21 ideas
| 21959 | Metaphysics is the most general attempt to make sense of things [Moore,AW] |
| Full Idea: Metaphysics is the most general attempt to make sense of things. | |
| From: A.W. Moore (The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics [2012], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This is the first sentence of Moore's book, and a touchstone idea all the way through. It stands up well, because it says enough without committing to too much. I have to agree with it. It implies explanation as the key. I like generality too. |
| 20744 | Phenomenologists say all experience is about something and is directed [Aho] |
| Full Idea: Phenomenologists agree that all experience has an intentional structure, that is, my experience is always about or of something; it is always directed towards an object. | |
| From: Kevin Aho (Existentialism: an introduction [2014], 2 'Phenomenology') | |
| A reaction: I am just beginning to grasp that the analytic debates about perception are a re-enactment of the Kantian debates about the thing-in-itself. This is the sort of idea you find in McDowell. Presumably the idea denies the Given, and raw sense-data. |
| 21958 | Appearances are nothing beyond representations, which is transcendental ideality [Moore,AW] |
| Full Idea: Appearances in general are nothing outside our representations, which is just what we mean by transcendental ideality. | |
| From: A.W. Moore (The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics [2012], B535/A507) |
| 20736 | Science has to abstract out the subjective attributes of things, focusing on what is objective [Aho] |
| Full Idea: Crucial to the scientific method is the ability to abstract out the subjective qualities that we give to things - such as beauty, meaning, purpose, and value - and focus only on the objective qualities of things, which can be measured and quantified. | |
| From: Kevin Aho (Existentialism: an introduction [2014], 1 'Emergence') | |
| A reaction: This seems to me exactly right. People who deny the primary/secondary distinction, like Hume, are usually correspondingly pessimistic about science. And Hume was wrong about that. |
| 20429 | Most of us are too close to our own motives to understand them [Fry] |
| Full Idea: The motives we actually experience are too close to us to enable us to feel them clearly. They are in a sense unintelligible. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.30) | |
| A reaction: Fry is defending the role of art in clarifying and highlighting such things, but I am not convinced by his claim. We can grasp most of our motives with a little introspection, and those we can't grasp are probably too subtle for art as well. |
| 20424 | Imaginative life requires no action, so new kinds of perception and values emerge in art [Fry] |
| Full Idea: In the imaginative life no action is necessary, so the whole consciousness may be focused upon the perceptive and the emotional aspects of the experience. Hence we get a different set of values, and a different kind of perception | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.24) | |
| A reaction: Good. A huge range of human activities are like scientific experiments, where you draw on our evolved faculties, but put them in controlled conditions, where the less convenient and stressful parts are absent. War and sport. Real and theatrical tragedy. |
| 20427 | Everyone reveals an aesthetic attitude, looking at something which only exists to be seen [Fry] |
| Full Idea: It is only when an object exists for no other purpose than to be seen that we really look at it, …and then even the most normal person adopts to some extent the artistic attitude of pure vision abstracted from necessity. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.29) | |
| A reaction: A painter of still life looks at things which exist for other purposes, with just the attitude which Fry attributes to the viewers of the paintings. We can encourage a child to look at a flower with just this attitude. |
| 20433 | 'Beauty' can either mean sensuous charm, or the aesthetic approval of art (which may be ugly) [Fry] |
| Full Idea: There is an apparent contradiction between two distinct uses of the word 'beauty', one for that which has sensuous charm, and one for the aesthetic approval of works of imaginative art where the objects presented to us are often of extreme ugliness. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.33) | |
| A reaction: The gouging of eyes in 'King Lear' was always the big problem case for aesthetics, just as nowadays it is Marcel Duchamp's wretched 'Fountain'. |
| 20430 | In life we neglect 'cosmic emotion', but it matters, and art brings it to the fore [Fry] |
| Full Idea: Those feelings unhappily named cosmic emotion find almost no place in life, but, since they seem to belong to certain very deep springs of our nature, do become of great importance in the arts. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.31) | |
| A reaction: Focus on the sublime was big in the romantic era, but Fry still sees its importance, and I don't think it ever goes away. Art styles which scorn the sublime are failing to perform their social duty, say I. |
| 20431 | Art needs a mixture of order and variety in its sensations [Fry] |
| Full Idea: The first quality that we demand in our [artistic] sensations will be order, without which our sensations will be troubled and perplexed, and the other will be variety, without which they will not be fully stimulated. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.32) | |
| A reaction: He makes good claims, but gives unconvincing reasons for them. Some of us rather like 'troubled and perplexed' sensations. And a very narrow range of sensations could still be highly stimulated. Is Fry a good aesthetician but a modest philosopher? |
| 20423 | If graphic arts only aim at imitation, their works are only trivial ingenious toys [Fry] |
| Full Idea: If imitation is the sole purpose of the graphic arts, it is surprising that the works of such arts are ever looked upon as more than curiosities, or ingenious toys, and are ever taken seriously by grown-up people. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.23) | |
