"can anything be of higher quality than anything else, or is it all merely in our minds? This question is really worth addressing: Does quality even objectively exist?"
I didn't see you proving that quality "objectively" exists, only that it subjectively exists (merely) in the mind of the viewer whose stimulation levels you are measuring.
"Lots of people seem to think that it doesn’t...a sizable portion of the population says things like “beauty exists only in the eye of the beholder,”...So deep down, lots of people really feel as though most things aren’t better or worse, and some people even think there’s no such thing as better or worse."
I think these people are saying things aren't better or worse objectively, or that there's no such thing as better or worse objectively. They may have subjective opinions about whats better or worse, but you can't generalise them to all people. How would you arrive at an objective answer of what piece of music is better than another? Measuring the stimulation across all human brains? Is Despacito higher quality than Beethoven because it has more views? Is pop music the highest quality because the most people find it the most stimulating so they keep returning to it?
It seems that "good" art makes us stimulated in a way we, individually find agreeable (even a sad movie can be enjoyable, because we are willing to feel such). Whereas "bad" art makes us feel things we do not willingly want to feel (such as repulsion, or worse, boredom!).
Statistically, some art will make more people feel one way over another.
But there's a certain element about great art that cannot be defined, where some things are just considered more beautiful to the masses than others. Perhaps it's the emulation of nature, or the geometry involved, or the colors. Or maybe it's the authenticity of the creator, whose spirit shines through somehow. Maybe it's something that is linked deep down to who we are as humans--the collective unconscious, so to speak, that hasn't been well-defined.
(Or maybe this unknown element has been defined, Idunno.)
So you've entered a space where I'd probably rather be spending my time, rather than being concerned about these niggilng details about whether what I'm interested in is actually, you know, complete nonsense. And I think your insights are overall pretty good.
Part of me wants to say "the preferences of individuals who are a) intelligent and also b) high in Openness indicate what is objectively good, because such people have a refined aesthetic sense" but who am I kidding, that's just like a Trump supporter saying "Only Republicans should vote, because those people are sensible about political matters." I'm just too aware of how many traps and snares lie in wait for the unwary that I've learned the better part of wisdom is the humble admission of ignorance.
And as for that je ne sais quoi that distinguishes truly great art from mediocre art... I have trouble with this a little bit, because a lot of people whom I would swear should know about these things will tell me that hollow, boring works are actually masterpieces, and I'm too confident in my own sensitivity and education to believe them.
But when I look at my best work, authenticity, trueness to life or history or nature, verisimilitude (in stories), and ambiguity or the multiplicity of interpretations all seem to matter. Also important is the process of getting emotionally swept into the work so that you can linger properly on passages that need time for the listener or reader to fully explore. And part of it is a bit of confidence and bravery, in saying "I don't care if people think I *am* childish, or conventional, or clumsy, or controversial, or whatever" and just including the elements in a piece that really belong there.
Most of the process of creating art feels, to me, like listening to what is supposed to be there, and letting it emerge.
③ "Art" is a relatively recent term for activities that blur en masse rite/ritual/performance/stages/architecture/sculpture/painting/landscape/worlding that our modern economies (after agriculture) allow us to separate out (and we separate "art" out in recent centuries from because state religions colonised these practices in their totalitarian moments over some thousands of years and got peeps other than ruler/priest to do the manual work)(All major artists you've heard of in recent years do the same, you do not know the names (including me) of peeps who physically make the art and solve problems along the way).
Modern artists merely wave their hands about while they curate their careers once they have found some hook or schtick enough to get other peoples money to pay others to do the actual work in their name (Marina Abramoivic, Matthew Barney, Jeff Koons, Damian Hirst et al).
Your creative powers and openness to find new (rituals?) is of no concern to that market. Which is what many peeps think of as the art world.
So I would define art as a process which solves problems which it also makes up, unlike science which solves problems of discovery or testing or implementation (technology). Maths is already like this definition of art, new maths discoveries works a lot by analogy and metaphor, and not by the logic of hindsight, but is built on experience, i.e. we live the gap between the two between the past (as hindsight) and the future (as ????).
How open we are to that factors our creativity.
