The Aesthetic of the Meta-Aesthetic: the Meaning Nexus Between Memeplexes – Andrés Gómez Emilsson
Are there facts about whether something is beautiful, or good art, or are such things purely a matter of opinion?
A Future Day talk by Andrés Gómez Emilsson
Synopsis: In the spirit of fostering a collaborative relationship between the memeplexes that currently occupy the minds of the post-political intelligentsia, Andrés shares a conceptual framework he believes is useful for sense-making independently of one’s subcultural affiliation. Namely, he will share a theory of aesthetics.
Aesthetics go much deeper than merely the preference one may have for clusters and correlations of sensorial patterns. Aesthetics, in fact, cut to the very root of our concept of identity.
Inspired by Rob Burbea’s Soulmaking, Andrés will discuss how aesthetics can be broken down into:
(1) Eros – the set of images that energize one’s thirst for life,
(2) Psyche – the network of relationships between Eros imagery, and
(3) Logos – the overarching ontology upon which Psyche and Eros are based.
Andrés discusses how these components emerge from specific philosophical background assumptions, are then adopted as social aesthetics, and ultimately risk becoming merely tribal markers. In so far as people are caught up in the dissonance between aesthetics without understanding the Logos that breaths life into them, they will continue to fight in unproductive ways. Ultimately, a careful map of the valence that an aesthetic associates to each symbol will allow us to create a music theory of aesthetics and liberate people from the burden of pointless memetic wars. Meaning that, we can predict in advance what kind of discussions are likely to break down due to different valences on key load-bearing symbols, and re-route them through a different path that nonetheless achieves the desired information processing. An understanding of how aesthetics bias our valuations would itself be an aesthetic, of course: the aesthetic of the meta-aesthetic.
This talk argues that such a meta-aesthetic could become the nexus that allows us to “get the best of each world”. The end-goal: to make aesthetic pluralism game-theoretically stable.
