Beauty

The Barbican Centre closed down before I moved to York. It is a massive leisure centre with untold treasures inside, and it sits behind a neat metal fence. Every so often it appears in the news and I sigh, and think about what it must have been like when it was open, and how sad it is when things lie abandoned.

But then I wander why I feel this reverence for the Barbican Centre when I never visit the leisure centres that still exist.

I was thinking about this yesterday, and I came to the conclusion that the element of resistance is a factor in what is beautiful.

A building is an thing for a particular purpose. But when it is abandoned the purpose is incomplete. As the activity can no longer be for us, it is revealed as activity in itself, which we can appreciate as what it is in itself. This is great because a building is essentially purpose. So in an abandoned building we find human purposiveness without purpose.

This made me think about the art I like, which is mostly honest stuff which reflects my life accurately. Again, it is a matter of the element of resistance. In biographical art, my actual situation and ends are abandoned to reveal the universal essence behind it.

So maybe truth is beauty, in that what an object is in essence is beautiful to us. But beauty relies on separation and destruction to remove the particular and reflect the essence. Therefore the true, the beautiful, and the in-itself can only exist when we imagine it as separate from ourselves.

And this is all inaccurate, messy thinking.

Essence and Object

Today was the last day of a sixty hour week. For the last five days I have been working at a traction fair. I am very tired. There's only been a few thoughts that I've had time to think.

For instance, I have been thinking about essence, identity and definition. On friday, I thought that the essence of an object and the definition of an object are our attempt to understand an object by identifying it with a class of objects. But, I think that this is an inexact way to think. And that if we go down this route the essence of an object will aways be the object's essence to us.

Definition is to do with identity and as such will always be inexact because there is a necessary dissimilarity between everyday objects and their definitions (i.e. all particular cats have features that are not covered by the general concept of "cat").

I hate the notion that we should start with the essence of an object, and understand the object by way of its state of being because if we start with essence then we run the risk of confusing essence and definition. And therefore we come to a circular reasoning: I know A is A because I have studied it based on its essential quality which is its A-ness.

Maybe we could understand essence as the opposite of definition. Maybe the essence of an object could be what sets it apart and makes it unclassifiable?

Or maybe not. I'm tired, and now it is lunch time.