Survival may rest on managing human resources of bands of unrelated humans in order to have enough insurance to eat when the hunting fails, which it usually does. So ritual/... is used to manage those human resources (including the meta of ritual/....) which is why political powers focus on the intensification of ritual/... (recursively) and creates things like doctrine/dogma/doxa as canon law in order to police heresy/disloyalty as well as paying for works of art and the mass (bread & circusses).
The Buddhist like scepticism of Pyrrho was critical of those new-fangled meta intensification of rites (he was a local priest at Elis) doxa/dogma/ which turn rites-without-belief into Nicene creeds. And later into art to honour the glory of those policing those creeds. The fact we think of religion and define it in terms of belief shows that Pyrrho, sadly, completely lost a very good lead.
I write hoping you will continue you work here, the analogy may be useful even if the starting assumptions are not-quite-right. Creativity is a process after all. (e.g. for the not-quite-right — I see that analytic philosophy has taken the idea of one type of maths, Logick, and then locked up "bellief" in propositional form... I find this very annoying as fideist use it as a slippery slope in which their say I belief the sun come sout or something and then I have to explain everything back to Pyrrho and they just wander off to their safe place. Does that mean I win? No.
"Mathematics and philosophy are both inherently rational disciplines." Both are hindsight if described thus. Logic predicts nothing. Making consistent maps reduces noise in the signal (of consistency/coherence/rationality) but is less open to stimuli. Solutions reached may pothole into sub-optimal outcomes (theology/philosophy) or, like in evolution, be a successful compromise of trade-offs == survival as in a fitness landscape. To get out of a pothole requires openness to out-of-the-box thinking, this requires play, or more analogoius thinking (which is what you are doing in the quoted sentence." In Pyrrhonism (possibly Buddhist influence ancient Greek skepticism (older than Academic skepticism) these potholes are called _doxa_ (in recent millenia translated badly as 'belief' but really means 'opinion' before Aristotle re-branded it) which are ***rashly*** held I-want-to-believe-s.
Many philosophies get potholed on their own petards and claim it as a virtue. I call it the… —gap. It's my main reason for blogging.
Moss, Jessica, and Whitney Schwab. “The Birth of Belief.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 57, no. 1 (2019): 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1353/hph.2019.0000.
I swear there's something here, so I'm going to try to make as much sense as I can of what you wrote:
________
Mathematics and philosophy are both exercises in hindsight. Logic predicts nothing.
Making consistent maps reduces noise in the signal a person receives, but with a cost: there's a reduced awareness to stimuli that don't fit into the maps. Then solutions you find may fall into a pothole like those seen theology or philosophy.
To get out of a pothole requires openness to out-of-the-box thinking. This requires play, or more analogous kinds of thinking (like what you are doing when you draw a relation between philosophy and mathematics as rational disciplines).
Incidentally, in Pyrrhonism, these potholes are called _doxa_ which are beliefs held rashly because *rashly* held I-want-to-believe-s.
Many philosophies get potholed on their own petards and claim it as a virtue. I call it the [something] gap. It's my main reason for blogging.
_______
So logic may not make predictions, but it's an invaluable tool. And come to think of it, I'd say logic absolutely can be source of hypotheses to test. Everything in this post I wrote would make for a wonderful hypothesis if anybody could think of a way of testing it!
I agree that beliefs held rashly or because you want to hold them are seriously bad. If I had my way, humans would have been smart enough to give us a solid foundation in philosophy which could clarify immediately how to solve moral quandaries and which religions and political positions are dead wrong.
(Admittedly, then people would come up with new religions and ideologies that achieved the bare minimum to satisfy the philosophical tools of the day, and then I'd complain that the philosophers hadn't done even more. Oh well; at least having a blog is fun?)
But I don't know what you meant by "I call it the… —gap." Can you clarify this?
"I swear there's something here, so I'm going to try to make as much sense as I can of what you wrote:"
Looks good.
I'll add these thinkers/believer throw stuff into the gap and then may say my work here is done. In fact it has just begun and the thickets of work they have created do not help as they all become idiolects (gaps in communication, even if the signal is stimulating) #noteToSelf. They say this is their best work and you just don't understand because Hegel or something.
_______________________________________________
"But I don't know what you meant by "I call it the… —gap." Can you clarify this?"
