Against nature: 4. Is it all nonsense?

[come_to_think]

Evidently, if the appeal to nature is foolishness, it is natural foolishness, and as such deserves some attempt at sympathetic understanding.  A notable attempt at a balanced view is provided by Bertrand Russell.  In "What I Believe" he saysThere is a certain attitude about the application of science to human life with which I have some sympathy,

Comments

[dpolicar]

What accounts for music being different, do you think?

Or is that just a matter of personal taste?

[come_to_think]

I suspect it may be something personal, tho it may be a peculiarity of the present state of culture. At any rate, it seems to me that beautiful sounds are much rarer in nature than beautiful sights. Every morning, after reading the news, I bring up http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html to restore my sense of proportion. And that is just a tiny sample of nature on one range of scales. What would a corresponding audio service bring up? Bird songs, maybe.

[dpolicar]

Bird songs, definitely. Water (rain, waterfalls, streams, rivers, oceans, etc.). Wind. Contented animal vocalizations. Breathing.

But sure, I can see responding far more strongly to beauty in natural sights than sounds... that makes sense. Especially if you responds strongly to the aesthetic of space... there's a built-in distancing effect there that's hard to achieve with any other sense.

And sure, in the relative absence of natural beautiful sounds, it makes sense that artificial sounds like music are more reliable as a differential source of beauty than artificial sights.

Only vaguely relatedly: I used to respond more strongly to natural scents than either sights or sounds, though my sense of smell isn't what it was.

[come_to_think]

There is another source of beauty that does not fit well into either art or nature, namely mathematics. If one believes, with Aquinas, the even Omnipotence does not extend to logical impossibilities, and with Russell & his followers that mathematics is a branch of logic, then not even God could keep the Mandelbrot set from existing --- indeed, He could not move a hair on the head of any of those little horses. That whole baroque spectacle is frozen in eternity.