Date: Fri, 21 Nov 1997 03:19:42 -0800 (PST)
From: LH Engelskirchen <lhengels-AT-igc.apc.org>
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: BHA: aesthetics


 
 
I have not followed all the posts on aesthetics, so I hope this
does not redig dug ground.  For a starting point,
 
Wouldn't a critical realist optic on the aesthetic of a work
perceive whatever counts as its aesthetic to be relational and
existing in virtue of, though not reducible to, its effects?
 
In addition if Le Roy's four dimensional analysis has general
philosophical validity wouldn't explorations along the following
lines follow:
 
1.   1M.  Non-identity.  The work as other -- other than its
creator, other than its audience, other than the world.  The work
as a transitive product in the intransitive dimension.  the work as
a materially embodied intransitive object, a sign, communicating in
the transitive dimension.
 
2.   2E.  Absence.  The work as located in space and process.  What
is left of music if sound is taken away?  What is left of a
painting or poem or play, etc., if sense is taken away?  (The
Lesson by Ionesco always impressed me as a structure driven by its
tempo to such a degree it hardly needed meaning to be what it was.) 
"Ceci N'est Pas Une Pipe" (Magritte) -- what is the referent of the
work and what is not.  What is the referent of music?
 
3.   3L. Totality.  The work in its internal relationality. 
Reflexivity and emergence, the dialogue of sound and sense,
reference and referent, the work as a whole,  in itself and in
relation to other things.  The work as an ultimata, a complex
object, a source and center of causal power, a thing of intrinisc
structure capable of bringing about a change in things, including
itself.
 
4.   4D.  Agency.  The work as capable of transforming its
creator(s) and its audience.  It's aesthetic as a flourishing, as
engaging transformation in terms of one's real interests.  On the
one hand my guess is the aesthetic of a work functions in a way
that is not different from science:  it gives expression to the way
things are and how they tend to behave.  But on the other hand a
work's aesthetic seems to embody always implicitly an additional
step:  it functions not to interpret the world, but to change it.
 
If a work's aesthetic gives expression to how things are, what it
does not offer is a "real definition."  How then does it capture
how things are?  That's a question for a critical realist
aesthetics, isn't it?
 
 
Howard
 
Howard Engelskirchen
 
"What is there just now you lack"  Hakuin


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