Aesthetic Realism

[@KaneB]

The queerness argument: kzbin.info/www/bejne/g3SwXquenq2aZ6c

[@cynicviper]

Being a moral anti-realist, but an aesthetic realist, is the most unfathomably based take.

[@abcd14486]

are you a "based" realist or a "based" anti-realist ?

[@Obscuredbywinds]

😂

[@low3242]

based beyond belief

[@justus4684]

​@@low3242 Omg this one is genius hahahah

[@STALKERWong]

Those are literally my views. I think it can be inferred totally through logic and facts of reality. Moral norms are just a product of human culture. If you look at animal kingdom - no morals there. So its entirely made up by humans. And speaking of beauty, it manifests everywhere in the world - every snowflake is as symmetrical and proportional, as is every planet and galaxy. And in more narrow sence this applies to symmetry and proportions of animals, of course. You can say, if animal will be asymmetrical/disfigured, it will be less capable to survive. Thus, beauty is most fundamental and essencial objective metric. Thus, people who deny aesthetic realism, are mentally retarded or/and dishonest.

[@tudornaconecinii3609]

This might sound silly, but I unironically think that aesthetic antirealism feels more plausible to most people than other types of antirealism, in significant part, because "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is just such a catchy phrase. Now, the argument can be made that it's irrelevant what the average joe thinks, the majority of contemporary philosophers DO reject aesthetic realism, but 41% is still a decent number. Also, it is important to keep in mind that philosophy is a field that lends itself to specialization: people who are philosophers weren't always philosophers, and if someone were pretty sure that aesthetic antirealism is true *before* they became competent at philosophy, they may not revisit the arguments for it *after* becoming competent.

[@KaneB]

I assume you're taking the 41% figure from the recent philpapers survey. However, this is 41% who accept that aesthetic value is objective, and you can be an objectivist about aesthetic value without endorsing aesthetic realism as defined here: ideal observer theories, on which the aesthetic facts are fixed by the responses of hypothetical agents such as ideal judges, are objectivist but not realist. I think that the number who accept aesthetic realism is far, far lower. Tropman (in "How to be an aesthetic realist") notes that aesthetic realism is widely considered to be a nonstarter. Hanson (in "Moral realism, aesthetic realism, and the asymmetry claim") concurs, writing: "Aesthetic realism, in contrast with its metaethical counterpart, has few, if any, supporters, and in fact it is considered to be such a nonstarter that any expression of support for it is likely to meet with what David Lewis called the incredulous stare."

[@tudornaconecinii3609]

@@KaneB I was aware of the distinction between aesthetic objectivism and aesthetic realism, but I didn't realize that the philpaper surveys only cover the former, at least insofar as the 41% figure, good point!

[@TheChurchofBreadandCheese]

Yay to Kane B!

[@martinbennett2228]

Kane, despite your own stand point, your presentation of the argument for aesthetic realism is impressive and nuanced. For myself, I am inclined towards aesthetic realism. To my students I note how implausible it is that established masters (from 100 and more years ago) might lose their status. The chance that people some generations in the future would find Bach or Beethoven to be rubbish and wonder what anyone in the past used to see in their compositions is basically zero and hardly better than the possibility that succeeding generations might reject the heliocentric description of the solar system. The question to pose is how or why this seems to be the case. Although I see myself as an aesthetic (and moral) realist, a friend who was a realist on more deontological terms, commented that I am actually a relativist. This is because my moral and aesthetic realism is relative to the species of human beings, a species that emerged 300 thousand years ago. In practice it relates to Homo sapiens of the last 70 thousand years, from when there seems to have been a population bottleneck when the total population dropped to between 1000 and 10 000 individuals. Since this time we can assume that there has been very little genetic change and that interspecific variation is superficial. It is important to be able to assume that aesthetic responses are potentially universal. The foundation of my realism is the understanding that aesthetic responses are causally determined and as such are potentially explicable in terms of past experience (including cultural experience) and neurophysiology. From this point of view it is the idea that aesthetic and moral responses are not real that appears to be odd or queer.

