[Dieter Bohn]

Originally posted by BobbyMike
No, nothing that simple. Beauty comes from our (individual) past experiences. That's why two different men can look at a woman and one can say, "Beautiful!", and the other can say, "Not quite....". We can agree that something is beautiful, but we don't have to. I can't know Kant's cant on this 'cause I haven't read his writings, but it sounds like a long winded way to say something similar.

kant may say (I haven't read the whole thing) that it's not so much experience as it is built into the fundamental structures of the brain (much like we have to perceive things within space and time).

it's longwinded because he's writing to a hostile audience. Had he not done it then you probably wouldn't be doing it now.

[errqre]

Originally posted by Dr Bohn

Right. So do I. But you find them beautiful not because of logic or because of goodness, but because of, well, beauty.

I disagree. I find them 'beautiful' because of what they are: logic or goodness. I also think beauty can be 'good'...and so on ad nauseam.

"May" or is.?

May, depending on how it answers a given problem. IOW, a situation may be answered by logic in such a way that the result is also good. Kant appears to agree. I argue that the logic behind that decision is good (i.e. it is purely logical, but that does not preclude its 'goodness'), with which Kant appears to take exception.

I think I follow. You seem to be try to accept the basic differences between T, G, and B, yet allow that they can "mix" in some sort of way. Yes?

More or less. Rather like yin and yang in that in pure evil is goodness and in pure goodness is evil (though I disagree with that tenet, it does give a clearer example of how I see G,T, & B - though still not spot-on). I don't believe that truth is necessarily inherent in logic or goodness, simply that it 'may' be part of said logic or goodness.



Here's to hoping for clarity. It's been a hell of an ADHD day for me (lack of sleep seems to...attenuate...my limited ability to communicate clearly).

[errqre]

BTW, I notice your going FreeBSD. Good luck to you kicking your MS habit. I'd also like to make fun of you for using an operating system based on inferior micro-kernels.

Too bad there isn't a 'point-n-laugh' smiley.

[Dieter Bohn]

Originally posted by ****-richardson
BTW, I notice your going FreeBSD. Good luck to you kicking your MS habit. I'd also like to make fun of you for using an operating system based on inferior micro-kernels.

Too bad there isn't a 'point-n-laugh' smiley.

I believe the relative value of BSD and *nix kernels is still up for debate, but I am certainly not qualified to take part in it yet. I'm just taking the advice of my uber-security-penetration-consultant pal, who prefers it.

I almost changed my avatar to the little Daemon giving it to the penguin like a new cell-mate, but I figured that might not go over to well.

[Dieter Bohn]

I disagree. I find them 'beautiful' because of what they are: logic or goodness. I also think beauty can be 'good'...and so on ad nauseam.

*shrug*. I think you find them beautiful because they're beautiful, and that the cause of their beauty is more of a mystery than you may think. ESP. given that they "may" be beautiful.

At any rate, Kant found it important to separate them because artists were getting their a$$ kicked by the various and sundry puritanical types hanging around. Everybody thought goodness=beauty, so then art ought to have = morality. Plato had the same issues, btw, he thought all Art (though he didn't call it art, or rather, what we call art he thought was the opposite of an Art..) was all a load of crap becase it was a poor imitation of reality. IOW, he thought that art ought to be truthful.

I don't believe that truth is necessarily inherent in logic or goodness, simply that it 'may' be part of said logic or goodness.

I think you're 9/10ths of the way to agreeing with Kant.

[BobbyMike]

"it's longwinded because he's writing to a hostile audience. Had he not done it then you probably wouldn't be doing it now."

Doing what?

[Dieter Bohn]

Originally posted by BobbyMike
"it's longwinded because he's writing to a hostile audience. Had he not done it then you probably wouldn't be doing it now."

Doing what?

Arguing that beauty is subjective. Hume and a few others had done it before Kant, but Kant's the first one to really make it respectable.

[errqre]

Originally posted by dietrichbohn
I believe the relative value of BSD and *nix kernels is still up for debate, but I am certainly not qualified to take part in it yet.

As if I were.

[errqre]

Originally posted by dietrichbohn
I think you're 9/10ths of the way to agreeing with Kant.

If so, you posed his arguments poorly. I was under the impression he viewed truth, beauty, and goodness as necessarily separate. I do not.

*shrug*. I think you find them beautiful because they're beautiful, and that the cause of their beauty is more of a mystery than you may think. ESP. given that they "may" be beautiful.

*violent spasm* I think I know why I find them beautiful, and it is no more mysterious to me than why I find my wife beautiful.

[Dieter Bohn]

Originally posted by ****-richardson
If so, you posed his arguments poorly. I was under the impression he viewed truth, beauty, and goodness as necessarily separate. I do not.

We're using the term "necessarily separate" in two different ways. We both agree that they can mix and suchlike. All I'm saying is that just as a conclusion isn't true because the argument is logical, but is instead merely valid, your wife isn't beautiful just because she is good, but is intead merely beautiful. And just as an argument can be valid and true (i.e. sound), your wife can be good and beautiful (i.e. marriage material).

You can even, as I've said, find her very goodness beautiful. However, you don't find it beautiful because of goodness, but because of the beauty of goodness, as it were.

It is, as I've said, a fine distinction, but it is one with repercussions for aesthetics: namely, shuffing off all those folk who believe that all art has to be moral.

*violent spasm* I think I know why I find them beautiful, and it is no more mysterious to me than why I find my wife beautiful.

Well, we're just using you as an example because it's easier than speaking in generalities. That said, I am in a way trying to speak for you, but I don't understand why you seem to be reacting so violently to that. Maybe you're afraid I'll change your mind?

