> On Dec 10, 2015, at 1:54 PM, Clark Goble <[email protected]> wrote: > > I’d assume that for human beings aesthetics will be a mix of universal > aesthetically values (if there are any) and those indexed to our particular > biology and the physics of the world in which we live. Beyond that knowing > aesthetic rules seems difficult much as for ethical. I’d suggest that if we > can’t agree upon ethics it’s hardly surprising we agree even less upon > aesthetics. I’m not sure that entails there are no truths regarding such > merely that we’re not at the stage where we can conclusively know much yet. > > Saying we disagree at this stage is probably akin to talking psychology in > the 17th century. Pointing to disagreement says nothing about whether there > are known psychological truths in the 21st century.
I’d probably add to the above that I suspect that in terms of how we use aesthetics in the arts along with many other terms are themselves equivocal terms. That is probably we’ll find with sufficient inquiry that there are very different notions and it would be fruitful to separate many of our notions. This makes sense as often in lay speech we conflate the enjoyable or pleasing with the aesthetical. I think Peirce definitely means something deeper ontologically by aesthetics. However while I understand some of the places aesthetics functions I’ll fully confess to finding the topic subtle enough and difficult to argue over as to be an area I don’t study much. That’s not to deny its importance just that I’m quite skeptical philosophers have made much progress here beyond transcendental arguments for there being some fundamental aesthetics. That is it seems something required in our analysis. Peirce says ethics are those things end in action and aesthetics those things whose ends embody feelings. But this presupposes first a phenomenology of particular feelings. Further that such feelings can be isolated in fashion separable from a particular biology (otherwise we’re really not dealing with general aesthetics at all). That is it seems to me Peirce wants to consider feelings ontologically rather than biologically when he discusses aesthetics as such. We may consider this an empty set and simply reject Peirce’s fundamental ontological assumptions. Or we may recognize that we simply don’t have any confident way at this time of conducting that sort of analysis. Perhaps a kind of psychology of aesthetics is the best we can do with our current knowledge and technology.
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