I understand that it's not that Witt denies the internal meaning is there, but it's that he ushers it out as superfluous — Hanover

That's a deeply mistaken account of Wittgenstein, for whom the most important things were aesthetic and ethical.

There is equivocation here, but not the one your think. It's very unclear what you are trying to say, despite the erudition. "Noumenal" is even less useful than "subjective". Science works because of agreed-upon standards of evidence and repeatability, not because it gets at “things-in-themselves.” You appear to be making the merely rhetorical move of redefining "objective".

My point is that if there was a science to art that resulted in proven, repeatable "good art," then any artist that doesn't do that would be a fool doomed to failure. However, we frequently see art that "breaks the rules" change how we think about art and what makes it "good." — MrLiminal

If the conclusion here is that there cannot be 'a science to art that resulted in proven, repeatable "good art"' then we are in agreement. Art is not algorithmic. Few things are.

My point was merely that disagreement is poor evidence for a lack of objective aesthetic value/criteria. People disagree about virtually everything. — Count Timothy von Icarus

All well and good, provided that we do not conclude that there must be an "objective " aesthetic value. That there is some agreement on aesthetic value does not imply that there is a fact of the matter.

Specifically if there was one thing you needed no matter what. (I am still open to opposing ideas)
Do a number of factors combined have to meet some standard? — Red Sky

No sooner is the "one thing you need no matter what" specified than some smart arse provides us with a counterexample.

Aesthetics is not a search for One Ring To Rule Them All, but a conversation between artist and viewer, triangulated with the piece. A fancy way of saying that the quality of the piece does not in some way inhere in the piece, but is found in the conversation.

It's the story that makes the piece valuable.

They are not rules and I do not say they are universal, but I do think they are practiced widely in the West. Possibly elsewhere, I have not made a survey. — Tom Storm

There's a key difference here. @Hanover seems to be looking for a set of rules that are practiced. But what answers the question, and what you have provided, is a set of rules that ought be practiced.

So Hanover points out in triumph that they are not practiced everywhere, missing the point entirely.

Won't be the best first time, but I'll do a deeper dive into this and see what I come up with.

But it's a false dilemma. Aesthetic claims - that the roast lamb in the oven as we speak, slow cooked with six veg, to be served with greens - is better than a Big Mac, is not just an expressions of feeling nor statements of fact—but an interpretation within a context of belief, intention, tradition, form, and reception. It arises as a triangulation of speaker, interpreter and dinner. It's not objective, but it's not relative, either. It is cultivated and critiqued, without requiring foundational aesthetic truths, because it is an integral part of a holistic web of taste that extends beyond the speaker and even beyond the interpreter into the world at large. Further, no such aesthetic scheme is incommensurable with other such schemes.

Wouldn't a "simple statements of fact" also involve: "an interpretation within a context of belief, intention, tradition, form, and reception?"

I'd argue that it will. You could look to someone like Rorty here. Hence a workable definition of "objective" cannot allow the aforementioned to be disqualifying factors, else hardly anything would qualify as objective.

But, more to the point, I am not more inclined to think that man, with our without his institutions and "games," is the sui generis source of beauty in the cosmos (or goodness, or truth for that matter). Discourse on beauty is affected by the aforementioned factors, as light passes through tinted panes of glass, but beauty is not contained within, nor created by, these things. "There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard" (as Psalm 19:3 puts it).

As Plato has it:

And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.

The idea is that beauty is prior to individual experiences of finite, contextual beauty. Or as more recent thinkers have put it:

Schindler first diagnoses why our modern condition is so poisonous. “[E]ncountering reality is a basic part of the meaning of human existence.” And, moreover, “there is something fundamentally good about this encounter with the world...."

