Thanks Ernest I think the op is well put.

Peter Berger's book 'The Social Construction of Reality' — Wayfarer

Footnote: this was co-written with Thomas Luckmann, a German who was also interested, like you I think Wayfarer, in religion :) I'm afraid I've never read anything by him other than 'Social Construction' but he was once well-known for 'The Invisible Religion', a view that religiosity permeated much of our social action in under-recognized ways.

I didn't mean to sound obscure. I only meant that 'visual field content' sounds scientific, and thus requires a certain level of precision. To be very precise, both you and the tree are changed entities in the course of your short narrative, but by convention, we still call you you, and the tree the tree. It all depends how precise you want to be.

If realism were the case, some language games presumably would be privileged over others. That would explain why people talk about illusions, for example, then say, 'whereas in reality...'.

I take it to be part of the very idea of language games to rule out transcendence in language. There only is one language game or another. Each has rules. As TGW says, professional rigour sometimes tries to partition off ordinary language meanings from meanings in professional practice.

why do we think it's the same tree? — Mongrel

I agree with aletheist, every step here is tricky if you want to be picky and non-literary. I am reading David Wiggins on sameness and substance at the mo', have you ever delved there? Slow patient stuff.

In the narrative 'you' are assumed to remain the same you, a first puzzle. The tree changes as you pass it, but in such a slow way that we tend to discount the difference, just as we do with whether your movement and ageing changes you significantly. (I saw a recent theatrical enactment of Paul Auster's New York trilogy in which two identically-dressed actors played him, one emerging a moment after the other left, or the two co-existing on stage for a moment)

The sameness of you and of the tree and the style of their narrative is then, for me, in a different language-game from one in which one would talk of 'visual fields', and in those different language-games different standards of 'sameness' apply. So any confusion may be clarified by Great Uncle Ludwig's recourse to grammar in the widest sense. Or so a Wittgenstein-lover like me might argue :)

external reality — Purple Pond

It's odd how when you drive a car through a narrow space, you squeeze your shoulders closer to compress yourself. Wittgenstein had a question about feeling one's way with a stick: if the stick taps hard ground, where do you feel the hardness?

As jkop said earlier, if you start with an assumption of external reality you're bound to find it necessary. But what justifies your starting there? I can close my eyes and inhabit Mahler's Fifth: am I not conscious in that orchestra there with old Gustav?

I find consciousness every bit as strange as Sam, though I conjure it in my mind differently, that each of us is almost constantly (though with pauses for breath) re-inventing their world, as we move through shared space among familiar objects. Either way, Sam's or mine, this oddness seems to fit quite well both with quite a lot of neuroscience about how human creatures act, and with something that's on the mystical slant of understanding.

Well, Dawkins wrote a very good counter to that in his book the 'selfish gene,' and it is very easy to read, one can pretty well read it in a day, and it will make you feel much better about the world, really, it is quite brilliant, I greatly recommend it. — ernestm

What do you think Dawkins was countering? His was hardly a work of philosophy let alone of ethics.

The modern world is full of apologias for selfishness, especially 'enlightened' (ha!) self-interest. The primary one for me was Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, an 18th century explication (in verse) of how the morality of the self-centred dandy and self-admiring narcissist lay at the core of modern enterprise, i.e. how vice has become purported virtue in the modern age. It was recommended by Joan Robinson, an armchair Communist and economist at Cambridge, who lectured me in my youth, as the ethical key to capitalism.

My own view, for instance, is that Wittgenstein is incorrect about the proposition of ethics. I believe that the propositions of ethics do not transcend the world, i.e., in the sense that they are attempts to say what cannot be said. I also believe that there are moral facts, and that they are objective facts that all of us are able to comprehend. They are not senseless in the Wittgensteinian sense. — Sam26

Sam, I am glad to see you here. Your notes on Wittgenstein are very valuable, as is your quiet, deliberate voice.

There is a copy of the 1929 Lecture on Ethics online, here, in an unformatted version. It ends:

My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it. — Wittgenstein

Presentism is so stupid! Eternalism is better. — quine

Do any of the options (including the 'growing block') make any difference to how we act? They seem to me like unsolvable word games.

