Well, you seem to insist that there is a universal and specific truth for any goal. This is the one-best-way view. You say when I use the word crucial I admit that there is one element or design (re books) that is essential and all others will be somehow deficient. This may appear to be view of the great theorist, Alberti, who said that beauty is achieved (in art) when nothing can be changed except for the worse. But he did not say that the radically different artworks he regarded as beautiful all had the same elements and one crucial element. He left open the realization that this perfection was something internal to the artwork. What cannot be changed in one artwork, except for the worse could easily be removed from another artwork to make it better.
Something may be deemed crucial and yet be only one of several crucial features of something or some action. For instance in a big building, there are many crucial supporting elements. In an action, there is a flow of events from one to another with infinite elements that blur the distinction of specific necessary or crucial "steps". Necessary and sufficient is a fine requirement and I like it in logic and in other contexts but it does not hold when it comes to the subjectivity of aesthetic decisions or responses. It requires an object whereas the insubstantiality of the aesthetic is purely subjective and not in any object. If it were not true that the "crucial" is something fashioned in the perceiver's subjective judgment, then why are there so many different designs of the same text in different books? Something may be crucial to each but not to all. Whatever makes one design better may be unique to the design or not and it may or may not be transferable to another design. If there was one perfect design for a given text then there would be one correct interpretation of the text. All of us know that such is not the case. The more durable and engaging the text, the more "correct" interpretations there are. This is as true of a great novel like War and Peace as it is of, say, the U.S. Constitution or the Bible. I realize defining art or knowing what is singularly crucial to defining art is a longstanding issue. But I think we err if we claim something inherent, or objective, that is both necessary and sufficient to an artwork. The idea of "significant form" was one such effort; the claim that art must communicate the artist's intention to another without change (the correspondence and intentional theories) is another. My view is that it doesn't matter what the artist claims as significant form or intention because it is the viewer or audience that determines the art value in those regards. If I were to design a book (and had a lot of familiarity with the task and its traditions, etc.) I would certainly try to fuse the form (typography and page and object) and the idea (text and my understanding of it) together so that they seemed as one, interdependent and equally (expressive). There might be something crucial to the result I achieve -- a font, a paper, a size - but it is only crucial to me and to my judgment. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Rupert Dasilva <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Mon, October 4, 2010 5:56:03 PM Subject: Re: Typography and literature I agree with you that many different designs can be appropriate for a text, and that some will not be. But I think that this is evidence that the design and physical form of a text are not 'crucial' to its content, in agreement with our intuitions about different editions of texts. It seems rather opaque to attempt instead to identify what is 'crucial' with what is 'appropriate'. If something is crucial, it is because it is necessary in some way, something have a certain appropriateness is closer to its being sufficient than necessary. On 4 October 2010 23:42, William Conger <[email protected]> wrote: > There are many ways by which a design may be fully appropriate or > "crucial". I > am not contradicting myself. There is no one best. I like Bloom's > comment > about Don Quixote: "It supports any theory you bring to it". I think > something > analogous applies in the relation between a book design and the text it > contains. To say that many designs might be appropriate is not to say ANY > design, of course. > wc > > > ----- Original Message ---- > From: Rupert Dasilva <[email protected]> > To: [email protected] > Sent: Mon, October 4, 2010 5:30:24 PM > Subject: Re: Typography and literature > > > The content is the reader's interpretation of a context evoked by the > text. > > There could be many, many different designs for the same text. > > > I'm sorry if I am not understanding you correctly, but I don't understand > how the above > responds to my query. You seem to be implying that you do not see the > design > of a > text as being as 'crucial' as I interpreted you as claiming previously. In > which case, > how should I understand the sense of the term 'crucial' in order to > reconcile this with > your claim that > > 'The design of the text and the whole book format is crucial to the > content'?
