"The disposed act of grooming the self to merely look pretty for its own sake and for no other reason..."
I have to disagree. Grooming has its physiological reasons. 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 13:36:15 -0400 Frances to William and others... The ideal form of seeming phenomena is given uncontrolled to human sense. This vast haze of real stuff has many aesthetic properties like continuity and purity and unity and beauty that are immediately felt to be nice. This orchard of formal stuff and its crop of nice haze will often drive normal humans to find or make objects that reflect those natural values of nicety. The disposed act of grooming the self to merely look pretty for its own sake and for no other reason such as mating is an instance of such a compelling drive. The further act of making ordinary objects into works of fine art that harvest and reflect say aesthetic beauty is also an instance of such a compelling drive. There is also a further drive to repeat this artistic act in routine and regular ways that will yield still further works of fine art. The skilled practice that produces this end result is a habit of conduct, which is soon realized as guides and norms and rules, and thus as standard measures or recipes. These habits however evolve by a process of lawful heterogeneous growth, and so expand and advance and progress. The artistic habits and their artistic results are therefore always continual yet fallible but never stagnant. It is probable that all cultural art is a semiotic simile of all natural haze, whether the simile has the properties mainly of an icon or index or symbol, and art will likely remain as such regardless of its historic passages. Every ordinary object will have aesthetic properties in its form to some degree, and most such objects can become empowered as natural aesthetic objects, but many natural aesthetic objects will fail to become empowered as cultural aesthetic objects or social works of humanal fine art, because their nonetheless nice form will lack the force needed to reflect a nice value and to evoke a nice feeling. An object depicting an actual act of real child porn or real snuff sex for example should and would absolutely fail as art, as would the use of a dead or live human body in whole or part as a material means to even a good artistic end. The point here is that not just anything can be art. The habit of finding or making aesthetic objects as artistic objects however will never be lost to humans. The meaning of human life and the reason for human existence is after all for humans to make the world more beautiful and moral and rational, and thus for intelligent humans to make their behavior more reasonable, because this act of human psyche is the highest state that evolution has yet taken phenomena to. All normal humans ironically tend to have this disposition and compulsion to act aesthetically and ethically and logically. (William partly wrote in my edited effect that the harvested properties of objects in the field of phenomena are used with improved skill in the production process by a ruling procedure of conventional standards to produce the artistic product.)
