Frances to William and Ian and others... This post casts a wide familiar net, but there remains a lot of intriguing ideas to wrestle with. (The original messages were regrettably deleted so as not to violate any limited length.)
The representational depiction of an immoral or illegal act in a picture, such as recording actual kiddy porn or actual snuff sex as it occurs in true reality for example, is clearly different from the behavioral action itself. It seems clear however that the art and the act may both occasion for viewers some aspect of aesthetics. The issue for me is not whether a limited line must be drawn, but that some standard line must be drawn by authorities at a point. There are few absolutes in the world that should be made, but the making and watching of real kiddy porn or real snuff sex in a movie or on a stage is pressing the need for prohibition. The thorn for me is to sort out the issues of aesthetics especially in regard to forms and properties and objects and values and responses. It may be found or deemed that the forms of all objects will bear or have or yield various qualities or properties such as continuity or ideality or purity or ugly or sublimity or beauty or unity and so on. This stance clearly allows for dumpy and nasty and evil objects to be beautiful, and for dainty and nice and divine objects to be ugly. It may be wise therefore to distinguish the aesthetic properties of all ordinary objects in nature or its cultures and societies from those ordinary objects that somehow become extraordinary aesthetic objects of nature or its culture and society. It may also be necessary to differentiate ordinary objects that are not art from extraordinary objects of art, and then perhaps even sort the kinds of art as being fine art and liberal art and applied art. This thrust of course assumes that good art is unique and does something that bad art or nonart cannot do or cannot do as well, such as reflect worthy aesthetic values or evoke intense aesthetic responses. The further thorn for me is whether aesthetics could be or should be assigned as a science, and then whether aesthetics would be applied to only art. This take on aesthetics clearly suggests it can or will be conferred with a purpose and a destiny, which may not be so. It also suggests that the findings of research in aesthetics would be expressed in discourses and reports made prone to peer review, so that groups of normal experts can agree by a consensus of opinion as to the likely truth found. If aesthetics is held to be a normative science of what ought to be, then it must likely be aligned with ethics and logics in the traditional manner. This entails that aesthetics be preparatory to ethics, and that aesthetics and ethics be contributory to logics, and that each of these be consummatory of what precedes them, so that there might be a combinatory approach to any field of study. This seems viable, because aesthetics is not likely free to engage in whatever it wishes or wills or wants or needs or thinks. As a science aesthetics would be necessarily tethered by what is rational and reasonable. It would then be relative only to what it must conform with. If aesthetics is to be made a formal science of general philosophy then the issue turns on whether a philosophic pluralism or philosophic relativism should be used as its main support, rather than a philosophic universalism. Plea to William... On your paper "Abstract Painting and Integrationist Linguistics" to be published in Language Sciences later, you might consider kindly posting it here to this list also in due course.
