But almost no one can identify aesthetic beauty. Its like a colourblindness that can not be illuminated to the person that is blind.
Why do you think that is? Why are so many people completely blind to aesthetic beauty?
I don't think they are blind to it, particularly. You might be living in a culture which subordinates beauty
below other values, like 'efficiency' for instance, but that doesn't mean people are 'blind' to aesthetic beauty.
For instance, the internal decor of many high-star hotels on the Persian Gulf are gaudily rammed with gold because beauty isn't the priority as much as communicating wealth is. The same is true of a lot of Renaissance paintings. Take a look at Ghirlandaio's
Presentation of the Virgin at the Temple, for instance:
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Why is the palette almost exclusively blue, gold and red here? Simply that these were colours mandated by the patron because they were showing off. These colours (especially the lapis lazuli blue) were at the time extremely expensive - the result is that 'beauty' is subordinated beneath these other values, but
not that people therefore don't have a sense of the aesthetically beautiful.
If my perspective is more accurate, your question then must become: 'why do people subordinate beauty beneath other values?'
"Quite generally, cultural relativism (about art or morality) has a very hard time explaining what people are doing when they think they are improving a tradition." (Deutsch, 2011).
This is a great quote which I thought I'd point out, even though, strictly speaking, it is baseless in causal terms. Closed systems are perfectly capable of producing their own innovations from their own rules (take
the universe for one example).
Sure, you can describe art with math, colour and composition. But beauty is way more than just that. It is not enough for art to have a cool mathematical description. Nor is it enough to have crazy colours or some kind of composition. Its something ABOUT the math, the colours, the composition that make art beautiful. Just because you can describe Beethoven with calculus does not mean its calculus that makes it beautiful. In fact, mathematics can be used to describe everything, even ugly art. So it cannot be used to judge the beauty of art. The beauty comes from somewhere else.
I think you're misunderstanding
@Asa here, deliberately or not. She isn't referring to the use of mathematics as a descriptive language as much as the
mathematical principles which proceed from its axioms; rules of balance, harmony and proportion, &c.
One of the reason Mozart's music is beautiful is because it is also hard to vary (I also explained why above). Is this merely a coincidence? I don't think so, but most other philosophers believe otherwise.
'Most philosophers?' I'm not sure that's true.
The colourful fruits theory does not actually work as an explanation. This explains why we would be attracted to certain species of flower. Much like the code between bees and flowers, we have probably developed our own unique code. But this doesn't explain our attraction to flowers that we did not evolve around.
Of course it does - if the attraction is based upon certain properties of certain flowers, then we can detect these same properties in novel flowers. If this were not the case, we'd still be stuck in East Africa.
There is clearly something that Da Vinci has done that the preschooler has not.
Uh oh! You said
Da Vinci! 
You lose 10,000 points.
Math also does not explain our attraction to art. Remember, math can be used to describe everything. So it, too, cannot explain why we find beautiful art so attractive. Further, are spiders not symmetrical? Yet most of us are completely repulsed by them. That doesn't mean they are ugly, but rather that symmetry cannot explain why something is attractive alone.
This argument ignores the fact that there are multiple evolutionary biases operating simultaneously - our repulsion to spiders (which is more cultural than anything - it's not as hard-wired as our repulsion to snakes, for example) is based upon a heuristic which
overrides the sense of 'mathematical' aesthetic.
Another thought is that the law of entropy may give an metaphor for what is happening when something is aesthetically impactful. It may be when we recognise a particular kind of order, when the infinitely more natural state is disorder.
This is a powerful idea which I thought I'd highlight so as not to let it go under the radar.
I’m not convinced by an appeal to evolution by way. I don’t mean I think it’s incorrect but it must be a lot more complex than looking at the way flowers and insects evolved jointly (a process that itself has great beauty). As far as I can see, a bee probably has the same relationship to flowers that I have to Tesco supermarkets in the UK. Their buildings have a common house style that tells me I can get groceries there, but they certainly don’t appeal to me aesthetically lol.
Ahh... that's a bit of a superficial argument, John, since our ancestors didn't co-evolve with Tescos, lol. We are able to use our rational functions to
know that Tesco = food, but our ancestors needed the more primal kick of a dopamine hit (or whatever) to know when they were getting it right. If we had millions of years living alongside Tescos, and somehow a third of our current brain capacity, then the cohorts that survive would be those who had an almost fetishistic attraction to those red and blue bars, and hence a new 'aesthetic' principle would develop among our descendants.
When you see a tree your mind creates your own unique version of the concept of a tree. Then instead of looking at that tree you focus inwards on that more universal idea of a tree. This helps you to function on an autopilot mode when less mental effort is needed to do the daily routines.
I love a tree
. Good intervention with a bit of Kant there, though, I like it.
Did you not try to bring mathematics into this? Something I actually have a masters in? And didn't you bring evolution into this also? Something I also have a degree in. We are talking about philosophy here anyway, not music theory or mathematics. You might be a professional musician, but I have a formal education in philosophy, mathematics and biology. I studied philosophy of art for god sakes. But that doesn't really matter at all does it? Especially if you have something to say that actually makes sense. Our credentials matter not.
Also yes, you are talking down to me. And probably because you can't think of anything to say. Don't try to be passive aggressive and expect me not to bite back. I have 6 sisters, I can handle you. If you didn't want to talk, you didn't have to be a dick about it. But no matter, I can be a dick back.
I think you may have misread Asa's tone there, wolly - I didn't read the aggression you're imputing, merely an invocation of her authority. It didn't seem passive-aggressive to me as much as it was a statement of fact.
