One Degree wrote:I like to picture people from the past rolling on the floor in hilarity at our interpretations. If a current majority agree with my interpretation of reality then it must be the correct one. :?: Why?
I think they'd have to overcome a great deal of confusion first because the world we live in now is so radically different that it'd almost be like an alien had come to learn about our human societies, not entirely, but significantly alien to them depending how far into the past we go.
Pragmatically having a majority agree with your interpretation of something does well to heuristically tell you that you're correct in your interpretation. But it doesn't make one invulnerable to the likelihood that you, along with the majority interpret something incorrectly.
No one would defend consensus as establishing truth without further qualifications. It's not clear whether consensus inherently brings people closer to the truth, because can have a bunch of idiots who make no effort to justify their belief in something.
Though I think somethings I would in practice accept as true because I had at least one other person to agree with me on something. I think the classic case is being on a desert island and asking whether the other person on the desert Island with you can see water, and they say yes. This is sufficient to prove that it's necessarily water though, they could be experiencing an illusion as much as me, seeing only a mirage.
To better confirm it's indeed water, we'd have to go over to it and experience the empirical sensations of water to confirm it. Some radical skeptical might try and push things further, but fuck those guys and their pushing the burden of proof super high Haha The proof is in the pudding (using our abstractions to act on the world congruent to our abstractions of it).
This is probably a tangent though and I should probably think of how it applies to aesthetics more, but I don't know all that much about aesthetics.
Though have the impression some speak of there being universal/objective beauty in some things, though not really that sensitive to nuance of what is being expressed by a universal approval of something as aesthetically beautiful.
Though in regards to interpreting something, I'm kind of wondering that attempts at fixed interpretations of things are a futile goal in that there can be no fixed meaning, that the meaning of things based on it's relations to other things. Just like the example at the end of the quote in the spoiler.
So if you were to have for example Derrida criticise Habermas, Habermas would say something like this, he would go “Understanding is a condition for our linguistic practices” Derrida would respond “If that is so, then so is misunderstanding equally constituentive”, because understanding won’t make sense conceptually unless misunderstanding does. They are correlatives – does that make sense? Well I hope it makes sense; I am asking a rhetorical question now about a philosopher who does rhetoric, but anyway… as well as argument.
The meaning of one word relies on it's relation to another word, that it doesn't have a fixed meaning in isolation. To continue more down this line of thought, follow this
link, press ctrl+F and type in the box that comes up in the top right corner "DERRIDA, DECONSTRUCTION AND LITERARY INTERPRETATION".
Am concerned that due to not having a firm grasp on deconstruction or Derrida's work that I don't know what mistakes I might be making should I try and transcribe his points on words to apply to aesthetics. Worried will have conceptual confusion by not first understanding how things apply.
Like this point about the meaning of words, I don't know if that is applicable to trying to interpret a painting where there are no words. Though i'm guessing that in providing an interpretation that one uses language and thus Derrida's point becomes relevant again.
But John Berger himself comes to mind in his Ways of Seeing...
Where in this episode Berger talks about the way in which paintings have an entirely different meaning in capitalist society. That historically works of art were unique, they was only one in a specific setting, you had to go to the Sisteen Chaple to experience the artwork on the ceiling. But now with photography, one can reproduce such images and put them in many contexts, where the meaning they initially had has been altered. Because in a new context, they are interpreted in entirely new ways, recreating classic artworks in say advertisements, where it promotes some commodity like coca cola.
A great example of how the meaning of something can change is to think of the image of Hitler, where one might think of him the person in his historical context but how he's interpreted is entirely diffrent when his image is recreated in memes or in advertisements in
Thailand.
He also speaks to the manner of how the authenticity of an artwork now becomes a such importance, where the history of an item is traced and asserted through the examination of many experts to say that this is the true Leonardo Da Vinci and to also place some monetary value on it. Where the prestige of Da Vinci and his work thus gives prestige to many things associated with him that are then idolized in Museums and given a context that gives that helps make more real that aura of prestige we associate with the original Mona Lisa or what ever.
Berger also does a good job explaining how the framing of things can have one manipulate images to mean something, that adding music in the background when viewing an image changes its meaning. Something employed in films and games, the music sets certain expectations for mood. That emphasizing certain portions of a painting fragments it and doesn't provide a holistic sight of the work, meaning one doesn't necessarily consider it holistically way and thus might have a one sided interpretation that was manipulated by how the portions of the whole were presented.
This seems to at least line up with Derridas idea on language, that there is no fixed meaning, that meanings are always shifting, and that to deduce the meaning of something entails considering other elements that relate to it. Which for the painting would be what ever degree of context one wants to examine the work.
Where for example background knowledge about the painting might shape interpretation of their work. For example, Kurt Cobain's suicide changed how people viewed his music and its lyrics or even his life. A single event change the entire tone people prescribed to Kurt Cobain as a person and his work. This is a sort of thing where I've seen people speak about how much can we dissociate the artists from the art. Some draw distinctions between them, that when the artist does something terrible like support the Nazis in the war, it doesn't detract from their work considered within itself for them. Whilst for others its a slight stain on something beautiful.
Also an extra, should be noted that John Berger's views owe a lot to Walter Benjamin it would seem, but I'm not familiar with a lot of
Walter Benjamin's work. Though it seems he might be a good thinker to think about aesthetics among other things.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics