22 ideas
| 23664 | Powers are quite distinct and simple, and so cannot be defined [Reid] |
| Full Idea: Power is a thing so much of its own kind, and so simple in its nature, as to admit of no logical definition. | |
| From: Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788], 1) | |
| A reaction: True. And this makes Powers ideally suited for the role of primitives in a metaphysics of nature. |
| 23669 | Thinkers say that matter has intrinsic powers, but is also passive and acted upon [Reid] |
| Full Idea: Those philosophers who attribute to matter the power of gravitation, and other active powers, teach us, at the same time, that matter is a substance altogether inert, and merely passive; …that those powers are impressed on it by some external cause. | |
| From: Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788], 6) | |
| A reaction: This shows the dilemma of the period, when 'laws of nature' were imposed on passive matter by God, and yet gravity and magnetism appeared as inherent properties of matter. |
| 23666 | It is obvious that there could not be a power without a subject which possesses it [Reid] |
| Full Idea: It is evident that a power is a quality, and cannot exist without a subject to which it belongs. That power may exist without any being or subject to which that power may be attributed, is an absurdity, shocking to every man of common understanding. | |
| From: Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788], 1) | |
| A reaction: This is understandble in the 18th C, when free-floating powers were inconceivable, but now that we have fields and plasmas and whatnot, we can't rule out pure powers as basic. However, I incline to agree with Reid. Matter is active. |
| 1556 | By nature people are close to one another, but culture drives them apart [Hippias] |
| Full Idea: I regard you all as relatives - by nature, not by convention. By nature like is akin to like, but convention is a tyrant over humankind and often constrains people to act contrary to nature. | |
| From: Hippias (fragments/reports [c.430 BCE]), quoted by Plato - Protagoras 337c8 |
| 23665 | Consciousness is the power of mind to know itself, and minds are grounded in powers [Reid] |
| Full Idea: Consciousness is that power of the mind by which it has an immediate knowledge of its own operations. …Every operation of the mind is the exertion of some power of the mind. | |
| From: Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788], 1) | |
| A reaction: I strongly favour this account of the mind and consciousness in terms of powers, because they give the best basis for their dynamic nature, and seem to be primitives which terminate all of our explanations. Science identifies the powers for us. |
| 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. |
| 23668 | Our own nature attributes free determinations to our own will [Reid] |
| Full Idea: Every man is led by nature to attribute to himself the free determination of his own will, and to believe those events to be in his power which depend upon his will. | |
| From: Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788], 5) | |
| A reaction: I'm happy to say we are all responsible for those actions which are caused by the conscious decisions of our own will (our mental decision mechanisms), but personally I would drop the word 'free', which adds nothing. We are not 'ultimately' responsible. |
| 20051 | Reid said that agent causation is a unique type of causation [Reid, by Stout,R] |
| Full Idea: Thomas Reid said that an agent's causing something involves a fundamentally different kind of causation from inanimate causing. | |
| From: report of Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788]) by Rowland Stout - Action 4 'Agent' | |
| A reaction: I'm afraid the great philosopher of common sense got it wrong on this one. Introducing a new type of causation into our account of nature is crazy. |
| 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. |
| 8383 | Day and night are constantly conjoined, but they don't cause one another [Reid, by Crane] |
| Full Idea: A famous example of Thomas Reid: day regularly follows night, and night regularly follows day. There is therefore a constant conjunction between night and day. But day does not cause night, nor does night cause day. | |
| From: report of Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788]) by Tim Crane - Causation 1.2.2 | |
| A reaction: Not a fatal objection to Hume, of course, because in the complex real world there are huge numbers of nested constant conjunctions. Night and the rotation of the Earth are conjoined. But how do you tell which constant conjunctions are causal? |
| 23667 | Regular events don't imply a cause, without an innate conviction of universal causation [Reid] |
| Full Idea: A train of events following one another ever so regularly, could never lead us to the notion of a cause, if we had not, from our constitution, a conviction of the necessity of a cause for every event. | |
| From: Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788], 5) | |
| A reaction: Presumably a theist like Reid must assume that the actions of God are freely chosen, rather than necessities. It's hard to see why this principle should be innate in us, and hard to see why it must thereby be true. A bit Kantian, this idea. |
| 23670 | Scientists don't know the cause of magnetism, and only discover its regulations [Reid] |
| Full Idea: A Newtonian philosopher …confesses his ignorance of the true cause of magnetic motion, and thinks that his business, as a philosopher, is only to find from experiment the laws by which it is regulated in all cases. | |
| From: Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788], 6) | |
| A reaction: Since there is a 'true cause', that implies that the laws don't actively 'regulate' the magnetism, but only describe its regularity, which I think is the correct view of laws. |
| 23671 | Laws are rules for effects, but these need a cause; rules of navigation don't navigate [Reid] |
| Full Idea: The laws of nature are the rules according to which the effects are produced; but there must be a cause which operates according to these rules. The rules of navigation never navigated a ship. | |
| From: Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788], 6) | |
| A reaction: Very nice. No enquirer should be satisfied with merely discovering patterns; the point is to explain the patterns. |