So, "the… —gap" is my symbol indicating metaphysical WTF moments. Like the opposite of "aha ... moments".
Like we work "it" out as incoherent or gappy, and then, OMG, what just happened… —and how can we even be alive if this cannot be known. (Digression poetic:We pivot Janus-like on the gap between the past and the future, the logic of hindsight and the 'chaos' of what may come -- this is consciousness).
One could also look at it like the edge of chaos whence order and unpredictableness both 'emerge' as a description of the gaps in/of understanding.
(Plato "solves" it with ideal forms and the cave (a gap no doubt) to explain the difference). (He throws a gap into the gap)(our lived experience into a cave --- to the underworld???).(complex).
I say we live where we live.
So, "the… —gap" as a term is a grab-bag I use of what maybe quite distinct phenomena or lack distinction. But thus…. — can allow analogous and thus de-potholing creative connections, creating leads which can be tested.
But which many thinkers/believers try to tie off (in case they bleed to death) or outlaw (like sets that refer to themselves) by fiat (see Hofstadter on this), in case the system falls apart. Or they just chuck their favourite thing into like a landfill of heavenly creatures, or demons if seen as a hell. Caves are scary places.
The gap is used in various ways, for example, "deconstruction" plays on the aporia in systemic thinkers by using their own terminology & methods to undermine what they are trying to say and are thus hoist on their own petards.
Often, if recognised by a systemic thinking looking at their own work they will throw something into the gap of their understanding, or innerstanding even. Such as faith, or God, or the milk of human kindness. I call this act as born of the moral urge when talking sociologically, and worlding when talking in my idiolect. I think the best of these is the milk of human kindness. Kant filled in this gap (lack of evolutionary conexts) and logicks it into the categorical imperative, I find it over-wrought and unnecessary, but lots of peeps identify with it in general...
Unnecessary in that peeps will be good even if the logicks are unfounded... evolution doesn't care.
Oh, hi Eric! I was just thinking about _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ the other day. You're right; it's an interesting work.
But man, I really dislike Plato. Whenever I bring this up it seems people insist we only know anything about Socrates because of Plato, but there's Xenophon, but then was Xenophon even present at the trial, and how much did he really record about Socrates? IDK. Maybe it's the case that we're all stuck replying to Plato forever, but sheesh, that only makes me dislike him more. Is the sorry state of philosophy Plato's fault? Let him answer that!
Plato is... interesting. While I certainly wouldn't use Plato for a model for everyday life, Plato has some very interesting implications for the metaphysics of mathematics.
In (very) short terms, mathematics certainly *appears* to have some correspondence to the Platonic Forms; quite a few mathematicians certainly believe that they're *discovering* theorems, not *inventing* them. Kurt Goedel (of the incompleteness theorems) was a devout Platonist, for example.
I also recently read _Thinking God's Thoughts: Johannes Kepler and the Miracle of Cosmic Comprehensibility_ by Melissa Cain Travis, that goes into the linkage between the abstract and the concrete; it might be a little too Christian for you, but most of the early Moderns were quite devoutly Christian...
Oh, yeah; Christianity is basically the glue that held all of Western civilization together. Originally you had Mediterraneans who had a lot in common, and were distinct from the northern barbarians who lived at the periphery. They weren't "Europeans" or "Westerners" in any real sense. Some of that division still survives today with Butter Europe and Olive Oil Europe - but then about 1500 years ago, Christianity united everything. I've heard people argue that Latin should have been the official language of the EU; they could have gone further and had the cross be the official symbol, too.
Mathematics has a lot to do with platonic forms, I agree. And I definitely don't think we invent mathematics; like anything else in philosophy I find I have a lot of trouble stating things confidently, but I strongly feel as though we discover math. I still don't like Plato, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_lie
(general comment to readers) read Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher Bach before Pirsig, then Confession of a Buddhist Atheist by Stephen Batchelor... , and then the Beckwith's Greek Buddha or Doug Bates' neo-Pyrrhonism books, or all at once.
...Do you have a suggestion about which to try first, or for what? I've never heard of any of those, and it's hard to get my hands on much of anything to read lately.