In the transcendentals—beauty, goodness, and truth—man participates in and, in a real sense, “becomes what he knows.” Schindler maintains that rejecting the notion that the cosmos is true, good, and beautiful, “in its very being,” we are actually committing a gravely dehumanizing move. We are cutting ourselves off from the ability to experience reality at its deepest level. This means that the study and understanding of the transcendentals is not some abstraction, disconnected from everyday life. Rather, a proper understanding of the transcendentals allows one the deepest and most concrete access to the real...

Beauty

Schindler first tackles the transcendental of beauty. This is contrary to the order most frequently employed by the tradition. There are both philosophical and practical reasons for this, however. With respect to the latter, Schindler notes that if “our primary . . . access to reality comes through the windows or doors of our senses” this means that the “way we interpret beauty bears in a literally foundational way on our relationship to reality simply.”

Schindler rejects the notion that beauty is just in the eye of the beholder, that is has no connection to objective reality. Rather, “beauty is an encounter between the human soul and reality, which takes place in the ‘meeting ground,’ so to speak, of appearance.” And beauty is a privileged ground of encounter because it “involves our spirit and so our sense of transcendence, our sense of being elevated to something beyond ourselves—and at the very same time it appeals to our flesh, and so our most basic, natural instincts and drives.” By placing beauty first, one establishes the proper conditions for the “flourishing” of goodness and truth.

https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2019/05/08/the-intelligibility-of-reality-and-the-priority-to-love/

Schiller and Goethe would be another counterpointhere.

Schiller takes on board the notion he finds in Shaftesbury and Kant, that our response to beauty is distinct from desire; it is, to use the common term of the time, “disinterested”; just as it is also distinct, as Kant said as well, from the moral imperative in us. But then Schiller argues that the highest mode of being comes where the moral and the appetitive are perfectly aligned in us, where our action for the good is over-determined; and the response which expresses this alignment is just the proper response to beauty, what Schiller calls “play” (Spiel). We might even say that it is beauty which aligns us.11

This doctrine had a tremendous impact on the thinkers of the time; on Goethe (who was in a sense, one of its co-producers, in intensive exchange with Schiller), and on those we consider “Romantics” in the generally accepted sense. Beauty as the fullest form of unity, which was also the highest form of being, offers the definition of the true end of life; it is this which calls us to go beyond moralism, on one side, or a mere pursuit of enlightened interest, on the other. The Plato of the Symposium returns, but without the dualism and the sublimation.

From the standpoint of this anthropology of fusion and beauty, we can understand one of the central criticisms that the Romantic age levelled at the disengaged,
disciplined, buffered self, and the world it had built. Beauty required the harmonious fusion of moral aspiration and desire, hence of reason and appetite. The accusation against the dominant conceptions of disciplined self and rational order was that they had divided these, that they had demanded that reason repress, deny feeling; or alternatively, that they had divided us, confined us in a desiccating reason which had alienated us from our deeper emotions.

Charles Taylor - A Secular Age

Wouldn't a "simple statements of fact" also involve: "an interpretation within a context of belief, intention, tradition, form, and reception?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yep.

Glad we have a point of agreement.

Is it worth my saying I don't usually read your long cut-and-paste quotes? Will it save you the effort? I will presume that if you have an argument of substance you will present it in the body of your post.

Why supose there is a "sui generis source of beauty ". Do you supose that that in order for beauty to be real, it must have a source, and that source must be outside human life? I don't agree. I'll throw the burden back to you to show that such a thing is needed.

Do you supose that that in order for beauty to be real, it must have a source, and that source must be outside human life? I don't agree. I'll throw the burden back to you to show that such a thing is needed.

Can man create something from nothing?

Can man create something from nothing? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. The notion of beauty.

And that's all? If one thing can come from nothing, why not anything more? Why just this one thing?

Goodness, and to a lesser extent, Truth are often offered up as other examples of things that man creates. I disagree. Ex nihilo nihil fit—out of nothing, nothing comes. Man does not act without causes, and does not create from nothing—if he did, we'd have no way to explain why he has created one thing and not any other. That's my contention.

