If you would trust my understanding of your position in its entirety including your refusal to admit that Notion is our reaction or reflection to objective independently occurring processes without titles until we give it to them. "Standards", "qualities", "art" are things we named to communicate to each other in order to find commonalities in the subjectively sensed world. We have to accept that Plato and few others on that level were smart enough to know that our notions created by independently existing events in the environment we are exposed to. Boris Shoshensky
---------- Original Message ---------- From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: Re: The "trinary" view of "what there is". Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2010 19:03:39 EDT Brady wrote: "We all accept the working premise that the remains of ancient art are representatively distributed across the range of quality. The best of the ancient Greek or Sumerian or Chinese art are in fact the best." After some remarks of mine, Boris wrote: "Brady did not say that abstract entities are mind- independentb&.. our brain b& creates "standards", "qualities", "art"." Agreed, Boris, Brady certainly did not say it. But the essential thrust of my posting (The "trinary" view of "what there is".) is that he, and philosophers before him going back through Plato, tacitly believe and "imply" that such things are mind-independent. You say, "our brain b& creates "standards", "qualities", "art"." I reply that our "brain" creates only notions - ideas, images, feelings - bits of consciousness -- and these notions vary from mind to the other. When Brady says, " The best of the ancient Greek or Sumerian or Chinese art are in fact the best," he is attributing qualities to the works, he is emphatically not saying, "This is only my, Brady's, feeling about those works." You, Boris, go on to say, "We forget too often that mind is a part of the reality also." Certainly my posting did not forget that (assuming "mind" is your word for "consciousness"). I asserted that I am a dualist - I believe in my consciousness - and yours - and I believe in the material world: Mount Everest is a material entity that would persist if all consciousness were extinguished tomorrow. I should interject that I believe my brain is a material object, and I'm ready to concede my consciousness depends on my brain's being around. Analogies prove little, but perhaps I can use two to convey my idea here: I believe that once the bulb is smashed, the light will be gone, but I also believe the light and the bulb are not the same thing. I believe the same sort of thing about a magnet and a magnetic field. Earlier philosophers spoke of consciousness as an "epiphenomenon" of the brain. The kinds of entities I do not believe in are such non-notional, mind-independent abstractions as "categories", "qualities", "sets", Platonic "forms", "absolute standards", "THE meanings of", "relations", "language", "referents", "beauty", "sin", or even "art". The list is far, far longer than that. Take such familiar words as 'justice' or 'terrorism'. I guarantee that people will argue all night about whether a given event "is" justice or not - and they are not talking only about their feeling. "That wasn't justice!" "Yes it was!" "Wasn't!" "Was!" "The bombing of Dresden was a terrorist act!" "No - it was an act of war!" "Terrorism!" "War!" Such disputants are not saying, "Well, that's the scornful term I'd call it because of the way I feel about it." For them it's not a matter of simply "calling". Their suppressed assumption is that a given act either is or isn't in the mind-independent category of "terrorist acts"; it has the "quality" of "terrorism". This forum has been haunted from day one by many listers who believe that certain works are in some absolute way "art". They are not talking solely about the way they choose to use the word 'art' because of the way they feel when they contemplate the work. They would say they feel that way because the work "is" art. You conclude: "I think Cheerskep is breaking in through the open door." Would that it were so, Boris. But the door is not open, and I'm clearly not breaking through.
