Combining Texts

Ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'Treatise 4: The Moral Sense' and 'The Right and the Good'

unexpand these ideas     |    start again     |     choose another area for these texts

display all the ideas for this combination of texts


2 ideas

21. Aesthetics / A. Aesthetic Experience / 2. Aesthetic Attitude
Aesthetic enjoyment combines pleasure with insight [Ross]
     Full Idea: Aesthetic enjoyment seems to be a blend of pleasure with insight into the nature of the object that inspires it.
     From: W. David Ross (The Right and the Good [1930], §V)
     A reaction: This is persuasive. Concentration seems required for aesthetic pleasure. It probably enhances sensual pleasure, but it doesn't seem essential. Some literature only gives the illusion of insight, and there is no real insight in listening to music.
21. Aesthetics / A. Aesthetic Experience / 4. Beauty
Beauty is neither objective nor subjective, but a power of producing certain mental events [Ross]
     Full Idea: In order to avoid the difficulties that beset both a purely objective and a purely subjective view of beauty, I find myself driven to one which identifies beauty with the power of producing a certain sort of experience in minds.
     From: W. David Ross (The Right and the Good [1930], §IV)
     A reaction: This makes beauty a relational quality, rather than an intrinsic one. Ross's theory won't avoid the many usual problems about relativism. Do we define colour similarly, as a power in objects to produce certain sensations?