From: Sarah Marr (sarah.marr@dial.pipex.com)
Date: Tue Mar 18 1997 - 15:12:46 MST
At 17:41 17/03/97 -0600, Gregory Houston wrote:
>T0Morrow@aol.com wrote:
>> (Enough of this sort of silliness! In the name of Newton, I want to
discuss
>> definitions of "definition" even less than I want to discuss defintions of
>> art.)
I heartily agree with TOMorrow on this one!
>Sara Marr wrote:
>> The point being, that the objective definition of anything, if an objective
>> defintion can exist, is temporally and culturally variant.
>
>Let us say that I were arguing that the earth is round, and you were
>arguing that the earth is flat. If I cannot convince you that your idea
>is less objectively true than my arguement that the earth is round, then
>there is simply no reason for us to argue. I must simply pass you by and
>wait for more reasonable people to be born,
You're missing the point here. If a person lives within a culture where
no-one has ever even suggested the world to be round, that person is every
bit as objective as you in his/her acceptance of the flatness of the world.
Whilst I agree with you that reasonable, Western people would accept the
roundness of the world, I can't accept your exceptionally blinkered of
culture as simply being "Western, post-Enlightment rationality = reasonable
and objective, everything else = unreasonable and subjective". I guess that
just the anthropologist in me coming out.
>...people who are not so
>attached to the archaic definitions or lack of definitions for things,
>people who will not accept fairy tales as valid sources of objective
>facts.
Just to make the point one more time: fairy tales are perfectly reasonable
sources of objective facts in those cultures where there are no other
opinion-systems to be heard. Objectivism is, I have said before, defined
as, simply, listening to what others said and assigning them a greater
priority than what oneself thinks.
>Each generation is accepting of less and less mystification of things.
Each generation has more information.
>Future generations will not accept our current mystification of art. You
>can argue with me day and night, but that will not stop the
>demystification and future scientific use of art.
Nor does it stop the current scientific use of art.
>If it [art]is not a source of truth or facts, then is it a source of untruths
>and non-facts?
No, that's an entirely spurious logical extrapolation. Art is a source of
discourse, which may or may not reveal truth or facts, or may do both. A
drawing of a flat Earth presents both a possible truth (this artist
believes the Earth to be flat) and a possible not-truth (the Earth is flat).
Sarah
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Sarah Kathryn Marr
sarah.marr@dial.pipex.com http://dialspace.dial.pipex.com/sarah.marr/
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