Aesthetics is the discipline that describes qualities, character and styles (These last two can in fact be reduced to the first but I wish to emphasize their presence in this particular course) The description of quality can however never be neutral. It may try to be what people like to call objective. I take that to mean that a quality is described without reference to our insterst and desire. For things to be dscribed in that way is hihgly desirable as it is thought, with some justification to lead to greater cogency. At the same time any quality describes the relationship between us and it. Even if we relieve the object of our desire to posses it in most ways. A quaility (a whatness) is a description of the behaviour of something relative to us. It is its behaviour at our scale of observation. This is not a usual description of either quality or the discipline of aesthetics, but it is a compelling and useful one. I would resist the temptation to invent a separate discipline, by some called meta-ethics, to define qualities that are desirable or udesirable. Aesthetics can do that work well. Words come to be, are invented, crafted by people living in the world and these words are then filled by the users on the basis of experience. We need discourse to make sure the meanings of our dictionary are commensurable to the dictionaries of our fellows. This is the only way to enure a reasonable transfer of meaning. All that can be hoped for. Words are necessarily sloppy ad reasonably vague beacause the world is far too rich to capture in a vocabulary that does not become ipossibly heavy even for the most verbose. So beauty, like goodness, in fact like any quality, is a metaword, a veil, vessel and place. It bellows to the dictates of its own material nature as word, obeying the light pressures from within and without. It is sensitive to breeze and covers anything. By covering its object, it creates value and reshapes itself. To declare something beautiful is to issue an order, generously but without further comment. It is the order to maintain a pregnant silence, while the breeze plays with the veil. The quality beauty predicates is unstable, often liquid; the attempt to cup that quality causes the uncontrolled mobilisation of a full but hopeless string of arguments, the unravelling of the dense and labyrinthine knot of connections. Good luck to that! Know thyself better! As such beauty is a go-between; it accepts this string, this knot, quietly, personally, unconditionally and then covers it by a thin cloth and proclaims an irreducible love to the world. That love is not loyal, it changes with the wind. Let's face it, the word beauty cannot lose its currency or be usurped without being supplanted by a word just as incapable and powerless, as potent and suggestive. At the same time its power to suggest a belonging to the gods makes it subject to semantic jealousy, hatred and worship. We have only one option and that is to take full responsibility for our capacity for beauty. So aesthetics is a discipline that describes all qualities and brings them in an appropriate relation to us, an so-called objective one, or subjective one, it describes qualities that could be seen as desirable and undesirable in relation to us and it can describe qualities that are generic or specific. The more carefully we observe, the more our world differentiates into a high resolution picture with nuanced differentiations. Iris Murdoch calls the words needed for this further differntiation secondary words. (The idea of perfection) So we have Good and Bad, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, joyous and sad, desirable and undesirable as primary words, dividing the world into black and white and then we nuance these blacks and whites into their infnite range of grays, pinks greens, blues, and yellows by secondary words such as bumptious, fickle, cantakerous and personable. This is no different to what Spinoza did in his aesthetics of feeling, (the word aesthetics had not yet come into existence when he was writing) where the whole gamut of possible feelings was built up of situational descriptions of sadness and joy. (Spinoza Ethics Prt III)

De hier volgende teksten zijn reeds gepubliceerd in het boek Jacob Voorthuis, Lezen om het Kijken Heen, Reflecties over Architectuur en Beeldende Kunst, 2009

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