[@yyzzyysszznn]

You might find Hacker's 'The Moral Powers' interesting; similar view of value being relative to humans from a wittgensteinian perspective.

[@tzakman8697]

Bach and Beethoven are absolutely trash tho so i don't know what you are talking about.

[@kapifromnevada4697]

This video is objectively beautiful

[@addammadd]

29:09 "similarly acceptable" already indicates a phenomenology impacted by cultural attitude. This is a breadcrumb towards a convergence of ethical and aesthetic judgement.

[@addammadd]

Interesting paper, "Why Ethics and Aesthetics are Practically the Same", by Aaron Ridley. Besides how it’s intended in the subject of this video, I think that paper intones that aesthetic realism is actually just ethics. The writer of course does not go that far, but it’s a reasonable extrapolation.

[@inoculatedcity]

your example of frank zappa as an objectively good musician reminds me of this guy i knew who once said “i didn’t like frank zappa before, but now i see that his music is just bad on purpose”

[@mark110292]

"Experience its goodness" gotta remember that. Kane B: wordsmith.

[@HerrEinzige]

It is objectively beautiful when people like and comment on a video

[@rebeccar25]

2001: A Space Odyssey is objectively the best movie to cure insomnia.

[@matthewalan59]

The irony is that the book is gripping. I could not put it down. I wish they would remake the movie in a way that is true to the book.

[@DARKXASSASINS]

A yes because a book/movie being compulsively watchable is definitely a sign of its quality.

[@rickybloss8537]

It could be an emergent property like vorties in fluid dynamics. There is no vortex particle but it would seem strange to say they don't objectively exist.

[@rickybloss8537]

Aliens may not be able to detect them with their eyes for example. But none the less they exist. And they may be able to detect other emergent properties that we can't detect. It would also be weird to say they don't bjectively exist.

[@PhilSophia-ox7ep]

In classical Greek antiquity, the Good was sometimes conceived in a tripartite manner as composed of three ideals: the intellectual ideal (truth/wisdom), the moral ideal (friendship/love/or sometimes just good), and the aesthetic ideal (beauty). Some philosophers, such as Whitehead, contend that the moral dimensions of the good are ultimately derived from, or grounded upon, the aesthetic. Without aesthetic content to operate on, notions of morality devolve to readily unto a set of lifeless and loveless edicts. Being virtuous and ethical is then reduced to the dead letter of the Mosaic Law, or Kantian duty for duty's sake. The creation and appropriation of beauty and truth in mutual relation with others is the final cause of morality. Thus, ethics is wholly positive from this standpoint. It is not an imposition, some begrudging burden contrary to one's self interest. Rather, it is most truly in one's interest, in the interest of living a life worth living. To do rhe good unto others is, at the same time, good for oneself.

[@Paraselene_Tao]

Will you or have you talked about transjectivity? It really seems like this lecture on aestheic realism vs aesthetic anti-realism comes down to how objective and how subjevtive aesthetics are. Perhaps a mediator concept like transjectivity can help decide between how objective and how subjevtive our aesthetics is.

[@samuelmelton8353]

Transjectivities are still jectivities. Simple as.

[@domwren]

I knew a guy your age, looked like you, dressed like you, talked like you, doing arts in Uni, absolutely adored Frank Zappa. But that was 30 years ago.

[@leohuang2610]

I wonder if aesthetic anti-realism or realism is part of commonsense philosophy. Someone should run a study on that. I have the idea that aesthetic values play a role in my decision making at least as ubiquitous as that of moral values; they might function when I decide what colour to paint my room, what shape of physique I shall build with weight lifting, or what shirt will best match my pants. The reason I'm not confident in this, though, is that there is plausibly a real distinction between matters of beauty and matters of "taste" (I'll need to work out a precise definition for this word), just as there is plausibly a distinction between matters of morality and matters of taste. So maybe the actions above are not motivated by aesthetic judgments per se, but by taste. If all this is true, the difficulty in clearly drawing the line between aesthetics and taste explains my intuition towards aesthetic anti-realism.

[@julianmartinez-tv7oz]

Mukarovsky's, aesthetic function, norm and value, covers the difference between everyday beauty and art's beauty and all sorts of interesting distinctions between different phenomena in the realm of aesthetics. Is a general overview of art as a social phenomena, is the most useful thing I've read while doing my literature degree

[@ellyam991]

I've been wanting to learn about aesthetic realism for a while because it seems too puzzling. Thanks!

[@luisvasquez5015]

We have the aesthetic obligation to increase engagement with this video

[@cherubic_axiom]

i think error theory makes the most sense here hmm... im surprised you ve covered this topic since i know you to be a staunch anti-realist but since its a popular topic you might as well attract more people to your channel. i ll still like your content regardless because its the best in the game dawgg

[@whycantiremainanonymous8091]

Aesthetic value is not objective. But its utter lack can be objective indeed 🙂

[@PhilSophia-ox7ep]

lmfao, I get you're joking but that doesn't make sense

[@blazearmoru]

Uh, what about the idea that we use the concept of beauty similar to how we use the concept of say, thirst or hot? I mean to say that some things have tracking but they're at a level where things are not tracking a foundational enough part of reality to be factual. An organism that needs water the concept of heat and temperature are things not exactly captured by mere notions of thirst or hot. I think this might align with Aesthetic Relativism (4:30) but there might be the possibility of a stronger claim there such as : ALL beings necessarily react as if x is beautiful, because x has the properties of y. I don't know where to go from here but I'm imagining something like color tracking wavelengths of light. A disagreement then would have to go back to the notion of say dry or hot, of which people do often disagree about but we have a much better comprehension of why we disagree in those areas. Beauty is such an entangled and primal concept that when we say something is beautiful, the speaker could be saying a large number of different ideas that are all entangled together. For an example, the notion of "happy" is a massively bundled mess where some people are talking about pleasure, or satisfied, or pride, etcetc. So when someone says "this makes me happy" I don't know what that means. And the listener having not untangled the substraits of that concept, might interpret it differently and be replying to an entirely different concept. What does it mean for something to be beautiful, and are there actually disagreements? (9:30) and is the disagreement something like "come swim! the water is warm!" vs "nah. it's cold man". However, this doesn't mean that heat cannot be measured. The video is long. I'm going to probably edit this piece by piece and add on more :0 (21:15) what's beautiful for us vs aliens: boiling point can be measured and calculated even though we know that different substances boil differently at different pressures and atmospheres or whatnot. This is not in conflict with the notion that different substances have different boiling points, but if we understand the substance then we have a clear picture that it is... relative(?) objective(?) as well. The calculations get to the point where we can make up fantastical substances and be able to still predict their boiling point. (32:30) why so much disagreements?: I return to the idea that co2 caves through pre-scientific eyes were percieved to be caves to hell. There were many reasons for this, and there can be many disagreements as well. The primitive tools we use to track beauty might just be insufficent. (38:10) objective values without valuers: panpsychism \O/. But also, if we strip beauty down to concepts of attraction or repulsion (and, calm relax excite etc etc) then we can point to that and say that beauty is what a rock feels when it obeys gravity. And building from that, we can point at collections of forces and figure out net directions of behaviors. Tangentially related, but overlapping consciousnesses for the rebuttal of people tripping over and falling as something they didn't want, as it could be that it is wanted but just not by the brain. (43:00) values + obligations, moral vs beauty.: Continuing from the earlier point regarding attraction and repulsion = beauty, the difference for morality might simply be that morality is layered on top of the individual system. Much of morality exists on top of social facts or truths. That might be where much of the similarlties and differences lay. There's a subtile difference between ruining something for yourself, and ruining something for a member of your kin, and that difference isn't just a subjective difference but one that might one day be measurable to the health of systems.