"Let others bend the breathing bronze to forms more fair..." — Mongrel

Here's a 1907 version by E Fairfax Taylor: the fuller quote is even more apposite, but perhaps that's what you meant subtly to imply and I've only registered it by seeking it out :)

Others no doubt from breathing bronze shall draw
More softness, and a living face devise
From marble, plead their causes at the law
More deftly... — Virgil tr E Fairfax Taylor

Enjoy your holidays, mcdoodle; these questions of the nature of truth are indeed interesting and nuanced, and I will be happy to take them up in another thread when you return. :) — John

Of course I may be bored by the heat and people lying around the pool all day and find there's good wifi :)

Much of this depends for me on what one thinks about 'knowledge' or whatever it is one bases one's action on. The little academic course I've been on for two years included access to colloquia with talks by quite well-known people. The very first was by an Italian Leibniz scholar who are argued that the 'justified true belief' account of knowledge is pretty much a 20th century invention. She proposed that a profounder tradition going back to Plato has knowledge and belief as separate sorts of beast. And almost the most recent talk was by Timothy Williamson, who argues very analytically for a 'knowledge first' epistemology, that 'knowing' is sui generis.

Anyway, more anon perhaps.

You say you don't want to press your ethics on others; does this mean that you recommend subjectivism? — John

I'm about to go on holiday, for a little contemplation, so I can't go into all your questions. What I still can't pick out of what you're asking is how 'truth' should, as you see it. enter into these questions. Your questions imply a position but you don't state one.

I would certainly *recommend", if pressed, a form of virtue ethics. There are certain values that I weigh when I am acting, or when I am expecting good standards of behaviour of others, both people and organisations. The best judgment as to how to act, or to think, is based on certain values weighed in the balance, and deliberation based on valid and sound reasoning.

I know Wayfarer, whom I regard as an online friend even though we disagree about many things, is keen on Truth (indeed with a capital T). My improved knowledge of the ancients in the last few years has not made me feel any clearer about how they are supposed to be talking about 'truth', which is for instance a poor translation of aletheia - hence the attempts by Heidegger in particular to reintroduce terms related to 'disclosing' and 'unhiding' to reach back to the originals. (His terminology does not of course lead to greater clarity, rather the reverse)

This feels like it belongs in a thread devoted to something other than 'imagination', to me. I'd be happy to engage in one, but won't be here much for ten days or so while I soak up the sun :)

This is partly my advancing years, I know, but I do find myself sometimes having had a desire, and satisfied it. Here I am, say, in the kitchen, and the kettle has boiled and there's a teabag in the pot, and all the while I was thinking about J J Gibson (current obsession), yet the kindly creature inside me, or iwhich I am inside, has made the necessary preparations for a pot of Earl grey tea all the same.

One thing I'm on the trail of at the moment is 'familiarity', which I think is related to all this. Sometimes in a strange part of the world one has a feeling - ah! - which clarifies itself as familiarity. I've been here before. There is, it seems, a psychology of such moments: there appear to be different processes at work. One, familiarity, is shared with many other animals who find their way about, make nests, recognise food and so on. The second one - self-reflection - is the human one. Familiarity turns into recollection. (There's a claim different neural networks are at work) Yes, it all makes sense. This is sameness: that's the same corner I turned at last time I was here.

I hope this is an interesting tributary and not a diversion!

I disagree with Aristotle here; why should contemplative wisdom only be "about" right thinking — Noble Dust

Well, to be fair to Aristotle, I think he does think contemplative wisdom just *is* right thinking, though its nature is obscure: my recent tutor suggested that the gods discussed quadratic equations all day, for Ari's gods haven't got Platonic perfection to discuss, so what on earth can they talk about?

What does this even mean? — Noble Dust

I don't respond well to questions like that, but indeed, such a remark demonstrates that even in talking about 'truth' none of us can resist a rhetorical trick or two. What I meant was, I don't try and proselytize about my personal ethics. I do, however, in the political arena, campaign as a Green, because I think an ecological approach would be a better way forward than either the course we're on, or the other options on offer.

I was mostly a playwright, and I think this has greatly contributed to a pluralism of view at the heart of me. I distrust the effort to unify ideas that don't look unifiable to me. Sometimes a scientific approach is best; sometimes an artistic approach is best; sometimes a political one. Univocalism emerged, to my mind, from monotheism, and as I'm a hardline (though pro-religious) atheist, I don't see the need for it. Chasing after a theory of everything, for instance, feels like building pointless castles in the air to me. Trying to unify ways of thinking which I find it useful to separate doesn't help me, I'm afraid. I like having different aspects of me :)

So, wisdom has to do with actuality then? And truth has nothing to do with actuality? — John

I didn't say it had 'nothing to do with actuality', no. The wisest way to act in actuality is with the best possible knowledge, related to context. I will use the word 'true' in talking to people as much as the next person, I should think. But I don't use the word 'truth' as having a Capital Letter implicit in it, if that's what you mean.

