Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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rather, questions of true or false come in here. Judgements pertaining to another kind of beauty
bring in questions relating to relevant or irrelevant before questions of truth or falsehood are
examined. I quote further from your article “. . . The more one reads these statements, the
more apparent it becomes that the scientist’s attempt to discover, perhaps even to impose order
and structure on the universe, rests on assumptions that are essentially aesthetic. Order itself,
and its implied simplicity and unity, are essentially aesthetic criteria.” Now the search for a
completely coherent theory of anti-matter (i.e. quark theory) is a fascinating one, and I certainly
would not dispute Richard Feynman’s claim that he has experienced revelata and therefore
is aware of certain things or phenomena that most of us are not. But, and I think it is a
considerable but, statements such as “nature is inherently beautiful” (Gell-Mann), and “It had
elegance and beauty. The goddamn thing was gleaming,” whilst maybe showing evidence of
the two physicists’ “aesthetic” sophistication do not in themselves have anything to do with
the effectiveness of an equation, formula, theory, etc.
The principles of aesthetics are an accepted area of philosophical investigation, 11 but the
aesthetic of principle is quite another. I wonder if there is (to use a metaphor) a danger of
putting the cart before the horse. Obviously, I am open to any discussion you wish to raise. By
using a phrase such as “the aesthetic of principle” 12 do you somehow intend to imply the
principle of the aesthetic of beauty? Are you hinting at some kind of meta-aesthetic? It seems
that here we are not only up against the difficulty of constructing a framework allowing a
general definition of goodness and its consequent directive to examine the varieties of goodness,
13 but also, here, you seem to be implying that our seeking after a thorough analysis of our
compulsion to seek after what we think is goodness is not the sole area that comes under the
heading of aesthetics, but that aesthetics is extended to the construction of the aesthetic of
principle theory (a kind of theory of principles?) in addition to its more conventional applications.
Such a notion implies that the framework that is set up to examine what the nature of
aesthetics is has the nature (framework) of what it is trying to examine as the foundations of
its own framework. There is, obviously, something not quite right here. A principle is defined,
in one sense at least, as a theoretical basis. An aesthetic of theoretical basis? Imagine books
written entitled, The Aesthetic of the Principles of Literary Criticism or The Aesthetics of the Principles
of Thermodynamics. What is often judged as good about a principle is that it is the foundation
of a certain theory(ies) or construct. Would then two books, to be purely speculative, trace
the origins of, say, the principles of literary criticism and those of thermodynamics to the same
principle of principles? I am open to your suggestions on such a point, but I think that such a