[@philosophicalmixedmedia]

Neo aesthetic realism is associated modernist art movements like 'systematic art that attempted to eliminate material artistic taste from idiosyncratic sentiments like taste culture. Morellet came to adopt chance in the mid-fifties through silkscreens called Random distributions of 40000 squares using the odd and even numbers of a telephone directory. Art becomes a token for mercantile intrinsic value based on innate truth such as the golden ratio is of objective value that correlate to particular objects that may have a human author or in a contemporary sense the blockchain as a token like value for goods and services in the free market. It's an objective rationalist approach that gives art intrinsic value and not objective naturalism or externalism, apart from finding the god particle which might be akin to aesthetic value. So if it has no market value than like when visiting the local rubbish tip there are recycle stations with 'art for sale' which if not sold is incinerated and so the story of art is equated world systems theory where imported trinkets from the developing economies have less aesthetic value but real non the less than a silkscreen actioned as a metropolitan gallery. Aliens could participate in this world system through complex interdependent relations and give their value on a purported art object as a form of exchange value. Ontological anti realism would not be convinced but ontological realists who claimed aesthetic anti realism are fair game here because they buy into intrinsic value of art which has ostensible links to capital influences if an artist can actual fund any art project and if so they have implicitly consented to a in-group aesthetic be that the local art club or a national guild with links to the Turner prize for painting as is the case for literature and rhetoric. However a person not linked to the capitalist system may form a idiosyncratic form of art which would indeed have a shock value as the form seem to violate certain objective golden ratio like norms that arguable are innate to human brains. So ought not to produce works that violate the golden ratio is aesthetically wrong is true but can be done for shock value or as a political act also referred to as sign crimes. The evidence for this is in aesthetic panics over graffiti artists painting in public spaces. The council push back for a decade of so is to employ their graffiti street artist and do large murals as a way to educate the riff riff painters. The town planning architects are agents for purporting aesthetic value and as a cohort have the dominant discourse on modernist style based on a theory of beauty that has big business to enforce an aesthetic on millions of people who may feel its an iron cage of modernity. So in a sense moral value plays out in a direct top down sense as cohesion or enforcement but aesthetic value percolates slowly from below through modernist art movements, research institutes that feel strange for the general public when going to a gallery maybe but then as the art escapes into the external world as structural realism the aesthetic becomes normative architecture with moral value in the form of ought to do more of that style and leave that style alone like conserve art deco.

[@Ryu-ix8qs]

Hi, I just discovered your channel. This video made me want to check out the ones on metaethics but it seems there are a lot of them 😅. Which do you recommend I watch first?

[@KaneB]

If you're completely new to meta-ethics, then watch the first 12 videos of my meta-ethics playlist in order, starting here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/hXOoZmOVqct0f6M After that, you can check out the rest in any order.

[@Ryu-ix8qs]

Thank you!

[@drdca8263]

Regardless of whether or not one thinks that aesthetic realism is *true*, one must admit that it is a beautiful idea. (/j)

[@apimpnamedslickback5936]

Some aspects of beauty are close to something “objective” I suppose like symmetry or colors that play on biological markers in our brains. ( red for instance) but I don’t think beauty can be objective in any real sense of the word imo

[@kras_mazov]

I think the aesthetic value of art is defined by author's intent and limited by his ability. This way works made by different species of aliens can both be objectively good, despite inability to be observed by other specie. The author is making his work in his idea of good, and if he is true and proficient enough, the result is a good work of art. But your idea of good may be different, this doesn't make the work any less, you just have a different taste.

[@kappaprimus]

But in most cases, isn't it impossible to confirm the creator's intent? Isn't it also that we observe so many existences of "accidental art", which is nevertheless appreciated for its beauty?

[@kras_mazov]

@@kappaprimus Yes, but accidental art is akin to nature. It can be beautiful, but it's not meaningful. It is not necessary to confirm the author's original intent, since the work of art is an embodiment of it. We can only perceive it through the lens of our personal experience.

[@PhilSophia-ox7ep]

​@@kras_mazovIf the standards of goodness differ and there is no universal foundation for aesthetic claims, then they aren't objective aesthetic values.

[@kras_mazov]

@@PhilSophia-ox7ep There is truth and there is truthfulness. For something to be aesthetically good, it doesn't need to be true, but it has to be truthful, sincere.