...a dialogue that tries to make scientific arguments for or against a proposition that cannot be approached by science... — andrewk

I agree with you here andrew, but I'd just add that one odd thing about 'consciousness studies' is how blind some natural-science-minded philosophers are to social science. Social science has excellent methods of approaching first-person testimony, for instance, which acknowledge the influence of the observer upon the process they're also observing. Much of the Chalmers-inspired stuff about 'science' and consciousness can't see beyond biology into the realms of the social. Few people seem to acknowledge for instance that it's applied sociology that makes Facebook and Google rich beyond reason: this is the secret of their algorithms, good scientific work by social psychologists. So much philosophy is trapped in a physicalist frame of mind.

Q, my last term's student paper was on this :) The thing is, I surveyed what I thought of as five possible positions on placebos, from the ultra-physicalist to the pluralist ultra-sceptics, and managed to find good arguments for all of them. To me, these metaphysical questions then come down to, well, one's metaphysical prejudices.

Quite a lot of effort has been expended on the middle ground of non-reductionist supervenience model, i.e. the idea that the world is as described by physicalists but there are mentalist ways of talking that cannot be reduced to the physical. Jaegwon Kim is the arch-exponent of this view.

I ended up taking the view of the practising scientist of placebos, and that is that you just have to use a mixture of languages, ranging from the chemistry of drugs to the social psychology of 'belief' and 'expectation'. Chomsky hates this and calls it 'methodological dualism'. I think it's inevitable, because there is something about 'belief' and 'expectation' that defy you to use other terms for them, and placebos are irredeemably about belief and expectation, not just of the pill-swallowers but also of the pill-prescribers. What a medical practitioner believes about your treatment seems to affect how well it goes, certainly in relation to pain relief, and that means that practitioners have to take a holistic view: the way 'treatment' occurs is a vital element in what works.

Did you read The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception? — Pierre-Normand

Yes, in fact I'm deep into the secondary literature because I'm hoping to write a student paper on the relationship of affordance and 'familiarity'. It is such a clear and different way of understanding, the notion of affordances, just because it does cut through stale distinctions between subjectivity and objectivity. And actually it's a bridge between analytic and Continental philosophers, because members of both schools are interested, and everyone gets to quote Heidegger :)

All this means is that physics hasn't described consciousness - yet. It doesn't imply that consciousness has some special quality about it that allows it to be untouched by science. That would be an description of consciousness that isn't based on any facts. It's most likely that consciousness simply hasn't yet been defined correctly. — Harry Hindu

It may be that physics hasn't yet been defined correctly, of course. A Chomsky paper from the 90's called 'Language and Nature' argues that earlier similar intra-science puzzles, like how physics and chemistry can interact, were puzzled by redescribing physics and science.

I'm into J J Gibson's 'ecological approach' at the moment. He argues that his approach is non-dualistic and even makes playful reference to ecological physics. This is on the basis that for an animal to perceive an object is for it to see the 'affordances' available from the object, i.e. the natural world is a vast network of mutual relations of affordance, an approach derived from gestalt psychology.

There's a rather dogmatic, but nevertheless to me greatly enjoyable, series of blogs by Bill Black outlining problems with Gary Becker's approach to rationality, discrimination and crime.

Bill Black's blogs

How could wisdom and truth be so far apart that one might not necessarily be connected to the other? What makes wisdom wise if not truth? What makes truth true if not wisdom? — Noble Dust

I do feel minimalist or 'deflationary' about this truth business. We are what we do, so wisdom for me is something to do with right action. After recent personal explorations of Aristotle I'd say this can come in (a) a practical form, phronesis or practical reason being about right action, and (b) a thoughtful form, sophia or contemplative wisdom being about right thinking. This 'rightness' is not an ethic I would press upon others, it's right for me, though I might recommend the process of arriving at it to others.

I don't feel this relates to 'truth' in anything more than an ordinary language fashion, in my own imagination.

I don't see these different "forms" of imagination as being necessary. They sound to me like theoretical postulations that don't have any grounding in the real imagination as experienced. The imagination as experienced is absolutely fluid. It's not categorical at all. Assigning categories to imagination is just a function of human reason trying to give meaning to the imaginative experience — Noble Dust

I am thinking about different aspects of the imagination as having different aspects because they are different language-games in which different things matter and we think differently.