For me, I find it much more comfortable to believe and act as though my wife's beauty is based on beauty (and obviously, I'm not talking about just what she sees in the mirror), instead of on morality or her adherence to a truth.

...it could be that your reluctance is similiar to mine: Kant's being crufty, i.e. he's adding another fundamental reality to reality. It goes back to my post about the progession from Plato to the Reinaissance to Kant. Do we need another "reality"? in addition to Truth and Goodness? I think we do, and it's Beauty.

...then again, if you push me to the wall, I'd have a difficult time dealing with the arbitrary nature of all three. But then again, so does Kant.

...lord, I can't believe I'm defending Kant. I should be shot.

[BobbyMike]

"It is, as I've said, a fine distinction, but it is one with repercussions for aesthetics: namely, shuffing off all those folk who believe that all art has to be moral. "

I believe that the real struggle is not that whether Art is/isn't moral, but whether or not it is 'dangerous' (which I concur could include morality). Art as defined by most modern artists has nothing at all to do with beauty, they're too busy trying to pitch ideas and attitude. (Jesus in a jar of ****)
I might be too close to the subject since that's what I did for so long.
The idea of beauty for me is not rooted in objects that are created by man, but also include anything that can be seen, tasted, touched, heard, smelled, or thought. I find something beautiful because of my experiences. If someone else has had similar experiences, we can probably relate. You can also decide to find something beautiful, or at least find some beauty in that thing.

Beauty is in between your ears baby!

[Dieter Bohn]

Originally posted by BobbyMike
I believe that the real struggle is not that whether Art is/isn't moral, but whether or not it is 'dangerous' (which I concur could include morality). Art as defined by most modern artists has nothing at all to do with beauty, they're too busy trying to pitch ideas and attitude. (Jesus in a jar of ****)

Kant's point as well. His idea of morality includes the kinds of issues you're talking about. If art sends a message, that's not the source of beauty (though, I suppose the message could also be beautiful....)

I find something beautiful because of my experiences. If someone else has had similar experiences, we can probably relate. You can also decide to find something beautiful, or at least find some beauty in that thing.

change "experiences" to something more like "human commonalities" and you've got something. Different folk have different ideas of beauty, but are mosly similiar. Just like different folk have different eyes, but mostly have 2 of 'em

Beauty is in between your ears baby!

word.

[errqre]

Originally posted by dietrichbohn
Well, we're just using you as an example because it's easier than speaking in generalities. That said, I am in a way trying to speak for you, but I don't understand why you seem to be reacting so violently to that. Maybe you're afraid I'll change your mind?

I'm not acting violently, that was just my spasm. Rather like a refreshing trip to the bathroom. Regardless, you won't do well in an argument against me while at the same time trying to speak for me.

For me, I find it much more comfortable to believe and act as though my wife's beauty is based on beauty (and obviously, I'm not talking about just what she sees in the mirror), instead of on morality or her adherence to a truth.

I find her beauty and the beauty of her goodness and the truth of her beauty and the goodness of her truth as comfortable as I would were her goodness ugly and her beauty untrue and her truth immoral. I also find them as comfortable as I would were I to pretend there was some division between the three.

[Dieter Bohn]

Originally posted by ****-richardson

I find her beauty and the beauty of her goodness and the truth of her beauty and the goodness of her truth as comfortable as I would were her goodness ugly and her beauty untrue and her truth immoral. I also find them as comfortable as I would were I to pretend there was some division between the three.

You, sir, are a Platonist.

[errqre]

Originally posted by dietrichbohn

You, sir, are a Platonist.

I yam who I yam.

[errqre]

With 30 minutes to go, I finally satiate my VC addiction. Got up, went to work, had to drive around all day. Finally get home to my own computer and decide that I want to make it faster (as much as one could reasonably expect with a 33MHz bus). So I put my dvd/cd-rw on its own ide cable (it was slave to the hard drive), optimize some hdparm settings (that'd be somewhat like checking the DMA option in the device manager for the assembled windows folks), and decide it's time to optimize the kernel. I have no idea what I did (or even what I should've been doing), but the computer went down. Hard. So I boot to the floppy and try to throw a known good kernel on. That seemed to work a little better as I was able to boot, but over half of the initialization stuff failed (probably due to optimizing hdparm without going to single-user mode). To make a long story short, after much cussing and dramatics and a reformat of my root partition, I boot into kde and everthing was there. My icons were right where I left them, the apps I had added to the panel were there and working, jpilot didn't miss a beat. I was impressed. All because I decided to let the linux installer put a /home partition on my hard drive rather than leave everything in one partition (which I thought would make things easier). This is no big deal to linux veterans, but it's damn nice to see first hand.

Screwing my system to hell took 2 hours. Fixing it took under 30 minutes.

[GSR13]

Originally posted by ****-richardson
Screwing my system to hell took 2 hours. Fixing it took under 30 minutes.

Completely opposite of everything failure I have ever had...

[BobbyMike]

Linux is a time machine!

[Toby]

Originally posted by BobbyMike
[...] So your picture of Dogbert with his blantantly erect ears has nothing or everything to do with your feelings about your own sexualty?

(what exactly is he looking at anyway?)

BTW, Bobby, if you're still wondering why Dogbert's ears are up, they're permanently stuck that way from being held up by them (see avatar for reference).

[Dieter Bohn]

Originally posted by Toby
BTW, Bobby, if you're still wondering why Dogbert's ears are up, they're permanently stuck that way from being held up by them (see avatar for reference).

800 posts in one thread! woo hoo!

I like the avatar, BTW!