Right, where are we. How much ground have we conceded and how much can we keep. We’ve admitted what we’ve always known and would admit when pressed: that aesthetic opinions are opinions, not facts. Very well. That’s the sum total of our concession, and I’m sure we can all remember conceding the same thing when we were fifteen and judging the contest between Austen and Bronte or the Beatles and the Stones or folky Dylan and rock Dylan (yes, thank you, I am a dinosaur, I told you that, I said on my birthday I was 175) or NWA and Eminem or whatever it may be. De gustibus non est disputandum. Fine. Granted. But we go on disputing just the … Read the rest

Okay, if you can’t stand to watch me preening and holding B&W up for the admiration of a goggling world, then skip this comment. But if a person can’t have a little harmless fun and self-congratulation once in awhile after toiling and slaving all week – well really. That’s all I can say. So I happened to find this very popular French site that just found B&W and is quite pleased with what it found. Sadly, the writer of the B&W-praise was so engrossed in her reading that she hurt her foot – that’s how absorbing we are. But that’s okay: if you don’t know French, you won’t have to read the compliments, because I’m not going to translate them … Read the rest

Very well. Fine. The convincing bugger has convinced us, not because he’s so convincing, but because our case is so hard – not to say impossible – to argue. I know that (she whined). I realize that, I understand that. But I also still say it doesn’t matter, at least not much. It’s still worth going on trying to make a case for the superiority of poetry over pushpin. Yes, that superiority is provisional and local – it’s a human superiority, not a superiority inscribed in the cosmos. It wouldn’t even convince other earthly mammals, let alone nameless entities in other galaxies. A giraffe would just think poetry is too short, and too close to the ground, and not spotted … Read the rest

More on the hand-waving subject. (It’s funny – I had an opportunity to engage my colleague in debate on this very issue only this morning [this afternoon UK time] but I didn’t take it. We talked on the phone about the publisher’s suggested emendations to the Dictionary, and the word ‘aesthetics’ came up almost immediately. I did think of interrupting and diverting the conversation in order to discuss the more foundational aspects, to query the very notion of ‘aesthetic reasons’ – but I didn’t. Largely because, I suppose, I was far more concerned to protect our brilliant ideas than I was to debate foundational anythings. Still, it is a coincidence, you must admit.)

Jonathan Dresner posted at Cliopatria yesterday on … Read the rest

We’ve wandered into an interesting discussion here (here as in here below, Bound Together) about hand waving and value judgments, about whether moral and aesthetic judgments can be grounded, or rather (since I’m not sure anyone here claims they can be grounded in the same way that physics or mathematics can, or the way empirical inquiry can) what follows from the fact (if it is a fact, and do correct me if I’m wrong about what anyone claims) that they can’t. My colleague, if I understand him correctly, thinks that since in the case of a conflict between a well-grounded argument that would support, say, genocide, and ungrounded moral commitment, we would (most of us, one hopes) choose the moral … Read the rest