[@PhilSophia-ox7ep]

@@kras_mazov which is in no way resolves the problem

[@drdca8263]

Huh, I’m surprised by the “independent of the responses of any actual *or hypothetical* agent” part.

[@ashikpanigrahi]

Explain how Flowers are beautiful?

[@norabelrose198]

7:09 XY zee Interesting I've never heard a Brit say zee instead of zed

[@inoculatedcity]

is it possible for an aesthetic anti realist to use the logic of “x is my favorite, but y is better”?

[@horsymandias-ur]

I think it is not unreasonable to say (and I do so for myself all the time) “Under different conditions (e.g. higher energy/athleticism, less traumatic memories, etc.), I have reason to believe that y would have been my favorite instead of x. I ought to get to the point where I am able to better appreciate y than x”

[@silvers345]

Kane what is the painting in the thumbnail?

[@KaneB]

Aivazovsky, "The Galata Tower by Moonlight"

[@tykjpelk]

It's funny that you say you will see us in the next video when really you will do no such thing whereas we will be seeing you.

[@KaneBsBett]

19:35 Moore

[@veganphilosopher1975]

I'm interested in the phenomenological experience of aesthetics. I think we'll need to make progress there before we can make progress on traditional aesthetic claims. I'm definitely open to both relativistic and realist views. I think they each hold a grain of truth

[@elinope4745]

Beauty precedes good and evil, and is the basis of this dichotomy. Those things that are metaphorically beautiful are morally good, those things that are metaphorically ugly are morally evil. Those things that first present as beautiful, and then unexpectedly become ugly are especially evil and inherently deceptive. The truth of the objectivity of beauty is that your genotype and phenotype are the result of these things of your parents, and you are a partial copy of your parents and you will receive objective genetic coding for what is and is not beautiful to you. Goldfish will find other goldfish beautiful, humans will find other humans beautiful as well as finding fish (food), majestic waterfalls (water), grand mountains (collection points for water, plants are growing at their base, food). What was good for your ancestors' survival is beautiful to you, its coded in your DNA. That is also how the perception for beauty is spread, its intergenerational memory of what is and is not good for survival, and only those who are correct get to spread their genes into the future and shape the perception of beauty of the next generation. Beauty is a far more simple form of judgement, much less complex than morality as described in philosophy. Without the capacity for the perception of beauty, I doubt a person could tell the difference between good and bad, function and disfunction.

[@utkarshsingh-rp2dq]

I can tell the difference between good and evil. But I don't care much for beauty.

[@elinope4745]

@@utkarshsingh-rp2dq I can fly using only my pinkies and happy thoughts. It's very easy to lie on the internet. But what's far worse than that is how easy it is to lie to yourself. If you don't care for beauty, which includes order and symmetry, than you will lack an effective ability to discriminate between predator (ugly) and prey (beautiful). Many of your survival instincts are based upon beauty judgements.

[@Paraselene_Tao]

For me (not necessarily for you or other folks), beauty, ugliness, good, and bad are all things to be transjectively agreed upon by a collection of sentient beings. It's a useful story to explain how we sentient beings feel about a thing. 😅 Said another way: For me, it's not even that beauty, ugliness, good, bad, and even Realness itself are objective or subjevtive: these things are transjective. A collection of sentient beings have individual subjective experiences based on many objective things going on around them, and then we collection of sentient beings decide (without free will 😂) together what the transjective object should be, how the transjective object ought to be described & defined, and what we ought to do with it now that we've collectively defined & described it. It's a funny world that we live in. There are objective things going on that we experience in a subjective manner at all times, and then we find ways to agree on what happened, what's happening, and what will happen with transjective language that links together our subjective experiences with the ineffable objective happenings of the universe. 😅 Explained even further: For me, beauty-ugliness is only one transjective, quasi-dichotomous spectrum that we're using as a shared mental construct to communicate significant or meaningful occurances. I hope I've made sense. Let me know.

