[Haskell-cafe] Re: Re: Allowing hyphens in identifiers

[Ben Franksen]

Daniel Fischer wrote:
> Am Montag 14 Dezember 2009 01:44:16 schrieb Richard O'Keefe:
>> Where is it written that aesthetic judgements are _entirely_ a
>> matter of personal preference?
> 
> I think you could find that written in many texts on aesthetic relativism.
> Doesn't matter, though.
> Of course, one's personal preferences aren't developed in a vacuum, they
> are strongly influenced by genes and society. So a lot of preferences are
> shared within a culture and even across cultures and aesthetic judgments
> aren't entirely *individual*. Nevertheless, I'm convinced that there is no
> Platonic idea Beauty (or Ugliness) and that if A says that van Gogh's
> Sunflowers is a beautiful picture while B says it's ugly, it's not the
> case that one is objectively right, the other wrong. Both are judgments
> based on their respective preferences and nothing else (unless: lying,
> acting, succumbing to social pressure, other reasons to not express one's
> actual opinion).

According to Robert Pirsig ("Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance") it
is neither objective nor subjective. It is (a facette of) something much
more fundamental than either subjects or objects, this something (a
difference in quality) being the reason why perception happens at all and
thus why a 'subject' becomes aware of an 'object' in the first place.

Cheers
Ben