Platt, Carl, and All --
On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 1:54 PM, John Carl paraphrased Mansanobu's refutation of Reductionism: > Science taking Nature apart to try and understand it is like > a Dr. analyzing the beauty of a woman by dissecting her. > Where did the beauty go? To which Platt asked: > Not only where did the beauty go, but where did the beauty > come from? As usual, science has no answer nor any capability > of discovering an answer. Something besides quarks, leptons > and bosons is going on. I nominate the creative force of DQ. Platt also pointed us to Roger Scruton's essay on "Beauty and Desecration." Scruton has some interesting things to say about Beauty as related to the art world. Here are a few that caught my attention: "There is a great hunger for beauty in our world, a hunger that our popular art fails to recognize and our serious art often defies." "[O]ur human need for beauty is not simply a redundant addition to the list of human appetites. It is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people. It is a need arising from our metaphysical condition as free individuals, seeking our place in an objective world." "Every now and then . . . we are jolted out of our complacency and feel ourselves to be in the presence of something vastly more significant than our present interests and desires. We sense the reality of something precious and mysterious, which reaches out to us with a claim that is, in some way, not of this world." Edgar Allan Poe once rhapsodized in a similar vein about Beauty: "We have still a thirst unquenchable, to allay which [man] has not shown us the crystal springs. This thirst belongs to the immortality of Man. It is at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence. It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us - but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time, to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone. And thus when by Poetry - or when by Music, the most entrancing of the Poetic moods - we find ourselves melted into tears - we weep then - not as the Abbate Gravina supposes - through excess of pleasure, but through a certain, petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and for ever, those divine and rapturous joys, of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses." - [E. A. Poe: The Poetic Principle] Depending on our esthetic sensibility, Beauty has substantial value to us. Pirsig correctly pointed out that value is not centered in either the subject or the object but transcends both. This is as meaningful a clue as any to the true nature of Beauty. To answer Platt's question, "Where does beauty come from?", it comes from our sensibility to Value. Specifically, it is our realization that the substantive essence of our reality is beyond the finite world of existence. Man's exquisite sense of symmetry, stability, and goodness is the value of the essential Source from which he is estranged. The awe and rapture we feel when we are in harmony with this Essence is imparted to the discrete objects and events which manifest the uncreated source in our experience. This, I submit to you, is what we sense as Beauty. Respectfully, Ham Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
