Agree with Frances on all points in this post. Her comments on dialectic in the past surprise me. Boris Shoshensky
---------- Original Message ---------- From: "Frances Kelly" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Subject: Categorical Classes of Combines (...from "The orchard..." topic) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2010 13:21:24 -0400 Frances to William and others... Any rule or recipe or standard deemed fit for a person to find and make an object into art should perhaps be held as the normative duty of art. The obligated norm of art would then likely be what art ought to be, and not what it was or is, or may be or can be or will be, or even must be. If any ordinary existent object has the power in its phenomenal form to reflect worthy aesthetic values and evoke intense aesthetic responses in forceful ways, then that ordinary object of nature or its culture would probably be enabled to become an extraordinary aesthetic object. Some pragmatists have classed aesthetic responses as being emotional and practical and intellectual, with these in turn as being pleasurable or enjoyable or admirable. The issue then might turn on what force is able to empower an aesthetic object to become an artistic object. This is an issue, because while all artistic objects must be aesthetic objects, not all aesthetic objects need to be artistic objects. The force found or held to empower both natural and cultural objects may therefore be similar, but not identical. The difference between natural aesthetic objects and cultural aesthetic objects as social works of fine art may surface in the evoked response, in that the response to art might be more immediate and initial and direct and whole, and thus more emotionally intense. There may also be a further difference in the evoked responses to arts other than fine arts, and to fine arts other than genuine fine arts like copies and fakes and frauds and forgeries. If the differentia of aesthetic objects or of art objects from objects that are not art is not found or held in the response to their form, then some other source of force and power must be sought, which does not seem promising. The alternative to a formal theory of course would be recourse to a referential theory or an instrumental and institutional theory, but then many objects other than art can satisfy these extra formal theories. It is after all the form of art that becomes empowered with force, and it is this empowered form that makes art different from other objects, and it is a unique emotive feeling that the form evokes that seemingly cannot be had by objects other than art. The normative science of aesthetics offers some relief to this thorn by establishing that the evoked feeling from the empowered form in art ought to be enforced in knowledge as a reasonable feeling. In summary, my task is to find any difference in say feelings that may exist between ordinary phenomenal objects and extraordinary aesthetic objects, and then between natural aesthetic objects and cultural aesthetic objects, and then between cultural aesthetic objects of social religion and humanal art, and last between works of humanal art that are of fine art and liberal art and applied art.