Example one. I've been wondering about the basis of the philosophy of language lately, with a view to a serious project, and why there is such a gulf between mainstream philosophy of language and speech act theory. It might be, on my model, that where people think of language as related to logic, formality and truth-conditions they are talking about language as it relates to the 'scientific image', and where people think of language as related to dialogue and speech acts they are talking about language as it relates to the 'manifest image'. (To use Sellars' terminology)

This gives us two 'images' to 'imagine', to start with. Then - having been a struggling artist most of my life - I would certainly like to add artistic imagination. I am struck by how poorly critical analytic language relates to the practice of art. Clever practitioners can bridge the gap, but often critics of art and explicators of art-practice seem to be talking different languages.

These are the lines I'm thinking on!

Anisotropy is a beautiful word. On the BBC, one commentator was explaining during a lull in the Masters' golf coverage how the powers-that-be at Augusta deliberately mow the grass of the fairways in one direction, so the driven ball skids further. I felt his explanation would have benefited from the word 'anisotropy', but I daresay it's not a term commonly used among the golfing community.

Truth is the result of evaluating the validity of a proposition, and the sum of known propositions by any one person constitutes their knowledge — ernestm

Truth may be the result of evaluation, but back at logic, that would be quite different from validity. One can make a valid argument and end with up with false conclusions; to be valid and true, you need soundness, the successful transmission of the truth-value you hope you started with.

Back at the opening theme...in fact tailor-made for you, Question...

People often forget that Ludwig Wittgenstein was once one of the richest people in Europe and gave away all his money.

Well, I was trying to understand what Simmel meant. I thought you were trying to contradict him without greatly caring what he meant. After all, he wrote a whole book, not just that little quote. And the notion of a 'vantage point' that is somehow independent of an individual or even of a space-time location is not earth-shattering.

if you were the kind if critter that eats tobacco it would be something you ate, instead of something you smoke. — Wayfarer

Yep, meaning is use :)

Where is this vantage point relative to the world that it is independent of?

Humans aren't the only ones that make value judgements. Making value judgements is an evolved psychological trait that we acquired from older life forms. The health, resources and the amount of time and energy one devotes to mating rituals will influence the decision of a member of the opposite sex and determine whether or not the other is chosen to pass on their genes. Natural selection "selected" such psychological traits because it promotes fitter offspring that have a greater chance at survival. — Harry Hindu

This summarises what seems to be Simmel's argument well: valuation is a naturally-occurring phenomenon. And yet our talk about it seems transcendent.

The (to Simmel, transcendent) vantage point is the human one: we reflect on value. Crows are bright creatures, for instance, but their conversation, as far as we know so far, does not rise to a caw about the value of one's latest stash or cache. Once we are capable of reflecting on value, how does that change our valuations?

And, the crunch: what happens when the valuations we articulate to ourselves clash? Enter 'value theory' of one kind or another. Simmel thinks money is both wonderful and terrible, for it enables us to compare the value of any single object (including the abstract) with any other via the intrinsically valueless intermediary of money, and this is its glory and its horror: it makes universal valuation seem easy, and it demeans the value of everything by turning our finest achievements into monetary value.

Well that's how I read it.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Another way of saying it would be: does imagination play a role in the process of seeking after the truth? — Noble Dust

I'm definitely seeking after wisdom, of which 'the truth' may or may not form an important part.

On the Uni course I'm currently on I attended a lecture course on 'Imagination' for pleasure. In the analytic world this rather surprisingly means examining the artistic/creative imagination and puzzling over fictionality and aesthetics.

I'm interested in the notion (which I think would be Continental but there you go) that there are different *kinds* of imaginative world, overlapping, but broadly understandable in their divisions. Then the sort of thing that Wayfarer is arguing against would be the result of philosophers becoming preoccupied with 'the scientific imagination', and mistaking the ideas in that imaginative sphere for the totality of ideas, or at least for an unthought-through predominance.

I think then one could postulate 'the religious imagination', 'the artistic imagination', 'the historical imagination' and 'the political imagination' (in the way that Landru in our old forum would describe various 'discourses'), together with whatever others one desires to discourse about, without insisting that a scientific view predominates. I trust that Streetlight and Pierre-Normand can explain that various French people have been thinking this way for some time :)

My view is that the whole 'possible worlds' idea is dependent on imagination. Although not usually expressed that way, a 'possible world' is in my view just a set of circumstances that we can imagine. — andrewk

Andrew, I was only the other day thinking the very same. Of course the notion has been taken up by logicians, who would require any given world to be defined in some way, and literalists, who can't make the leap into an imagined world without deciding it has to be there.

