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AUDIENCE COMMENTS |
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An opportunity for the audience to have their say on In Our Time. |
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BEAUTY
Roland Barker - on the nature of beauty
The programme brought to mind an observation made in an 'Oxford Scientific Films' about time-lapse photography, which concerned "...the evil beauty of the mushroom cloud".
beautiful sights and sounds.
From léo burton; my cat howls when she hears atonal music, but makes no objection to mozart. my neighbours who have education but are well-off, attended a concert of "modern" music which they detested. one called it "picasso music" because his reactin to it was similar to his reaction to modern art. is much of the beauty we appreciate an acquired taste; some attributes of female beauty in other cultures, we consider as cruel deformities. perhaps beauty is the perception of harmonious, univeral mathematics, and we humans have the ability learn to perceive harmony where none exists
tony stutters - extending discussion for download having gone through all your back catalogue off the web i was struck by the number of references to the need to miss out huge chunks of the 'prepared script'. why not continue the talk after ending transmission and make the longer or both versions available for download? If only all were available as mp3 :-) Well done all
Allan Jones / Beauty
Like all things in Human nature,an evolutionary explanation gets closest to the truth. Finding out what beauty is, is a question of reverse engineering. We find pleasing and ''beautiful'' whatever our brains have evolved to experience as rewarding. A mothers face had better seem beautiful,the consequences of it not being would be fatal.
Philippa Brown Beauty and Sublime
In the middle of a thesis on the sublime and the visual arts this was a timely programme. It seems we are faced with the dichotomy between the beatutiful and sublime on a daily basis through the increasingly provocative or shocking images we have to witness in the media. Separating the beautiful from the sublime in order to comprehend the incomprehensible as Kant and Burke articulated needs more than just a reality check these days. Although perhaps times have not change as much as we would like to think. Caspar David Friedrich the German Romantic artist whose arresting images portrayed the sublime and our search for a spritual well being way back in the mid 19thc might have something to offer us now.
Robin Allott Beauty and truth
Another winner. The contributors were excellent, as Melvyn Bragg suggested in his note about the programme. If so much can be covered in three-quarters of an hour, how much could be in an hour and a half or longer? A suggestion: some time a neurologist or linguist should be added to the philosophers. We have the words 'beauty', 'truth' and 'good' but where did they come from? How is it that equivalent words exist in other languages (if they do)? How does the human brain function so as to arrive at these concepts? How does a child learn the meaning of these words - or are the concepts there before the child finds the words? Maybe the time is approaching when philosophical discussion can be enriched, enlivened or reformed by drawing on progress in neuroscience and in research into the foundations of language.
for Amie Albrecht
Amie - radio 4 ran a week of special programmes for the 60th anniversary of VE day - that's why there was a break
Laurence Copeland - Beauty (today's prog)
I was surprised at the choice of writers covered in discussing negative attitudes to beauty in the 20th century. There was an immediate reference to Yeats ("a terrible beauty is born"), in spite of the fact that he was by all accounts a pretty muddled thinker on this and other subjects, and in any case his poem "Sailing to Byzantium" could be cited as evidence of his positive view of beauty. On the other hand, I heard no mention of Thomas Mann, who had an unambiguous suspicion of beauty, and who, in many of his novels and novellas, expressed his disgust for those who pursue it(presumably including writers like himself). Nonetheless, IOT is worth the licence fee on its own. I have just one question you have probably already answered a number of times,in which case I apologise for asking you to repeat the answer: why on earth is it called In Our Time?