Thank you for trying! Do be aware that I am extremely skeptical that any philosopher anywhere has ever discovered anything past 1 & 2, though. I present my own unformed thoughts in this blog post with the sense that
* They are missing a lot of mathematical detail; for example there should be a whole ensemble of stimulus and quality functions, the latter of which would have to be aggregated to determine the total quality of an artistic work, and without a weighting function my argument requires that *all* quality functions be higher at t1 than either t0 or t2, etc etc
* They may have some other hole that someone else will notice and point out to me, which I will (hopefully) be able to address with a better exploration of the subject but (unfortunately) may just find is totally fatal for the entire enterprise.
I'm drawn to philosophy by natural inclination, but that doesn't mean philosophy is actually worth pursuing!
I included this because of what you said here: “That’s it. Courtesy of Socrates and Decartes, we know 1) basically nothing, other than 2) that we exist. All the other philosophers out there are essentially just bloggers from before the age of computers”. Also, keep in mind... philosophy can be seen as a history of ‘thinking’ - referring to Hegel. The above link to Steiner’s seminal book does give a good backdrop to his lecture on Art and Theory of Art. I can try and find it.
"can anything be of higher quality than anything else, or is it all merely in our minds? This question is really worth addressing: Does quality even objectively exist?"
I didn't see you proving that quality "objectively" exists, only that it subjectively exists (merely) in the mind of the viewer whose stimulation levels you are measuring.
"Lots of people seem to think that it doesn’t...a sizable portion of the population says things like “beauty exists only in the eye of the beholder,”...So deep down, lots of people really feel as though most things aren’t better or worse, and some people even think there’s no such thing as better or worse."
I think these people are saying things aren't better or worse objectively, or that there's no such thing as better or worse objectively. They may have subjective opinions about whats better or worse, but you can't generalise them to all people. How would you arrive at an objective answer of what piece of music is better than another? Measuring the stimulation across all human brains? Is Despacito higher quality than Beethoven because it has more views? Is pop music the highest quality because the most people find it the most stimulating so they keep returning to it?
It seems that "good" art makes us stimulated in a way we, individually find agreeable (even a sad movie can be enjoyable, because we are willing to feel such). Whereas "bad" art makes us feel things we do not willingly want to feel (such as repulsion, or worse, boredom!).
Statistically, some art will make more people feel one way over another.
But there's a certain element about great art that cannot be defined, where some things are just considered more beautiful to the masses than others. Perhaps it's the emulation of nature, or the geometry involved, or the colors. Or maybe it's the authenticity of the creator, whose spirit shines through somehow. Maybe it's something that is linked deep down to who we are as humans--the collective unconscious, so to speak, that hasn't been well-defined.
(Or maybe this unknown element has been defined, Idunno.)
Overall, I think you succeeded in your attempt.
So you've entered a space where I'd probably rather be spending my time, rather than being concerned about these niggilng details about whether what I'm interested in is actually, you know, complete nonsense. And I think your insights are overall pretty good.
Part of me wants to say "the preferences of individuals who are a) intelligent and also b) high in Openness indicate what is objectively good, because such people have a refined aesthetic sense" but who am I kidding, that's just like a Trump supporter saying "Only Republicans should vote, because those people are sensible about political matters." I'm just too aware of how many traps and snares lie in wait for the unwary that I've learned the better part of wisdom is the humble admission of ignorance.
But I can say that Open and empathic people like sad music https://jyx.jyu.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/48421/1/vuoskoskijketal311.full.pdf
And Open people and introverts like minor scales and slow music in general https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14613808.2014.933790
And as for that je ne sais quoi that distinguishes truly great art from mediocre art... I have trouble with this a little bit, because a lot of people whom I would swear should know about these things will tell me that hollow, boring works are actually masterpieces, and I'm too confident in my own sensitivity and education to believe them.
But when I look at my best work, authenticity, trueness to life or history or nature, verisimilitude (in stories), and ambiguity or the multiplicity of interpretations all seem to matter. Also important is the process of getting emotionally swept into the work so that you can linger properly on passages that need time for the listener or reader to fully explore. And part of it is a bit of confidence and bravery, in saying "I don't care if people think I *am* childish, or conventional, or clumsy, or controversial, or whatever" and just including the elements in a piece that really belong there.