I think you are talking to someone else. That's nothing at all to do with what I wrote, which is the philosophical derivation of socialism in the tradition of Western empiricism, not its historical forms. — ernestm

I was talking to you, Ernest. I have read some of your website, and the breadth of your reading is amazing, but I am well-versed in this corner of learning, the history of socialism, and so I am confident that you are mistaken in saying:

If you wish to consider socialism, the first step is to consider its origin in Marxism. — ernestm

Socialism began to be used as a term, before Marx was active, in French circles (BC has just mentioned Fourier in another thread) and British circles, where Owenist 'utopianism' survived the repression of the 1790's - when the first mass working-class meetings were held, as documented in E P Thompson's 'The making of the English working class' - to establish communities in New Lanark, and later in north America.

The conflicts that broke up the First International, and bedevilled the Second International, were at least partly because some, the anarchists and syndicalists, plus the ex-Chartists and Owenites, opposed the centralism and authoritarianism of Marx and his allies. Proudhon for instance, in saying 'Property is theft', actually regarded State property as theft too, he advocated mutualist organisation.

Later the divide was more clearly between those who became 'socialists' and those who became 'Communists', though this wasn't as clear-cut as one might think till the 20th century, since for instance for a period from 1870 it was German Marxists who proposed parliamentarianism, so one shouldn't imagine the Marxian influence was entirely authoritarian.

This is all to point to socialism as a material practice, as neo-Marxists themselves would acknowledge in their histories. There may be a attractively simple scholastic line that leads neatly from Kant through Hegel and Feueurbach to Marx, but this line in the history of ideas has only a tangential relationship to 'socialism'.

If you wish to consider socialism, the first step is to consider its origin in Marxism. — ernestm

Some of us are socialists, and are likely to take umbrage at this. We have been lumbered with accusations about 'Marxism' all our lives. Well, we soldier on.

I am one of the Other Socialists who find their origins in Saint-Simon and Owenite utopians, a tradition which opposed the authoritarianism of Marx and his friends at every turn in the 19th century, joined in the turn-of-the-19th-20th-centuries move to involve the working-class in democracy, pursued socialism through trade unionism for much of the 20th century, found a new lease of life with the wave of socialist feminism in the 1970's...and here we are, still agreeing to disagree. Still mutual after all these years.

Pardon me butting in - I like the 'genres'. I'm interested in taking from Bakhtin the notion of speech genres and applying them in the philosophy of language to the idea of speech acts. But it can be a creepy idea. There is no 'authentic' voice, only the ring of authenticity in a particular genre. (Just as there is no metalanguage for the 20th century logicians, you've got to face it, the metalanguage is English too.)

Still, I'm amazed you two get all this from Feuerbach, whom I've tried, but to me he's only seemed a footnote to Marx on the one hand and George Eliot (his first translator) on the other. Maybe I need to give him another go. :)

When presented with an ethical dilemma, what am I to do? No doubt I have already chosen (to have the dilemma) and must make a choice (my eventually response), but there is no meaning or significance to guide me. I cannot say: "Well, X matters, so I am obligated do Y rather than Z. In the end (speaking of his early philosophy) Sartre just goes with the cop out of: "There is only what is chosen."

Sartre gives a great account of power. No matter what reasoning I give, I am the one doing it. It's bad faith for me to say: "I must because..." for it denies my responsibility in causing events. Even if I am behaving ethically (e.g. X matters), I'm the one doing it. I choose to make that world rather than it being a necessary outcome of whatever ethic (e.g God's authority, social demands, that X matters, etc.) is expessed.

In terms of value or ethics though, it's all but empty. Sure, it's true what happens will only be my choice, but that's no better than saying, "tomorrow, something will happen." It doesn't help with anything. If I'm dealing with value or ethics, I want to know what is important , so I can make a better choice about my actions. To say, "Well, there is nothing to say on the matter, there is only what is chosen" is only to miss and ignore the point entirely. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Thanks for amplifying what you mean. My memory of Sartre is that he isn't as minimalist as this, but the core is, I suppose, as you say it. My memory of him is that one can usefully try to understand what has been important to you and to others, and that there is for instance a political arena where one upholds one set of values rather than another. Certainly in his later work where he had read more Marx-related stuff he came to this sort of view.

