The more you protest, Chuzzlewit, the more I suspect that I understood you correctly, and that you do place Art below Science.
In your latest post, you have fudged the issue a bit by positing an opposition between "esthetics" and "science." Esthetics is a branch of philosophy, concerned with the analysis of Art, of Beauty.
I was talking about Art=Beauty itself, not the analysis of it. I mean -- can you imagine Keats saying:
Esthetics is truth, truth esthetics -- that is all
ye know on earth and all ye need to know.
That doesn't hack it, somehow...<g>
Now, you make the point that the truths emerging from "esthetics" -- that is, Art -- are fundamentally different, serving fundamentally different purposes. I would agree. But then you go on to say:
I think the problem arises when those of us who are not versed in the sciences (you don't mean "us", you mean: those of you who are not versed in the sciences) start to talk about the truths emerging from the arts as if these truths were on an equal footing with the truths that emerge from science. Clearly, they are not.
If you did not feel that the "truths" of Art were inferior to the truths of science, but just different, you would/should have said that their truths were not on the same footing. As it is, you said they were not on an equal footing. Separate, but unequal. One superior, one inferior. And Art is inferior, because:
There is no objective truth in esthetics.
Rephrased:
There is no objective truth in Art.
There is no objective truth in Beauty.
Now, that is something with which most writers on esthetics would disagree. No objective truth at all? None?
Purely subjective? "Different people have different tastes," you say. And so since we can't prove in a laboratory that Shakespeare is superior to Robert Service, since we can't perform some kind of "repeatable experiment" with them, one man's opinion is as good as another's? Nevaire....
Here, all I can do is sputter. You know better than that, Chuzzlewit. It wouldn't bother me if you did not care for Art. But you do.
This kind of misguided radical subjectivism -- I should say, solipsism -- is what led you to exclude some of your favorite works from your 100 Great Books list ("just fiction", did "not affect the course of history"), and to doubt that your beloved Mozart expressed any kind of "universal truth."
But I am not trying to claim that Art is 100% objective, and hence "the equal" of science. It is "subjective," in that it is something that each one of us experiences individually, one-on-one with the thing experienced. It can be like a religious experience. It, too, to use Otto's term, can be "numinous." All the joy in our lives comes from such "subjective" experiences.
At the same time, Art/Beauty can take us out of ourselves, make us feel more "at one" with other people, with the Universe, if you will, than I submit Science ever could. In that sense, it is not purely subjective. Or perhaps we need a new word -- "supra-subjective"? "trans-subjective"? You name it...
And perhaps "factual" is a better word than "objective," when you are using it in this context. Otherwise, it is not just Art that will have to take a back seat to Science, but literally every discipline & pursuit that is not science, that cannot "reproduce its results in a repeatable experiment." That would include philosophy, history, literary criticism, economics even...
Well, cooking -- the Culinary Arts -- might make the cut. <g>
Joan |