Most of the process of creating art feels, to me, like listening to what is supposed to be there, and letting it emerge.
The idea of mapping stimuli to noise-signal-Habituation has been done, surely? (Neuro-aesthetics has been around for 2 decades).
I say that because:
① I work in an art museum. See habituation and my comments below.
②
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/why-i-no-longer-arts-artifacts-into
on
https://www.archaeologysouthwest.org/2023/03/08/why-i-no-longer-call-it-art/
③ "Art" is a relatively recent term for activities that blur en masse rite/ritual/performance/stages/architecture/sculpture/painting/landscape/worlding that our modern economies (after agriculture) allow us to separate out (and we separate "art" out in recent centuries from because state religions colonised these practices in their totalitarian moments over some thousands of years and got peeps other than ruler/priest to do the manual work)(All major artists you've heard of in recent years do the same, you do not know the names (including me) of peeps who physically make the art and solve problems along the way).
Modern artists merely wave their hands about while they curate their careers once they have found some hook or schtick enough to get other peoples money to pay others to do the actual work in their name (Marina Abramoivic, Matthew Barney, Jeff Koons, Damian Hirst et al).
Your creative powers and openness to find new (rituals?) is of no concern to that market. Which is what many peeps think of as the art world.
So I would define art as a process which solves problems which it also makes up, unlike science which solves problems of discovery or testing or implementation (technology). Maths is already like this definition of art, new maths discoveries works a lot by analogy and metaphor, and not by the logic of hindsight, but is built on experience, i.e. we live the gap between the two between the past (as hindsight) and the future (as ????).
How open we are to that factors our creativity.
Survival may rest on managing human resources of bands of unrelated humans in order to have enough insurance to eat when the hunting fails, which it usually does. So ritual/... is used to manage those human resources (including the meta of ritual/....) which is why political powers focus on the intensification of ritual/... (recursively) and creates things like doctrine/dogma/doxa as canon law in order to police heresy/disloyalty as well as paying for works of art and the mass (bread & circusses).
The Buddhist like scepticism of Pyrrho was critical of those new-fangled meta intensification of rites (he was a local priest at Elis) doxa/dogma/ which turn rites-without-belief into Nicene creeds. And later into art to honour the glory of those policing those creeds. The fact we think of religion and define it in terms of belief shows that Pyrrho, sadly, completely lost a very good lead.
I write hoping you will continue you work here, the analogy may be useful even if the starting assumptions are not-quite-right. Creativity is a process after all. (e.g. for the not-quite-right — I see that analytic philosophy has taken the idea of one type of maths, Logick, and then locked up "bellief" in propositional form... I find this very annoying as fideist use it as a slippery slope in which their say I belief the sun come sout or something and then I have to explain everything back to Pyrrho and they just wander off to their safe place. Does that mean I win? No.
"Mathematics and philosophy are both inherently rational disciplines." Both are hindsight if described thus. Logic predicts nothing. Making consistent maps reduces noise in the signal (of consistency/coherence/rationality) but is less open to stimuli. Solutions reached may pothole into sub-optimal outcomes (theology/philosophy) or, like in evolution, be a successful compromise of trade-offs == survival as in a fitness landscape. To get out of a pothole requires openness to out-of-the-box thinking, this requires play, or more analogoius thinking (which is what you are doing in the quoted sentence." In Pyrrhonism (possibly Buddhist influence ancient Greek skepticism (older than Academic skepticism) these potholes are called _doxa_ (in recent millenia translated badly as 'belief' but really means 'opinion' before Aristotle re-branded it) which are ***rashly*** held I-want-to-believe-s.
Many philosophies get potholed on their own petards and claim it as a virtue. I call it the… —gap. It's my main reason for blogging.
Moss, Jessica, and Whitney Schwab. “The Birth of Belief.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 57, no. 1 (2019): 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1353/hph.2019.0000.
I swear there's something here, so I'm going to try to make as much sense as I can of what you wrote:
________
Mathematics and philosophy are both exercises in hindsight. Logic predicts nothing.
Making consistent maps reduces noise in the signal a person receives, but with a cost: there's a reduced awareness to stimuli that don't fit into the maps. Then solutions you find may fall into a pothole like those seen theology or philosophy.