| A reaction: But then you might say that same about fine wines. A mere nice taste is hardly worthy of grown ups, and yet lots of grown ups feeling quite passionately about it. What about Fabergé eggs? |
| 20428 | Popular opinion favours realism, yet most people never look closely at anything! [Fry] |
| Full Idea: Ordinary people have almost no idea of what things really look like, so that the one standard that popular criticism applies to painting (whether it is like nature or not) is the one which most people are prevented frm applying properly. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.29) | |
| A reaction: A nice remark, though there is a streak of Bloomsbury artistic snobbery running through Fry. Ordinary people recognise photographic realism, so they can study things closely either in the reality or the picture, should they so choose. |
| 20432 | When viewing art, rather than flowers, we are aware of purpose, and sympathy with its creator [Fry] |
| Full Idea: In our reaction to a work of art (rather than a flower) there is the consciousness of purpose, of a peculiar relation of sympathy with the man who made this thing in order to arouse precisely the sensations we experience. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.33) | |
| A reaction: I think this is entirely right. I like the mention of 'sympathy' as well as 'purpose'. |
| 20425 | In the cinema the emotions are weaker, but much clearer than in ordinary life [Fry] |
| Full Idea: One notices in the visions of the cinematograph that whatever emotions are aroused by them, though they are likely to be weaker than those of ordinary life, are presented more clearly to the conscious. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.25) | |
| A reaction: Fry had probably only seen very simple melodramas, but the general idea that artistic emotions are weaker than real life, but much clearer, is quite plausible. |
| 20426 | For pure moralists art must promote right action, and not just be harmless [Fry] |
| Full Idea: To the pure moralist, accepting nothing but ethical values, to be justified, the life of the imagination must be shown not only not to hinder but actually to forward right action, otherwise it is not only useless but, by absorbing energies, harmful. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.26) | |
| A reaction: I think this is the sort of attitude you find in Samuel Johnson. Puritans even reject light music, which seems pleasantly harmless to the rest of us. 'Absorbing energies' doesn't sound much of an objection, and may not be the actual objection. |
| 20734 | Anxiety, nausea, guilt and absurdity shake us up, revealing our freedom and limits [Aho] |
| Full Idea: Some moods, such as 'anxiety' (Heidegger), 'nausea' (Sartre), 'guilt' (Kierkegaard), and 'absurdity' (Camus) are important because they have the capacity to shake us out of complacency and self-deception, disclosing our freedom and finitude. | |
| From: Kevin Aho (Existentialism: an introduction [2014], Pref 'What?) | |
| A reaction: [bit compressed] Problem: if I fail to feel such things, and deliberately induce them in myself, am I being inauthentic? Making a huge and unnatural effort to be an existentialist seems all wrong. And who wants the permanent grip of such feelings? |
| 20733 | Our 'existence' is how we create ourselves, unconstrained by any prior 'essence' [Aho] |
| Full Idea: 'Existence precedes essence' means there is no pre-given 'essence' that determines who and what we are. We are self-making beings. | |
| From: Kevin Aho (Existentialism: an introduction [2014], Pref 'What?) | |
| A reaction: This not a yes/no dilemma. Personally I believe (with Aristotle, and Steven Pinker) that there is a fairly comprehensive 'human nature' which we all share, and is the basis of ethics. On top of that, though, a fair bit of 'self-making' can go on. |
| 20753 | The self is constituted by its choices made within a social context [Aho] |
| Full Idea: The [existential] self is constituted by the continuous, open-ended process of choosing and pulling together the social interpretations that we care about and that are made available by the situation we grow into. | |
| From: Kevin Aho (Existentialism: an introduction [2014], 4 'Self') | |
| A reaction: These kind of explanations always seem wrong. That the self is influenced and moulded strongly by the choices it makes sounds right. But that the choices 'constitute' the chooser sounds like a bit of a muddle. |
| 20738 | Social contracts and markets have made society seem disconnected and artificial [Aho] |
| Full Idea: Modern society has come to be viewed as something artificial, an aggregate of disconnected individuals that is held together by instrumental social contracts and monetary exchanges. | |
| From: Kevin Aho (Existentialism: an introduction [2014], 1 'Emergence') | |
| A reaction: This is all long of you, Thomas Hobbes! Aho is explaining the rebellion of existentialists against this - though existentialism strikes me as another variant of liberal individualism. |
| 20737 | Protestantism brought the modern emphasis on inner states of the soul [Aho] |
| Full Idea: An important development in the formation of the modern worldview was the emergence of Protestantism, that reconfigured the self by privileging the inner states of the soul. Salvation concerns inner feelings, thoughts and desires, which can be genuine. | |
| From: Kevin Aho (Existentialism: an introduction [2014], 1 'Emergence') | |
| A reaction: [bit compressed] He is preparing the historical background for the existentialist concept of authenticity. We can link this Protestant idea with Descartes's Cogito, which grounds knowledge in the inner self. |
| 20766 | Four Noble Truths: life is suffering, caused by attachment, it is avoidable, there is a path [Aho] |
| Full Idea: The teachings of the Buddha are summarised in 'four noble truths': 1) life means suffering, 2) the origin of suffering is attachment, 3) the end of suffering is attainable, and 4) the path to the end of suffering. | |
| From: Kevin Aho (Existentialism: an introduction [2014], 9 'dukkha') | |
| A reaction: 1) and 2) summarise everything I dislike about most eastern philosophy. In the modern world life does not have to be suffering. To break off attachments in order to avoid suffering is a hideous injunction. |