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Thanks for your contribution - this is similar to the impression I get about taste, not having studied aesthetics but having a passing familiarity with postmode

Thanks for your contribution - this is similar to the impression I get about taste, not having studied aesthetics but having a passing familiarity with postmodern philosophy. Do you have any book or philosopher suggestions I could check out? I'm generally interested in epistemology and this sounds like a good angle for further reading.

dwmbt 5y ago
i'm not a philosophy nut or anything, but consider looking into empiricism versus rationalism and looking at Paul's writing, or conversations about the objectivity/subjectivity of aesthetics through that lens. Paul lives up to his rational roots here.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  PG's essay is awful - I was looking for something with more merit. PG is a logical positivist, which is just a philosophical position - it isn't inherently rational, especially outside the hard sciences.
  - dwmbt 5y ago
    i agree. personally, i tend to look at the world through something akin to Kant's empirical realism. though it's not epistemology, his work Critique of Judgement is unique in that he directly tackles how "the judgement of taste" (X is beautiful) is reached. i recommend reading critiques on the critique, as this is how i regularly consume philosophy. on that note, i was wondering if you had any recommendations for how to consume philosophy, since it is something of interest to you?
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      I have to be honest, it's something I struggle with too - especially as the postmodernists are known to be quite difficult to read. I tend to start with secondary sources (books about a field, essays from academics, even YouTube video essays) to understand a philosopher's broader contentions and positions and the vocabulary that they have inevitably invented, then go back and read the primary source with that initial knowledge in mind.
      - xoac 5y ago
        Kant is not a postmodern, he is the modern if anything. If you are even remotely interested in the subject of aesthetics, it is required reading. It's still quite a subtle and difficult read but not because of him trying to be convoluted, but the opposite as he's trying so hard to be clear that it ends up being a bit of a slog. One of my favorite books of philosophy.
        beaconstudios 5y ago
        yeah I know Kant isn't a postmodernist - I haven't actually read the Critique, or any of Kant's works. I'm more interested in Deleuze & Guattari at the moment, but am slowly working my way through. I will probably go back and read Kant at some point though!
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    Even within the hard sciences, logical positivism isn't inherently rational. It's an epistemological position that is self-inconsistent, and applying it within the sciences does not make it any less self-inconsistent.
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      I agree, I'm a social constructivist. I was just pointing out that logical positivism is only even viable within hard sciences so applying it to art is beyond nonsensical.
motohagiography 5y ago
Thank you, while I can't recommend original philosophical sources, I can say I like Matthew B. Craford's "Shopclass as Soulcraft," was the best recent version of these ideas I've read, and it is a much more in-depth treatise than one would typically expect from a popular book. Only tangentially related by motorcycles is zen and the art..., which was also about these kinds of qualities. The other influences might be Aristotle's nichomachean ethics and the Stoics, but I'm having trouble sourcing my own ideas directly from those much better ones other than to say they were influential. From a po-mo side, Venturi's "ducks and decorated sheds," essay was influential, as his bit was about buildings that are symbols vs. buildings with symbols. I don't imagine reading Simulacra and Simulation again, and I don't know if it would stand the test of time, but that decoupling of symbols from artifacts and the represented from the real is a theme in 20th century critical theory. There's some romantic thinking in there as well, and I can't quite source why I believe it, but there is a kind of catholic, hellenism to taking the idea of our perception of beauty and symmetry as a form of truth (as distinct from mere power deciding truth by fiat, or of it being ineffable), and then iterating on that idea into a logic around it. I don't know whose idea that was, but the limits of it became obvious when I learned about things like polyrhythms and self similarity, where the symmetry is more dynamic and implied, whereas even music demonstrates how our minds impose symmetry and favour the things the mind can impose its sense of symmetry and beauty on. That would probably align with pop "cognitive biases" lists and thinking fast and slow. The effect vs. affect part has been a personal theme for a decade or so, so I can't source that elsewhere.
- killjoywashere 5y ago
  You're writing has the pattern and thematic elements I'd expect of the Arts & Letters Daily crowd. This has to be some sort of in-crowd signaling. How long do you think the average member of that crowd took to learn the lingo?