[Tangent something evolution involves tradeoffs something]
To get out of a pothole requires openness to out-of-the-box thinking. This requires play, or more analogous kinds of thinking (like what you are doing when you draw a relation between philosophy and mathematics as rational disciplines).
Incidentally, in Pyrrhonism, these potholes are called _doxa_ which are beliefs held rashly because *rashly* held I-want-to-believe-s.
Many philosophies get potholed on their own petards and claim it as a virtue. I call it the [something] gap. It's my main reason for blogging.
_______
So logic may not make predictions, but it's an invaluable tool. And come to think of it, I'd say logic absolutely can be source of hypotheses to test. Everything in this post I wrote would make for a wonderful hypothesis if anybody could think of a way of testing it!
I agree that beliefs held rashly or because you want to hold them are seriously bad. If I had my way, humans would have been smart enough to give us a solid foundation in philosophy which could clarify immediately how to solve moral quandaries and which religions and political positions are dead wrong.
(Admittedly, then people would come up with new religions and ideologies that achieved the bare minimum to satisfy the philosophical tools of the day, and then I'd complain that the philosophers hadn't done even more. Oh well; at least having a blog is fun?)
But I don't know what you meant by "I call it the… —gap." Can you clarify this?
"I swear there's something here, so I'm going to try to make as much sense as I can of what you wrote:"
Looks good.
I'll add these thinkers/believer throw stuff into the gap and then may say my work here is done. In fact it has just begun and the thickets of work they have created do not help as they all become idiolects (gaps in communication, even if the signal is stimulating) #noteToSelf. They say this is their best work and you just don't understand because Hegel or something.
_______________________________________________
"But I don't know what you meant by "I call it the… —gap." Can you clarify this?"
Example is the prior art of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
So, "the… —gap" is my symbol indicating metaphysical WTF moments. Like the opposite of "aha ... moments".
Like we work "it" out as incoherent or gappy, and then, OMG, what just happened… —and how can we even be alive if this cannot be known. (Digression poetic:We pivot Janus-like on the gap between the past and the future, the logic of hindsight and the 'chaos' of what may come -- this is consciousness).
One could also look at it like the edge of chaos whence order and unpredictableness both 'emerge' as a description of the gaps in/of understanding.
There are many types of gap but... I shove or blur them together into this phrase (blur in order to boost any hope of getting a signal out of the noise of our systems/potholes -- the analogy is signals work where they add chaos in order to lift the signal out of noise)(https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3314062/what-is-the-difference-between-noise-and-chaos)
The dangers here are obvious.
And also _aporia_ can be inherent in systems (Gödel's incompleteness theorems in mathematics etc). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aporia
(Plato "solves" it with ideal forms and the cave (a gap no doubt) to explain the difference). (He throws a gap into the gap)(our lived experience into a cave --- to the underworld???).(complex).
I say we live where we live.
So, "the… —gap" as a term is a grab-bag I use of what maybe quite distinct phenomena or lack distinction. But thus…. — can allow analogous and thus de-potholing creative connections, creating leads which can be tested.
But which many thinkers/believers try to tie off (in case they bleed to death) or outlaw (like sets that refer to themselves) by fiat (see Hofstadter on this), in case the system falls apart. Or they just chuck their favourite thing into like a landfill of heavenly creatures, or demons if seen as a hell. Caves are scary places.
The gap is used in various ways, for example, "deconstruction" plays on the aporia in systemic thinkers by using their own terminology & methods to undermine what they are trying to say and are thus hoist on their own petards.
Often, if recognised by a systemic thinking looking at their own work they will throw something into the gap of their understanding, or innerstanding even. Such as faith, or God, or the milk of human kindness. I call this act as born of the moral urge when talking sociologically, and worlding when talking in my idiolect. I think the best of these is the milk of human kindness. Kant filled in this gap (lack of evolutionary conexts) and logicks it into the categorical imperative, I find it over-wrought and unnecessary, but lots of peeps identify with it in general...
Unnecessary in that peeps will be good even if the logicks are unfounded... evolution doesn't care.