[@elinope4745]

@@Paraselene_Tao I like your summation. Beauty is a mix of both objective tangible things and the subjective experience of it. Ultimately I see it in an evolutionary lens, seeing the subjective experience of beauty as part of a set of biological survival and reproductive capacities. I believe that the concept of morality is actually overlaid across the experience of beauty so that beautiful and ugly precede good and evil. We have essentially repurposed that part of the brain. Reality is highly complex and doesn't always have clear borders, language is simple and is incapable of describing a full truth. Always the use of language fails to capture the full essence of a thing or event.

[@Paraselene_Tao]

@@elinope4745 You're touching on an interesting topic of evolutionary psychology. "How come we humans (one form of sentient beings) evolved transjective understandings of beauty-ugliness and good-bad so early on? Which came first, and how did they evolve?" This heavily implies that we had some evolutionary pressure towards defining these transjective things earlier than others and also applying more significance or meaning or value-worth to them than other, less important transjective things. Yes, this is an interesting topic or perhaps perspective on our evolution that I haven't put much thought into. It would be interesting for me to learn more about it. I find evolutionary biology, evo-anthropology, and evo-psychology to be very interesting fields. I should become more familiar with them-well beyond my novice understanding of them.

[@samlastname1252]

I judt coughed up phlegm an remembered

[@zaconeil3709]

Would it be possible to put text up as black on a white background? I don't particularly enjoy the horizontal stripes afterglow on my retinas. Or maybe it's just me!

[@KaneB]

That's how it used to be, until lots of people asked for darker backgrounds as they found the white harsh on their eyes.

[@zaconeil3709]

Fair enough. There might be a middle-ground that works for all, but it's hardly worth spending much time on.

[@injinii4336]

Yeah, naw. Properties, facts, and judgements only exist inside human minds.

[@justus4684]

✏️📄

[@lorenzreiher1407]

Bane kaker

[@RestIsPhilosophy]

Okay that’s your opinion

[@OBGynKenobi]

Art/Aesthetics emmanate from culture and are informed by culture. They shift between cultures. If you show a Rothko to an African Bushman and tell him it's beautiful, they'll think you're insane, they will not understand it. So any aesthetic properties of something arise from culture.

[@timherz86]

same argument could be applied to morals too no? morals change depending on culture thus morality is subjective?

[@OBGynKenobi]

@@timherz86 yes, I would agree except that I think there are some universal morals, like goodness and others.

[@AminTheMystic]

No. That’s bad example to give. Rothko paint stripes aren’t beautiful or good art. Even within his cultural homeland he’s controversial. If understanding the beauty of any foreign language poetry is dependent on knowing the language then this doesn’t discount the universality argument. If you heard a song in a language you don’t know, you’d still get the beauty of singing A beautiful church, mosque or temple is recognisably beautiful despite you having no affinity with that religious culture. Hopefully enough there to show the layer of universality which goes beyond individual cultures.

[@OBGynKenobi]

@@AminTheMystic you just proved the point. Rothko is widely regarded as esthetically pleasing, otherwise people wouldn't hang it up to display. Church hymns may sound nice to you but to others they may sound like screeching. Art is very subjective among individuals, nevermind cultures. There's no inherent beauty in anything, it's all up to interpretation.

[@AminTheMystic]

@@OBGynKenobi No. Rothko isn’t widely regarded at all. Beautiful people are beautiful irregardless of culture as is beautiful music or voice. Same with building. Same with paintings - those that accurately depict reality.

[@TheYahmez]

I'd say ~"sharks" like art for what it captures (&who it f*cks) ~"sheep" like art for boundaries broken (&nourished blooms) Critics are worn out ~sugar addicts either way, luddite monks & children are closer to zen with less saturated neurons. Beauty is absolutely subjective, especially for extremely bored & rich frækos; The power to arbitrarily inflict suffering in creative ways is the historic pastime of our "betters". Perhaps in cleverly overlayed/interlaced/superposed synthesis we could reach a kind of aesthetic objectivity while taking an pragmatic view within the context of a given audience and intent? But then again, "what is art?".