dwmbt 5y ago

i'm not a philosophy nut or anything, but consider looking into empiricism versus rationalism and looking at Paul's writing, or conversations about the objectivity/subjectivity of aesthetics through that lens. Paul lives up to his rational roots here.

beaconstudios 5y ago
PG's essay is awful - I was looking for something with more merit. PG is a logical positivist, which is just a philosophical position - it isn't inherently rational, especially outside the hard sciences.
- dwmbt 5y ago
  i agree. personally, i tend to look at the world through something akin to Kant's empirical realism. though it's not epistemology, his work Critique of Judgement is unique in that he directly tackles how "the judgement of taste" (X is beautiful) is reached. i recommend reading critiques on the critique, as this is how i regularly consume philosophy. on that note, i was wondering if you had any recommendations for how to consume philosophy, since it is something of interest to you?
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    I have to be honest, it's something I struggle with too - especially as the postmodernists are known to be quite difficult to read. I tend to start with secondary sources (books about a field, essays from academics, even YouTube video essays) to understand a philosopher's broader contentions and positions and the vocabulary that they have inevitably invented, then go back and read the primary source with that initial knowledge in mind.
    - xoac 5y ago
      Kant is not a postmodern, he is the modern if anything. If you are even remotely interested in the subject of aesthetics, it is required reading. It's still quite a subtle and difficult read but not because of him trying to be convoluted, but the opposite as he's trying so hard to be clear that it ends up being a bit of a slog. One of my favorite books of philosophy.
      - beaconstudios 5y ago
        yeah I know Kant isn't a postmodernist - I haven't actually read the Critique, or any of Kant's works. I'm more interested in Deleuze & Guattari at the moment, but am slowly working my way through. I will probably go back and read Kant at some point though!
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Even within the hard sciences, logical positivism isn't inherently rational. It's an epistemological position that is self-inconsistent, and applying it within the sciences does not make it any less self-inconsistent.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    I agree, I'm a social constructivist. I was just pointing out that logical positivism is only even viable within hard sciences so applying it to art is beyond nonsensical.

motohagiography 5y ago

Thank you, while I can't recommend original philosophical sources, I can say I like Matthew B. Craford's "Shopclass as Soulcraft," was the best recent version of these ideas I've read, and it is a much more in-depth treatise than one would typically expect from a popular book. Only tangentially related by motorcycles is zen and the art..., which was also about these kinds of qualities. The other influences might be Aristotle's nichomachean ethics and the Stoics, but I'm having trouble sourcing my own ideas directly from those much better ones other than to say they were influential. From a po-mo side, Venturi's "ducks and decorated sheds," essay was influential, as his bit was about buildings that are symbols vs. buildings with symbols. I don't imagine reading Simulacra and Simulation again, and I don't know if it would stand the test of time, but that decoupling of symbols from artifacts and the represented from the real is a theme in 20th century critical theory. There's some romantic thinking in there as well, and I can't quite source why I believe it, but there is a kind of catholic, hellenism to taking the idea of our perception of beauty and symmetry as a form of truth (as distinct from mere power deciding truth by fiat, or of it being ineffable), and then iterating on that idea into a logic around it. I don't know whose idea that was, but the limits of it became obvious when I learned about things like polyrhythms and self similarity, where the symmetry is more dynamic and implied, whereas even music demonstrates how our minds impose symmetry and favour the things the mind can impose its sense of symmetry and beauty on. That would probably align with pop "cognitive biases" lists and thinking fast and slow. The effect vs. affect part has been a personal theme for a decade or so, so I can't source that elsewhere.

killjoywashere 5y ago
You're writing has the pattern and thematic elements I'd expect of the Arts & Letters Daily crowd. This has to be some sort of in-crowd signaling. How long do you think the average member of that crowd took to learn the lingo?