Plus, I find it particularly strange that this sort of theory of man's creative powers is so often couched in terms of epistemic humility, since it is saying that all Goodness, Beauty, and Truth in the cosmos is the work of man's will—that man is essentially God, making things what they are, bestowing onto them their unity, goodness, purpose, and beauty.

Can man create something from nothing? — Count Timothy von Icarus

We did not starting from nothing. We start embedded in the world and in a community.

Right, we are embedded in the world, its beauty, truth, etc.—the world is not embedded in our communities, practices, and "language games." One is prior to, and the ground of the other.

And that's all? If one thing can come from nothing, why not anything more? Why just this one thing? — Count Timothy von Icarus

It was just a quip. But I would say that concepts like God, goodness, evil, and charity are human constructs—they arise from human experience and imagination rather than existing independently.

The notion that something can come from nothing is typically embraced by those invested in teleological arguments for transcendence.

If beauty were created by man and his practices, I'd contend that there would be no proper orientation towards the world. And if there is no proper orientation to the world, then something like Huxley's A Brave New World has no aesthetic defects. The wilderness, sunsets, flowers, love, commitment, romance, justice, parenthood—these are hideous because society has said that they are so, and people have been conditioned accordingly. What is beautiful is mass produced consumer products, orgy porgy, utilitarian "pneumatic" relations of pleasure, etc.

But even Huxley has the problem of explaining how his miracle drug soma tends to make everything that is sensed more beautiful.

If Hamlet is right, if "nothing is good or bad (beautiful or ugly) but thinking makes it so," we are left with the question of why anything should be thought beautiful or ugly in the first place. Such notions should be uncaused, and thus random, but they do not seem to be. Pastural poetry from ancient Greece and Rome, or India, Persia, or China, is still quite accessible to people across the world millennia later, after vast social changes.

The notion that something can come from nothing is typically embraced by those invested in teleological arguments for transcendence.

By who? It seems to me that it is normally quite the opposite. For instance, the contention that there must be a being that is pure act to explain any move from potency to act. Or that there must be a first cause in a chain of efficient causes. Or that there must be a being that is necessary and subsistent, whose essence includes existence—all so that we don't have "something coming from nothing."

Plus, I find it particularly strange that this sort of theory of man's creative powers is so often couched in terms of epistemic humility, since it is saying that all Goodness, Beauty, and Truth in the cosmos is the work of man's will—that man is essentially God, making things what they are, bestowing onto them their unity, goodness, purpose, and beauty. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, well I know it isn't a unique view but my position is that goodness, truth, and beauty are not transcendentals but are contingent products of culture and language. I don’t think we are God so much as we see the world in certain ways and create the frameworks that give gods their life.

The world is always, already interpreted. It shows up for us through our practices, our language, our forms of life. To suggest otherwise is to appeal to a view-from-nowhere—a fantasy of access to the world prior to interpretation.

So I have to ask: aren’t you smuggling in a theological or metaphysical assumption, something like a First Cause or transcendent source? Why suppose that beauty must have a ground outside human life—outside history, culture, or shared understanding?

Why does this need for an external “source” apply to aesthetic judgments in particular? Does language require a source beyond human life? Do games, rules, rituals, or cultural artefacts?

We don’t create beauty from nothing—perhaps. But why assume the alternative is no creation at all? Isn’t that a false dichotomy? Why not acknowledge that we shape, interpret, and respond to the world from within it—not outside it? That we bring forth meaning without having to posit some metaphysical “before” or “beyond”?

This need to find beauty’s origin “elsewhere” seems to rest on an unexamined assumption: that what’s meaningful or real must come from outside us. But why believe that?

If beauty were created by man and his practices, I'd contend that there would be no proper orientation towards the world. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'd say there is no proper orientation towards the world.

