Truth HQ by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T R U T H H Q

either profundity or superficial prettiness were out of the window when it came to ladies’ shoulders. Mr. Burke could only swoon! What to make of all this?

For one thing, almost all philosophers who have sought to define aesthetics have tended to do so by means of categories, like our own Mr. Burke (except in the case of the aforementioned shoulders). Thus, another human list, that

seeks to add some kind of material reality to something that can only ever be aesthetic. I mean the idea that something can possess beauty rather than just being beautiful. There are many such lists or groupings along these lines. Thus: There is not a thing called existence, things just exist or they don’t. And: There is no quality of truth that things can possess – things are either true or they’re not. And: There is no list of moral rules to which things in the universe try to conform – no possession of being morally correct. Values – leading to ethics and morality – are rather innate to the universe or innate to people and other conscious beings. AGENCY defines us.

CHOICE defines us. These are the results of emergence – simply from what defines a conscious being – mind plus body plus way of being in the world.

And so: It’s easy to see that the same applies to aesthetics. In fact, morality is just a special case of aesthetics. It is about AGENCY and

CHOICE. But perhaps we could say that ethics and morality carry a burden of responsibility, whilst aesthetics, more generally, is about pleasure.

The interesting thing about aesthetics is that, for the most part, we don’t take it too seriously. We say such things as, ‘well, beauty is in the

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