Nevertheless I stick with Sartre in thinking, it's only the choice that matters. I daresay that's why I find most discussion of ethics rather over-theoretical and baffling. I've been reading some 'value theory' lately to get my head round it, and all this stuff about 'intrinsic' value of objects, for instance, leaves me cold. One is ethically as one does; one makes the leap into the unknown.

Let's see others living up to their claims, as well! — Evol Sonic Goo

Well, I shall doodle. My lifetime is the age in which individualism has become enshrined in various 'universal human rights', so I can't say I feel fin-de-siecle about that sort of individualism. It looks to me like it's thriving.

Of course Communism collapsed and there's a McDonalds in every country, plus an American military base handy for most countries. That betokens a different strand of individualism, the Puritan vein that began (in my genealogy anyway, for as Evol says we aren't doing history here) out of a notion that the individual accepts and surrenders to secular power as an amoral or immoral force, beyond 'our' control. Our corporations live by greed, our armies invade and assassinate, and the ethics we debate are not theirs but our 'individual' ethics. We are helpless before Google, Goodman Sachs and militarism. But we use the right word for transsexuals.

There's a doodle for you :)

Sartre, for example, treats meaning as if it's​ a human creation. Rather than understanding meaning or value is an infinite expressed by a state itself, Sartre treats it like it's nothing more than a human whim. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Just remind me where Sartre says something like this, would you?

Although it would be awesome if you would read something by a respected Muslim scholar. — Mongrel

There is an organisation called 'Muslims for Progressive Values: http://www.mpvusa.org . They make very clear statements against child marriage, fgm and in favour of women's and lbgt rights.

How are we to act? I read the Koran as a teenager and was shocked and appalled. But I was already agnostic, brought up without religion, and I read the Old Testament at the same time and was shocked and appalled by that too. (I'm not disagreeing that the two have different religious status, I'm just remembering how I felt)

Still, what is written in Holy books is not how people act. People act for present day reasons with present day values out of present day concerns. I live among Muslims and chat with them every day, they are workmates and friends of my wife's, they are fellow-students of mine at uni from faraway countries as well as Dewsbury and Leicester - how am I to act?

I just act in a friendly egalitarian fashion, while remaining true to my principles and opinions. I'm not going to debate hadith with the local shopkeeper, but the state of Pakistani and English cricket. When the moment comes to oppose, say, violence by British Asians, or fgm inflicted on British women, then I will and do. (I'm retired, my wife is a lawyer dealing with such cases alongside Muslim practitioners)

What I dislike about lists of what's wrong with the Koran, or generalized critiques of Islam, or indeed vague liberal affirmations of equality, is that they are so often silent on what action should be taken. What more is to be done other than to be a good citizen? The implication of silence by critics of Islam seems to me that we should oppose and restrict other people just because of their religion. I oppose that. I prefer the dangers of egalitarianism to the dangers of exclusion.

In the ancient world I'm sure it was the same, insofar as classical works of all kinds were intended to conform to an archetype. Classical art always conforms to very strict proportions and measurements, which are thought to replicate the essential form - quintessence, as you have said.

I'm sure it never would have occurred to an individual in pre-modern times whether he or she liked or didn't like some classical form. — Wayfarer

I don't think our knowledge of Greek and Roman sculpture and architecture, for instance, bears this out. In Greece, in quite a short period the favoured relationship between the head and body, for instance, changed from Polykleitos, who I think is believed to be the first to try and introduce prescriptive ratios, to later sculptors. The period in which strict proportion is known to have been used in sculpture is short, and greatly exaggerated by Roman writers like Pliny later. Architecture has more 'natural' constraints, but the Greek models, I accept, are more pervasive in this field.

Then in the early Italian Renaissance people like Mantegna and da Vinci rediscovered the joys of proportionality at the same time as their art exploded into physicality, and interest in the natural human body, against the strictures of medieval art.

There's great aesthetic pleasure to be found in proportion, no doubt about it, and the echoes between formulas Nature has evolved and great artists have employed are profound. But some bad artists and architects have also been deeply influenced by proportion at the expense of vision and understanding.

At the risk of sounding deeply postmodern...to me our finding our foundations in ancient Greece and Rome - whether in art or in philosophy - is a sort of creation myth, a secular story that appeals to certain prejudices in us, which we then reinforce by constantly referring back to Plato and Aristotle, Polykleitos and Lysippos. I enjoy it, I engage it in it myself, but it's a myth.

"Modal collapse" is intriguing. — tom

There seem to be some humans following the same line of 'modal collapse'. Here's a paper by a guy called Kraay arguing that theists should embrace modal collapse.