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/can-we-define-the-gap
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/divining-the-gap
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/allowing-the-gap
example of a public intellectual throwing stuff into the gap
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/mark-dooleys-roger-scruton-and-my
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/bad-worldbuilding-roger-bad
A couple of thoughts:
1) Have you read _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ by Robert Pirsig? It has some interesting discussions on the meaning of Quality.
2) Someone described Western Philosophy as a series of replies to Plato. Even Cartesian minimalism exists in a frame defined by Plato.
Oh, hi Eric! I was just thinking about _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ the other day. You're right; it's an interesting work.
But man, I really dislike Plato. Whenever I bring this up it seems people insist we only know anything about Socrates because of Plato, but there's Xenophon, but then was Xenophon even present at the trial, and how much did he really record about Socrates? IDK. Maybe it's the case that we're all stuck replying to Plato forever, but sheesh, that only makes me dislike him more. Is the sorry state of philosophy Plato's fault? Let him answer that!
Plato is... interesting. While I certainly wouldn't use Plato for a model for everyday life, Plato has some very interesting implications for the metaphysics of mathematics.
In (very) short terms, mathematics certainly *appears* to have some correspondence to the Platonic Forms; quite a few mathematicians certainly believe that they're *discovering* theorems, not *inventing* them. Kurt Goedel (of the incompleteness theorems) was a devout Platonist, for example.
I also recently read _Thinking God's Thoughts: Johannes Kepler and the Miracle of Cosmic Comprehensibility_ by Melissa Cain Travis, that goes into the linkage between the abstract and the concrete; it might be a little too Christian for you, but most of the early Moderns were quite devoutly Christian...
RE: Plato. In recent months I have been gritting my teeth going.... mhhmmmh, okay. Ideal forms is still tosh but.
Oh, yeah; Christianity is basically the glue that held all of Western civilization together. Originally you had Mediterraneans who had a lot in common, and were distinct from the northern barbarians who lived at the periphery. They weren't "Europeans" or "Westerners" in any real sense. Some of that division still survives today with Butter Europe and Olive Oil Europe - but then about 1500 years ago, Christianity united everything. I've heard people argue that Latin should have been the official language of the EU; they could have gone further and had the cross be the official symbol, too.
Mathematics has a lot to do with platonic forms, I agree. And I definitely don't think we invent mathematics; like anything else in philosophy I find I have a lot of trouble stating things confidently, but I strongly feel as though we discover math. I still don't like Plato, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_lie
(general comment to readers) read Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher Bach before Pirsig, then Confession of a Buddhist Atheist by Stephen Batchelor... , and then the Beckwith's Greek Buddha or Doug Bates' neo-Pyrrhonism books, or all at once.
...Do you have a suggestion about which to try first, or for what? I've never heard of any of those, and it's hard to get my hands on much of anything to read lately.
Hofstadter. (Warning: I drop out of uni after studying it, at your age you might be safe but.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach
heaps of cheap copies around
https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA004/English/RSP1964/GA004_index.html
Steiner is a philosopher, yes; I don't notice anything in that index relating to art or aesthetics, though.
Ok, I can’t find it. I don’t think it is available online.
Thank you for trying! Do be aware that I am extremely skeptical that any philosopher anywhere has ever discovered anything past 1 & 2, though. I present my own unformed thoughts in this blog post with the sense that
* They are missing a lot of mathematical detail; for example there should be a whole ensemble of stimulus and quality functions, the latter of which would have to be aggregated to determine the total quality of an artistic work, and without a weighting function my argument requires that *all* quality functions be higher at t1 than either t0 or t2, etc etc
* They may have some other hole that someone else will notice and point out to me, which I will (hopefully) be able to address with a better exploration of the subject but (unfortunately) may just find is totally fatal for the entire enterprise.
I'm drawn to philosophy by natural inclination, but that doesn't mean philosophy is actually worth pursuing!
I included this because of what you said here: “That’s it. Courtesy of Socrates and Decartes, we know 1) basically nothing, other than 2) that we exist. All the other philosophers out there are essentially just bloggers from before the age of computers”. Also, keep in mind... philosophy can be seen as a history of ‘thinking’ - referring to Hegel. The above link to Steiner’s seminal book does give a good backdrop to his lecture on Art and Theory of Art. I can try and find it.