From: Colin.Wight-AT-aber.ac.uk (Colin Wight) Subject: Re: BHA: Reply to Michael Date: Thu, 9 Apr 1998 09:37:45 +0100 Hi Michael, I accept your points but don't think I am guilty of confusing the positions, but of arguing that the first group are incorrect. This doesn't, I should add, commit me to denying the objective structure of say a Bach concerto, but only that this structure is in anyway aesthetic. If you go with the first strand of thought it seems to me that given the vast differences in approaches to aesthetics we have two solutions. One, is to claim that everything has aesthetic worth, or that some things do and some things don't. The former makes aesthetics as meaningless some Foucaultian (not all) claims that everything is power, the latter dangerously elitist - i.e. Can't you see the aesthetic worth in this? A highbrow theory of art. Or even worse, a Platonic proscribing of what art is good for the republic (I don't doubt, however, that art has been used in this way). I don't accept Baumgarten's, nor Kant's, claim that aesthetic consciousness is a unitary element of human experience, however I do think, with Kant, that aesthetic judgement is unlike either theoretical judgement, or practical judgement, because it is effected entirely subjectively (accepting of course the manner in which subjectivity in embedded within the social). Talk of judgement also leads me to question your assertion that 'Aesthetics has no necessary evaluative component'; we do evaluate aesthetic experiences and the first strand of thought (the objective structure group) seem to imply that some judgements are better than others (they capture more of the objective structure). Whether this aligns me with Burke or not, it seems to me that taste and aesthetic judgement are inextricably linked. > >The objective aesthetic structure of, say, the Oedipus >necessarily involves Oedipus's recognition of his sin--or, >better, his impurity--and his blinding at the end of the play. But this simply assumes what I am questioning - the existence an an objective aesthetic structure. >An Oedipus (the play) which omits the blinding (as Johnson >argued King Lear should not have its fifth act with the >death of Cordelia) isn't Oedipus, but some other play which >we have either lost or never existed. Well, yes I agree. But this argument only preserves the structure of the play as important and does not say whether this structure is aesthetic. The same play watched by an Azande might induce neither fear or glee, but merely sleep. This may still, on your terms be an aesthetic experience derived from the structure of the play, but it seems to me that we would be stretching things rather far here. Thanks, ------------------------------------------------------------------ Dr. Colin Wight Department of International Politics University of Wales, Aberystwyth Tel: (01970) 621769 ---------------------------------------------------------------- --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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