Stephen Layland [Bristol]: BEYOND BEAUTY, IN THE O
In some near Burkean sense, the mere look of the appearance of the nuclear mushroom cloud may well appear sublime to some - i.e. beautiful to some dreadful and aweful extent. One has to have a more complete knowledge of anything - and of its more complete context - before one may, with any due confidence, judge it to be beautiful - i.e. to objectively know it to be beautiful. These distinctions will all be familar to those interested the works of William Blake. Those following the debate over siting monstrous wind-turbines on land-based locations should reject the very premise of the almost completely disengenuous arguments that some people employ: that land-based wind-turbines look beautiful. The role occupied by our finest countyside is to provide a location for utopia - the promise of something better, still worth the effort of striving for. Leaving aside the manifold harmful impacts of all the associated infrastructure, it is enough to know that such "windmills" are being erected amid some of our finest landscapes simply to provoke people into the sort reactionary reaction of that would cause them to even think to allow the building of more and more nuclear power stations. Given the manipulative purpose of those willing to employ that sort of permanently harmful finesse, all such land-based wind-mills must necessarily appear ugly. This is quite beyond being merely another subjective opinion. For the measure of the harm of building more and more nuclear power stations is of the same scale as all the cumulative measures being taken to reduce both the means and targets available to terrorists - including the issuing of ID cards [aka extension of logic and purpose of supermarket loyalty cards] and, more significantly, the collation of every detail of all our lives as consumers. The real point of such manifold collations is that, of course, they will then allow those in power over us to increase that power - not least by allowing them the knowledge needed to manipulate our individual preferences - and especially the floating voter(s) in marginal constituencies - on an almost daily basis. We are encouraged not to waste our vote when those we elect are content to finesse the strength and purpose of democracy. Now that those in the East have adopted the word, its time we in the West had a democracy worthy of its name. All this is beyond a matter of market-led reform. The question is, consequently, not really one of the beauty of appearances but of knowledge - our knowledge of the ugly character of matters beyond [as if orthogonal] to appearances.
tony woodd........philosophy of beauty
Given that the human condition is determined by it's identification with it's past,as it's psychological history, the result of which is essentially insecurity and fear all of which gives rise to our violence.The "philosophy of beauty" is surely a contadiction of terms if one considers the source of the thought that is trying to consider beauty..Surely beauty is a state of mind of appreciation, of no thought...The appreciation of a state of mind of beauty is lost by the thought that seeks to keep it..The appreciation of, and the thought of beauty seem to me to be mutually exclusive................
Jana Fielding - Beautification
After hearing this moring's programme this is my response. Beautification is the process of seeing beauty in everything so that we turn away from nothing. The philosopher's stone seems to me to be the vital spark at the centre of attention that touches the edges of inner and outer matter. In the touching and acceptance matter is beautified.
Robert Gore:Beauty
Dear Melvin, To discuss beauty it seems to me one must first establish a philosophy of the nature of reality and the relation of human consciousness to it, other wise considering the rival notions of beauty becomes a way of discussing the fundamental position of 'what is reality?' at one remove. If the physical world has no spiritual dimension, and is real and exists as it is, separate from human perception and interaction, then the spread of notions of beauty is limited and determined by that prior position. Therefore I would say that beauty can only be defined within a particular philosophical system, or family of similar systems. To my mind it is easier to discuss beauty generally by selecting an example that is not controversial. For instance rather than what is a beautiful body or painting or idea, 'what is a beautiful musical chord ?'. It is easily shown that a harmonious chord has a set of simple mathematical realtionships which is absent from a dischord of random frequencies. This I believe is a good choice becase one can directly move to considering whether the mathematical relations exist abstractly beyond not only human experience and predeliction taste and culture and so on, but in an abstract world beyond the existence of human kind, and human consciousnessaltogether. This aids the discusiion of whether or not beauty has some eternal point of reference, avoiding complications of taste and culture. We cannot escape the prior question, 'does the world exist in the mind of the beholder?' So Melvin I think you are going to need another program in this area, and perhaps to spend a whole program trying to unravel Kant's view of reality. Perhaps you should fill your studio with guests who have taken a position and truly believe it and wish to argue for it, rather than of educators who simply parade their knowledge of the whole field, albeit entertainingly and sincerely, but who are not committed to a particular world view themselves, and thus lack passion. The great philosophers of history were not reviewing the field, although that might have been part of their method, they were propounding what they believed to be the actual truth and were trying to lead mankind from the slavery and suffering of various delusions.
Nicky Ennion - ' Philosophical History of Beauty'
It seems to me that there is a frozen time element to Beauty which I would like to bring in to the discussion. It could be stated, I think, as: "Beauty is that moment's ultimate expression in defying entropy when witnessed"
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