169. Aesthetic Obligation | THUNK

Is there such a thing as aesthetic obligation? Do we have duties that are explicitly aesthetic in character, or are they really just moral obligations? With great beauty comes great responsibility!

-Links for the Curious-

[TheGloryofMusic]

The logical positivists taught that normative statements about aesthetics and ethics were ultimately meaningless. But here's a thought experiment: I sneak into A.J. Ayer's abode and slightly tilt a painting hanging on the wall. I wonder how long it would take for him to notice and straighten it?

[narutosaga]

This channel is a goldmine!! You deserve wayyy more subs! Keep up the good work

[YourndPlanB]

I strongly suspect there are theories that reverse the relationship between morality and aesthetics, and posit that our principle duty is to live an aesthetically pleasing life. Moral duties would then reduce to aesthetic duties; a mother caring for her child is a beautiful thing, and therefore moral. Sacrificing yourself to save another's life is an act of tragic heroism, and should be praised for that fact.

I don't think I personally subscribe to this theory, but it could be interesting to explore.

[String.Epsilon]

The only a e s t h e t i c obligation is to try the wine. You have to experience the mouthfeel.

[MartinLichtblau]

Sometimes we believe we are right and others are wrong, because we held there perpective once, or at least have deeply thought about it, but eventually realized that this perspective is wrong. Now we look back and smile upon us.

[TacoDude]

Super interesting topic I hadn't heard of/considered before.

[rxixcievzncksoduf]

That was great, thank you! Do you have a video on possible reasons for saving Venus de Milo in that scenario you mentioned (e.g. to sell it and buy a whole lot of mosquito nets, saving many more lives)? It'd be great to hear your thoughts about it :)

[Zeklandia]

Great video, as always! I don't mind the gaps in our regularly scheduled programming, I have been conditioned only to expect a video when Pavlov's notification bell rings.

I have some thoughts I want to spill. I have been wondering about aesthetics lately, so this video is nicely serendipitous.

The way what we are exposed to shapes our "unique tastes" is too often understated.

I know for me personally it is quite easy to understand why I like chiptune and other electronic music more than anything else: it sounds like the things I heard in life, like video music, computer sound effects, movie sound effects, machinery, &c. Historically I think this also makes sense: there seems to be a relationship between the massive popularity of cars and motorcycles in the middle of the 20th century and the rise of electric guitars and rock music, because the engines and the electric guitars and drums sound similar (same could likely be said for the introduction of trains in Europe and orchestral music having more of a "driving force" to its rhythms).

But this is also a visual thing: I have watched a lot of cartoons and animated media, so I find it easy to appreciate 2D or 3D animated movies, but I know people who didn't grow up on that kind of media (especially older people) who act almost confused when they watch intense animated stuff. I think Benedetto Croce wrote about how each particular art form, like painting, is effectively a language with its own vocabulary, like textures and colors, and grammar, like shapes and patterns. If you don't _speak_ that language, you won't understand it, but the more you're exposed to it, the more you understand it, just like spoken languages. Really, this should boil down to the way our brains find patterns being how we understand the world, and aesthetics are standards in the same way grammar is a standard for spoken languages.

I don't feel comfortable with attitude that someone's tastes and aesthetic preferences are some innate individual quirk, but I think it makes more sense if they are acquired, since it would then follow that no matter how the world appeared to you, since that's what you saw it would make sense to you, which is why cultures can have such vastly different aesthetics.

Just like with living organisms, there's no right answer, there are only survivors. Things work or they don't. If the goal of a painting is to convey the beauty of a natural landscape, the only aesthetic standard it needs to adhere to is looking to people in some way like a beautiful landscape. As we can now see, there are tons of ways to accomplish this, and there are countless more we have yet to uncover.

To me this explains why pop music always sounds similar, thinking of the songs as animals trying survive. On the one hand, there is competition for listeners and radio time, but there is also cooperation, because songs with widely different rhythms and styles are difficult to mix together for radio DJs, for example. And then there's also a feedback loop with what I said earlier, about how it seems what we like to here is derived from what we have heard. Now that we have so much control over what sounds we hear, we have created a process of rapid audio evolution. Such a thing wasn't really possible in past ages when the only way to hear music was when the occasional orchestra or choir stopped by your medieval town. Now we hear so much music, it shapes our expectation of how music sounds, so we change the way our music sounds, and this seems to have been going on for more than half a century by now.

[Brassur]

Great video! I heard an interesting take on aesthetic normativity a few months ago that conceptualizes aesthetic obligation like Humean constructivism handles morality. I.e. we have certain dispositions that cause us to desire things, and to satisfy these desires, it is rational to pursue them in ways dictated by what the world is like. E.g. if I lack a sense of taste, it might be hopeless for me to try to appreciate good whisky, but if I am a person interested in interpersonal relationships then I'm missing out if I don't read something by Jane Austen. I think this account nicely accounts for the subjectivity of taste, while allowing aesthetic expertise and refinement, as the refined ones are just people sharing the same dispositions as we do and have mastered the art of satisfying them.

[Fiddling_while_Rome_burns]

I would go with cultural relativity here. It's what you are raised or conditioned to think beautiful or not, most of the time. Experiments have shown familiarity to music creates appreciation and people can be converted from hating a music to loving it, simply by repeated exposure.... Same as fine beer which is an acquired taste.


With your wedding example, it could have been a clownsuit theme wedding and the person in question turned up in a morning suit, this situation is more about context than aesthetics.


On the other hand, while man made art seems to come from conditioning and context, natural beauty may be universal.

[bthomson]

Hey! I know Bob from Accounting and he likes Brahms, Singer Sargent, cheese soufflet, Celeen Dion, and knows how to spell a lot better than I do!😎

[ijcmartinez]

Follow me on this one ... Supposing human beings had access to more than three spacial dimmensions such that Time was not a linear dimmension but something that one could move through like any other topographical situation (an idea explored in the movie, Interstellar (2014)) ...

Do you think Aesthetics would have more concrete, linguistic (or strictly rational) modes of explanation? Is it a plausible conjecture to think that aesthetic appreciation is a function of a sense that humans have such as Proprioception or what a recent study suggests that we have a bit of Magnetopreception; aesthetics as a topic worth discussing with inarguably objective qualities despite its ambiguities because it's a topic that might unpack more "rationally" with ideas such as Sir Roger Penrose's thoughts on the quantum nature of consciousness.

Sometimes I wonder if human beings do, in fact, have an intuitive, non-linguistic appreciation and experience of a 5th-dimmensional continuum where transcendetal objects such as Love and Justice (and the patina of soot on Michaelangelo's frescos on the Sistine Chappel, or my favorite - the millenia of erosion that resulted in The Grand Canyon and its magnitude), is experienced less as a "feeling" of awe and wonder or mere recognition of virtue and beauty, but, instead, experiences as something that can be manipulated and measured?

There is a common refrain from those whose artistry and virtue in creative pursuits has reached this level of mastery where they claim that the thing of beauty they crafted "wrote itself, " or that it was already there in medium (i.e. Michaelangelo's statement, "every block of stone has a statue inside of it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it").

Anyway ... just some random thought provoked by the video. Just Thunking over here.

Thanks!

[PetersonSilva]

Isn't hedonistic utilitarianism a redundancy?

[ferulebezel]

How much time and how many run throughs do you have to go through to get the one take videos?



Aesthetics isn't hard. There's the stuff I like and bad stuff. Duh.