The Sense of Beauty

Can we agree that there are shifts in artistic taste, that is, shifts in what is considered beautiful, over time? I'll try to describe them in broad brush terms here. This will be part of the broader project of uniting my Moore-ish breakthrough in ethics (really in axiology) on the one hand, and the still-powerful historicist/Jamesian memes at large in my skull on the other. We should be able to talk about beauty in historical terms.

If we try, we notice at once that there is an underlying battle between connoisseurship and novelty. Suppose that we are living in a time when the impressionistic style is dominant in the world of painting. The smart people are the ones who know something about impressionism, who have developed and shared with one another standards that determine which painters are doing it best, etc. A recognition of beauty arises and is understood within this universe of discourse.

BUT ... there is also an innate human drive for novelty. Eventually the relevant public will get bored by impressionism, and there will be a thirst for the next Hot New Thing -- maybe (in my very simplified history): cubism. The initial appeal of cubism will be that it is NOT impressionistic, and there will be intense arguments between those who speak for novelty and the connoisseurs of the older style. Those arguments will be reasoned. They aren't simply "you like vanilla." Yet the underlying dynamic is clear. The bored cannot be talked out of looking for novelty. The connoisseurs can sometimes be talked into seeing the value in the new thing, and even becoming connoisseurs of that.

And, inevitably, the process is repeated down the line.

There are, then, two distinct kinds of first-order aesthetic arguments. There are arguments among connoisseurs who share common standards/premises and who are interested in the same particular style/period. "The same standards that you invoke in explaining your enjoyment of Picasso's Dryad should apply to the appreciation of Braque's Large Nude, should they not?"

And then there are the arguments among styles, most pungently the arguments between the old and the new of any particular moment.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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