And if there is no proper orientation to the world, then something like Huxley's A Brave New World has no aesthetic defects. The wilderness, sunsets, flowers, love, commitment, romance, justice, parenthood—these are hideous because society has said that they are so, and people have been conditioned accordingly. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't see how this follows. It feels like this is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Just because something doesn't have a transcendent source doesn't mean it's nothing or we can readily reverse perspectives at will. (Although, grant you, in some areas we've almost done this - slavery, women's rights, our more recent changing understanding of gender) Human taste has a lively intersubjective dimension, it's a contingent but powerful force based on our interactions with the world. And although it evolves and changes over time and is the product of contingent factors, it still matters to us and we can talk about it and cultivate views. I think some of those views can be pigheaded attempts at objectivist dictatorialism, but that's people, right?

↪Count Timothy von Icarus The world is always, already interpreted. It shows up for us through our practices, our language, our forms of life. To suggest otherwise is to appeal to a view-from-nowhere—a fantasy of access to the world prior to interpretation

I think this is a false dichotomy. I mentioned Rorty above to head of exactly this sort of false dichotomy, whereby the later empiricst trots out the earlier empiricst's failed model, knocks it down, and then proclaims that "if not-a, then it is necessarily b." I don't think this follows, one could just as well turn around to attack the presuppositions made by both a Russell/early-Wittgenstein and a Rorty/late-Wittgenstein.

I already allowed that "a 'simple statements of fact' also involves: "an interpretation within a context of belief, intention, tradition, form, and reception." But this is different from saying that there is no truth prior to "interpretation within a context of belief, intention, tradition, and reception." To say that would be to say that nothing was true until man's communities arose. Yet the order of human discourse is not the order of being, the former is contained within the latter, not vice versa.

So I have to ask: aren’t you smuggling in a theological or metaphysical assumption, something like a First Cause or transcendent source? Why suppose that beauty must have a ground outside human life—outside history, culture, or shared understanding?

Why would notions of beauty be one way and not any other if beauty was not in any sense prior to human life?

You could ask the same sort of questions re truth. Why did disparate culture groups come to recognize ants and cockroaches as distinct species, and individual ants and cockroaches as individual organic wholes, animals? The most obvious answer is: these organisms already existed as species with individual members prior to the advent of man and his languages. So here, the truth is prior to its culturally bound representation. The priority which exists is not merely temporal, but also exist in terms of a hierarchy contemporaneous efficient causes, in the same way that a hanging chandelier depends on each link in the chain above it to be hanging rather than falling at any particular moment.

A First Cause, First Principle, and First Mover might follow from the idea that explanations need to be intelligible and do not bottom out in "it just is" and the spontaneous movement of potency to actuality—that's another question however.

Why does this need for an external “source” apply to aesthetic judgments in particular? Does language require a source beyond human life? Do games, rules, rituals, or cultural artefacts?

Certainly. They do not spring from the aether fully formed. Language has causes outside language. If language had no prior cause, there would be no reason to explain why it is one way and not any other.

This need to find beauty’s origin “elsewhere” seems to rest on an unexamined assumption: that what’s meaningful or real must come from outside us. But why believe that?

It comes from the assumption that our language and judgements have causes.

I'd say there is no proper orientation towards the world.

So, then Hitler, Stalin, and the BTK killer represent equally valid orientations towards being as anyone else?

I don't see how this follows. It feels like this is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Just because something doesn't have a transcendent source doesn't mean it's nothing or we can readily reverse perspectives at will.

Right, no need to bring up transcedence. It follows from the assertion that there is no proper orientation towards being. If there is no proper orientation towards the world then the orientation represented by the society of A Brave New World could hardly be improper, no?

I think some of those views can be pigheaded attempts at objectivist dictatorialism, but that's people, right?

People acting properly?

If Hamlet is right, if "nothing is good or bad (beautiful or ugly) but thinking makes it so," we are left with the question of why anything should be thought beautiful or ugly in the first place. Such notions should be uncaused, and thus random — Count Timothy von Icarus

Others here have focused on this as well. It simply doesn't follow that, because there is no transcendental or foundational basis for aesthetic values, our notions of value are therefore uncaused or random.

