Beauty, a rival to Truth and Good?

How, if that is so, could art have come to be in the first place?

The "artlover" gets hung up on expressions. That is why he's never more than a critic. The artist, however, is more concerned with impressions. Something to express. So I disagree with your statements in this paragraph. Art has risen because man had a need to express the beauty he found all around him, or the horror, or whatever it was he saw.

All that other crap which people who can't paint say about the pictures has about as much to do with art as beer drinking in front of the tv on gamenight has to do with football.

Forgive my rudeness, but if you have something to say about a piece of art you've missed the point of it.

(In my opinion, of course).

Re: Beauty, a rival to Truth and Good?


"Aesthetics" refers to a purely emotional response to something. "Beauty" in the sense Einstein used it (as well as other phycists) refers to something that is in it's most simplistic form yet maintains a universal truth. (E=mc2 is the "standard" for beauty in physics because of it's simplicity and universal application). The two have nothing to do with each other.

When you start with a wrong premise, you end up with a wrong conclusion.

The Golden spiral is the only thing that I ever understood in math:

Golden Spiral


The Golden Spiral is based on a mathematical sequence involving the Golden Mean, and which at the same time yields a unique result. The uniqueness results from the fact that there is a far deeper purpose in the development of the numbers/spiral, one which provides a profound image of the movement through time, one essential to evolution.

The Golden Spiral is routinely manifested in nature in the spiraling bracts of a pinecone, the development of a nautilus (the sea creature as well as the exercise equipment), the path a fly follows as it approaches an object, or most anything! In man's attempt to replicate this beauty of nature, we see the Golden Spiral in the fact that the Sphinx and Pyramids of Giza (The Great Pyramids) all lie on a Golden Spiral. Even the Yellow Brick Road (the symbol of transformation from the Land of Munchkins to the Land of Oz -- in the Wizard of Oz), begins as a Golden Spiral! (And surely the Wizard of Emerald City knows best!)

That's why I love Oliver Wendell Holmes' Chambered Nautilus, Coberst

Re: Beauty, a rival to Truth and Good?


No, I can't, nor can I understand why such a thing would be desirable. In the realm of aesthetics, universal qualities are almost by definition trivial qualities. For example, it is a "universal" (i.e. objective and undeniable) quality of Wagner's Das Rheingold that it begins in Eb-Major. I doubt very much that this fact has much importance in whatever aesthetic pleasure someone may derive from it.

I am not so sure about that, shapeless.

The key of any given piece of music has an effect on the subconsciousness of the listener. If that piece was played in G major it might cause a different emotional response in the listener, thus being the source of a different aestethic experience.

I think "might" is the key word in your comment, Cyracuz. Coberst was inquiring about "universals," so the potential and subjective responses of a listener to certain keys (which is a frequent phenomenon in music, no doubt about it) wouldn't fall under that purview.

Oh.. Ok. Carry on then.

JAMES HAYDEN TUFTS Aesthetic Categories
http://spartan.ac.brocku.ca/~lward/Tufts/Tufts_1903.html

I failed to reference my source.

It doesn't, quite, because it seems largely self-evident. What doesn't seem self-evident, however, is the following statement:



I have a harder time understanding this statement because it is very vague. There are many different kinds of "somethings" out there, so it is futile to make a blanket statement about how "we" give great weight to "something's" objectivity or subjectivity. There are certainly instances when objectivity counts more than subjectivity--whether to prescribe penicillin to this patient, for example--and other instances where subjectivity counts more than objectivity--whether to score this melody in the flute or the trumpet. Don't you think it's important to specify contexts before trying to analyze something as vast as "propositions"?

When it comes to matters of aesthetics, I freely confess that I used to be an arch-formalist--i.e., I used to believe that what was of primary interest in works of art (mainly music) were those things that were inherent in the musical work itself rather than located in my sujbective response to them. It took me a while to realize (1) that this view was a quintessentially modernist, reactionary view, which shattered my illusions of having found a "universal" approach to music; and (2) that, in my quest for purely objective musical features, the things I would often tout as "inherent" musical properties (e.g. that this chord is a half-diminished 7th) were, in themselves, remarkably uncontroversial and obvious. This is why I believe that, in matters of aesthetics, there is a direct relationship between what is undeniably true and what is straightforwardly uninteresting.

The question asks whether "beauty" is an alternative to "truth", presumably in the "sciences" since Einstein views are cited as an example.

Firstly we must be clear that the particular aspect of "beauty" involved is one of "elegance" or "simplicity". It comes as a revelation to some for example that a geocentric planetary system was rejected over a heliocentric one largely because it made the equations simpler ! There is no " objective truth" applicable to the heliocentric model.

This leads to the second point that "truth" is not what "science" is about....it is about "successful prediction" for which "elegant models" have a practical advantage. (Indeed Popper's "falsifiability principle" underscores the point that so-called "universal laws" are philosophically statements of "confidence" rather than "fact") Einsteins problem with quantum mechanics was a subtle one about probability levels, or in laymans terms "shades of grey" which made prediction more complex than "all or none". In this sense QM failed the "elegance test".

Agreed, Fresco.

Shapless

It appears to me that we put a great deal of emphasis on a judgment being subjective or objective. Everyone considers physics as being like the greatest and they say objective facts, i.e. objective judgments are the reason.

I am just begining to consider the possibility that aesthetic judgments are as important to us as are our judments about truth and good.

Fresco

As I mentioned to shapless I am just now begining to think that our aesthetic judgments may be as important as our judgments regarding truth and good.