Design by Jesse Turri

I went to a great talk last night which featured Dr. Aaron Meskin, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leeds. His aesthetic research is really interesting. It addresses such topics as the effects of exposure to bad art and the nature of aesthetic adjectives such as ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’. Basically, what I took away from the data that Dr. Meskin presented was that it’s really hard to judge if something is beautiful or ugly, and on top of that, it’s even harder to explain why people have this difficulty. I think William James gets pretty close in the passage below though, which comes from this essay by Vincent Miller.

“In the early 20th century,several notable scholars entered the vagueness debate sympathetic toward ontological vagueness. These included A.N.Whitehead, Owen Barfield, C.S.Pierce and William James. These figures in particular went against the prevailing cultural and philosophical climate that valorized precision, clarity, and objectivity and where vagueness was seen pejoratively as a condition of chaos, uncertainty, and uselessness (Schofield,2003). Instead, James, Pierce, Whitehead, and Barfield argued not only that vagueness is an inevitable part of the use of language and experience of the world but also that recognition of its condition (as opposed to imposing a false precision on it) was of fundamental importance to depictions of truth and “the real.”

In this respect,the American philosopher William James (1909) stands out as per-haps the thinker who has most strongly argued for an appreciation of ontological vagueness in philosophical discourse (Schofield,2003). Writing at a time when most philosophers (such as Russell) lionized certainty, objectivity, and universal truth in language (both that it was possible and that it was desirable), James took a devout anti-absolutist stance. Heavily influenced by Bergson’s work, he lashed out against what he called “vicious intellectualism”: the violent attempt to impose precision and clarity on experiences that are too rich or complex to be represented fully:

Each passing moment is more complex than we have realized, more vague and multi-dimensional than our concepts can pick up. Not only the absolute but every pulse of experience possesses this common complexity, this vagueness. (Gavin,1992,p.50)

In other words, our experience of reality is so “thick” and “rich” that any attempt to represent this linguistically is doomed to fail:

Thought thus deals solely with surfaces. It can name the richness of reality, but it cannot fathom it….To understand life by concepts is to arrest its movement, cutting it up in to bits with scissors, and immobilizing it there in our logical herbarium where, comparing them as dried specimens, we can ascertain which of them statically includes or excludes which other.(James,1909,p.244)

Attempts to capture the richness of perception in many cases results in what James (1909) called the act of “bumbling,” a situation where one “seeks certainty, seeks the apodictive, the fundamental Archimedean point as a necessary desideratum in life, but fails to find it” (Gavin,1992,p.2).

Gavin (1992) argued that what really exists for James are not things but “things in the making.” Thus, James had a view of reality that was dynamic, in flux, and ultimately overwhelming for precise language and representation. In fact,James described concepts as “cuts” made into ongoing experience for the (scientific) purposes of predicting possible outcomes. Concepts cannot contain the “many-in-oneness” of the world that perception offers (conception by its very nature is “exclusive” and, therefore, the perceptual world is richer, more intense, and more “real” than our conceptions of it.”

Tags:aaron meskinaestheticsbeautyvaguenesswhiteheadwilliam james