I'm puzzled by this reply because the post says this follows from Hamlet's position, not from a lack of "transcendental or foundational basis."

The question of whether man's will and his various "games" (which are said above to ground aesthetic judgement) generate their own existence is a different question. I would maintain they do not, that they have causes that are prior to them. But this is not the same question as the ultimately arbitrary nature of aesthetic and moral judgement if Hamlet is correct and man wills values. IDK, perhaps Milton's Satan is the better example here: "evil be thou my good," through the act of the "unconquerable will."

It absolutely does follow that if there is nothing prior to man, his communities, and his "games" then there is no reason for them to be one way and not any other. If something "just is" ("always already") why is it one way and not any other? The "community" as a bare primitive has this problem.

I should note that the austere physicalist doesn't have this problem. They have an idea of what lies prior to man and his games. They might have a similar problem when it comes to "why is the universe one way rather than any other," though (it depends).

If you were to ask for a universal standard, then you would be stuck with the majority's vote unfortunately. — PartialFanatic

I disagree. If you consider that, in every society, the uneducated constitute the majority, then only someone who is similarly uneducated and shares their tastes can benefit from the majority’s vote. For an educated reader, however, this vote of the masses is irrelevant. If there is anyone you can trust in this regard, it is a critic whose taste you know and whose preferences you share.

:up:

And indeed, there is an issue with feedback between educated/elite opinion and majority opinion, in that the two shape each other. What gets taught as a matter of a normal education also matters. Plus you also have the issue of earlier works affecting later works. Although, these are less of an issue with natural beauty.

I once saw someone argue that Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer were given undue praise because there are so many more people alive who can write in English today than in their epoch. Thus, "the Bayesian prior for them being truly elite writing talents would be quite low." This, to me, totally misses the close relationship between history, philosophy, culture, etc. and art, both art as received, and how it is produced.

I'm puzzled by this reply because the post says this follows from Hamlet's position, not from a lack of "transcendental or foundational basis." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Didn't you mean Hamlet to be articulating the position that there is no transcendental basis for values?

Transcendent in what way? I am saying something about the things judged good/beautiful must be prior to the act of judging/thinking itself, else the objects themselves would only be arbitrarily related to the judgement. Anything could be judged any which way, because the properties of objects do not determine how they are judged. Note that the post you are quoting is the second one a chain in which Tom said that Beauty was an example of man creating something from nothing, which is what I was responding to.

This seems to be obviously false for something like color. That something is judged to be blue is dependent on the object judged. Why would it be different for beauty?

When I respond to your view here, am I really engaging in a rational pursuit of truth, or am I simply performing a kind of power move, attempting to universalise my own subjective stance? — Tom Storm

That deserves its own thread. It’s the nut of so many discussions.

If one answers that giving an opinion is “performing a kind of power move, making universal that which is really subjective” aren’t those who hold such a view basically lying when they offer their opinions?

Here is an opinion, for example: “to judge art as ‘good’ is a subjective view and is not about the piece of art in itself”.

This is a universal statement about what art and what good art is.

If I offer this opinion as part of an argument for the sake of a rational pursuit of truth, than whether this opinion is either true or false will require supporting argument to prove its merit. But I can honestly mean it. This can be an honest opinion about the truth of art as part of an honest debate.

But since the opinion itself is a universal statement, if I believe universal opinions cannot be true (or are not real, or are some sort of categorical mistake of language), because all such statements are really “attempts” and “power moves,” then I am lying to you about what I actually think when I tell you what I think art is. If I think “art is only subjective” is universally true, then I am “attempting” to universalize my own subjective stance and make a power move; I am not really saying anything true about art, or more plainly, I am lying to you.

