humans in terms of formal artistic standards and arbitrary social conventions and deliberate chosen decisions and artificially manufactured consents and professional industry institutions. My attitude here is clearly to sweep human history with a very broad cultural brush, and thereby avoid any limits of say polity and cult and nationalism. The culinary lineage of crop and recipe and food is like the physical lineage of an adept trait and an adapted skill and an adopted or apt ability, which is further like the psychical lineage of sense and will and thought. This topical idea of the crude produce and the brute process and the tasty product as a categorical combination of classes harks back to the threaded scholarly issue of what came first in art: the bent trait, or the lead trail, or the lean trial. In other words, the best lineage on the one hand may be of tendency and practice and theory, or on the other hand the best lineage may be of theory and practice and review. In either event, it is likely that research would fall under practice in both these lineups. In acts of science, the best lineage would perhaps be of curiosity and inquiry and discovery. The idea also smacks of whether the topic of arts and even of signs originated initially in nature and biology and pathology, or rather in culture and anthropology and epistemology. To however keep on a simple track, the question might be posed if theory comes before practice, or if practice comes before theory; and indeed if the process is more important than the product. The pragmatist sources of aesthetics that may impact on art is the idea of evolutionary love, whereby things have a tendency to grow naturally in the best directions and toward good goals, aside from any exploratory paths that may be wrong or bad or evil. For normal humans to show evolutionary love in practice is for them to be rational in their conduct and to be reasonable toward other humans. The pragmatist basis of aesthetics itself that may further impact on art is the idea that there continues to exist in the world ideal forms; to include as such things the likes of goodness and goalness in general, which can then be attained or realized in specific good goals via certain good ways. The aesthetic tenet here is that objects give of themselves freely, and do so for the sake of giving alone, and for no ulterior motive or reason, yet they expect nothing in return for the effort. For pragmatism, the aesthetic thus can exist without the artistic, so that the aesthetic likely comes before the artistic, when the artistic comes to exist if at all, and so the artistic must presuppose the aesthetic. This is to say that ordinary objects may become empowered as aesthetic objects that can then become empowered as artistic objects, if their form has the force to reflect worthy aesthetic values and to evoke intense aesthetic responses that are worthwhile both individually and communally. While all ordinary and extraordinary objects will have aesthetic qualities like continuity and even nicety or beauty as properties embedded in their form, not all such objects can or will or need be artistic. The manufactured cultural conventions of persons and peoples are virtually irrelevant to the natural evolutions of such facts. All normal humans have found stuff to be nice or to groom their body for its own sake, and even in spite of themselves and their actions. Furthermore, the aesthetic and artistic is what eventually and necessarily prepares for the logic and scientific. All things however grow by heterogeneous evolution in that they advance and expand and progress. What was so in the past need not be so in the present and will not be so in the future, be the thing beauty or morality or legality. The guiding pragmatist tenet here is fallibility. There is a strong underlying idea of real action here in this pragmatist approach. It suggests to me that the act of practice is central and thus bracketed by the bookends of the continual ideal and the theoretical idea; and that acts are therefore also centrally pivotal to arts and apts. It may hence be that products and theories are the last things to emerge in the lineage, and that they probably will emerge because this is the best state that evolution has as yet taken things in the world; which state is cerebral and mental and psychical, and so intellectual and rational and logical, of which art and tech and science are the best exemplars of evolution. -----Original Message----- From: William Conger [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2010 6:33 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: "...The orchard used to produce a crop every year, which was made into cherry jam. But, as Firs informs us, now the recipe has been lost. It is thus a relic of the past, an artifact, of no present use to anyone except as a memorial to or symbol of th..." This is one of the topics always under discussion. The problem with skills and recipes is that no threshold standards for determining art quality are recognized anymore. Now anything can be art and thus nothing is excluded as possible art. We need to go back to Kant to understand why. He argued that an aesthetic impression is intuitive, a-priori, and tacit. It affects how we experience the world and makes it possible to experience anything at all as aesthetic. So the objective world, including what we call art, is partially enabled and shaped by the subjective a-priori. The "we" is another problem, one that entails cultural, class, political, agreements, more or less explicated or undone from time to time. You are lamenting that public taste in saying it's all but absent anymore. I'm not so sure it's absent but it is being expanded to paradoxical extremes. And who is to say what a skill or recipe is? Every artist uses conventions -- ways of doing things -- and you might say that these are skills or recipes. The conventions are, however, always under scrutiny because redundancy, conventions that have lost their relevancy for both artists and culture, are dead and false. Any serious artist is forever testing his and his culture's conventions, in the medium, and in conceptual ways of shaping ideas about the world (and of experience). Furthermore, I think it's impossible to forego all "art" conventions or recipes because those that already exist are the only ones to copy, test, alter, destroy. In this way the artist is always addressing the past and whatever is proposed as a new or altered contention necessarily retains the echoes of its history (in other art or symbolic cultural endeavor). It is equally impossible to retain a past convention intact (or even from day to day) since one's way of experiencing the world, both in ordinary sensory and informational terms, and in (more correctly) metaphorical terms are undergoing constant change. You are not the same person from day to day in the most intimate experiential terms and thus you do not have the same a-priori sensations day to day and thus you construct your perception of reality different from day to day (meaning also moment to moment). If this is so, how much more is it true of something from a distant past (reconstructed also) and by different minds? As usual, I need to bluntly reject the intent of