Bottom line, as is so often the case, where all is relative and subjective, there can be nothing to honestly discuss about it. So if you are bothering to speak, you must see something objective we both would have to say, or you are lying to me in order to over power me.

How else can I be corrected but by something prior to your opinion that can be prior to mine? Your view may over power my view, but it can’t correct error if it is merely your powerful view.

If one honestly thinks judgements are simply subjective then you should be agreeing with the Count about Brave New World having no defects as all such orientations are like all other human endeavors - inventions from nothing, purely conventional, in a world where the practical can be re-trained according to any subsequent and new power move.

Or if you disagree with Hitler, on principle, you might be “engaging in a rational pursuit of truth.” But if you disagree with Hitler absent any objective, prior principles or belief in universal truths, you might be “simply performing a kind of power move, attempting to universalize your own subjective stance.” In which case you said nothing about Hitler anymore, but merely became the over-powering dictator.

Last point, when people who think all is subjective and relative agree with each other, there is no real point in debating, but they might enjoy themselves making small clarifications (which would really be attempts at universalizing as they win power struggles). But when people who think all is subjective and relative truly disagree with someone, their best argument is really “you are stupid and you should just shut up” because otherwise they have to pretend (attempt) to engage in rational argument for the pursuit of truth, which would be lying.

Right?

You can have any opinion you want. But if you are trying to tell me I’m wrong, then you can’t have any opinion you want.

That something is judged to be blue is dependent on the object judged. Why would it be different for beauty? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, because there is universal agreement on how to recognize and judge blue, and nothing similar in regard to beauty. But in any case, I see the context for the Hamlet quote, thanks.

Shifting ground here.You started with

I am not more inclined to think that man, with our without his institutions and "games," is the sui generis source of beauty in the cosmos (or goodness, or truth for that matter). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Now it's

I am saying something about the things judged good/beautiful must be prior to the act of judging/thinking itself, else the objects themselves would only be arbitrarily related to the judgement. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If you are now saying only that the flower is prior to the flower being called pretty, then you have dropped your main gambit. But it does not follow that judging the flower to be pretty is arbitrary.

Anything could be judged any which way, because the properties of objects do not determine how they are judged. — Count Timothy von Icarus

"The properties of objects do not determine how they are judged" is rubbish. The flower is judged to be pretty because fo the properties it has.

That something is judged to be blue is dependent on the object judged. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It's also dependent on the eyesight of the person doing the judging, together with the language they use and the community in which they use it.

So we are still at:

Why supose there is a "sui generis source of beauty ". Do you supose that that in order for beauty to be real, it must have a source, and that source must be outside human life? I don't agree. I'll throw the burden back to you to show that such a thing is needed. — Banno

I'd say there is no proper orientation towards the world.

So, then Hitler, Stalin, and the BTK killer represent equally valid orientations towards being as anyone else? — Count Timothy von Icarus

It's funny how people always reach for Hitler in these discussions. Why not Pol Pot, surely a satisfying enough human rights violator in his own right?

Like many people, you assume there's a need for a universal moral standard that tells us the right way to relate to the world. I'm positing that no such standard exists. That doesn’t mean I approve of people like Hitler or whoever, just that I don't believe there's some higher, absolute scale to measure orientations to the world.

But note: we can still judge and reject them, but we do so from our own perspective, not from some objective, godlike viewpoint.

It's perfectly legitimate to condemn Hitler or Pol Pot on the basis that they do not create the society we wish to build. This is a discursive process. Not all all values are equally appealing or equally helpful for us as human beings trying to live together.

It seems to me that this is all culture ever does - balance pluralism and proffer assessments and values based on human-made frameworks. We don't get access to some objective standpoint outside all human values.

Besides, even if one believes the good is something non-human or absolute, people will still disagree. Some will passionately insist that their Pol Pots or their Trumps represent the way forward and the true path. Appealing to an absolute standard of the good doesn’t settle the issue, it merely relocates the disagreement to whose interpretation of that standard prevails.