Connecting the dots

“Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our
aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.”
~ Alfred North Whitehead

 

What we perceive in the objective entity is only its properties. I say this as an adjunct to another important unproved result from another very lengthy examination, in this case an examination of Time - the result is intuitive and obvious, but involves some very complex analysis if we want to go about proving it, and it states simply that we can only directly perceive one objective entity at once. When we understand that a relation is necessarily the product of some comparison of more than one entity in the context of this result, we obtain the happy insight that relations necessarily concern subjective entities, while properties necessarily concern objective entities. Our understanding of discrete entities, either subjectively or objectively, requires us to understand both properties and relations: of course, the experience of observing some property creates the endogenous impression of that property, and it is strictly this rather than the property itself that informs our identification of any entity.

A subjective entity, which we have said is a created thing, a manifestation of the willed agency of the mind-artist, is therefore a deliberate arrangement of property-impressions and relation-ideas. The distinction between impression and idea can be more clearly understood in this framework if we appreciate that we can choose to arrange a given set of property-impressions and relation-ideas any way we like - we are not constrained to those arrangements which correspond to identifiable objective entities in our experience. We can invent entirely novel arrangements of property and relation that have no objective existence. We can, in fact, posit continua of relationship, along which entities of successively greater bigness or redness, say, can be intuited. The ability to intuit such relational chains, which is what cognitive scientists call pattern recognition, is an immensely powerful mechanism of rational thought. In the limit, we can consider relations as continua without specifying any entities lying anywhere along a particular continuum. This is what Plato meant by an ideal; in Platonic idealism, every thing that physically exists partakes of the ideals of its necessary properties.

Pulling this back to your understanding of my writing - you, as a self-aware conscious individual, have a reaction to this (to any subjective entity, in theory) which is essentially emotional, or sentimental to use a Humean expression. This reaction represents your critical evaluation of its conformity with your own subjective ideals, which develop organically out of an extrapolation of your historic perceptions. In hopefully plainer English, you develop your ideal of 'bigness' through having had to compare different entities along a continuum of increasing size in the process of identifying them as uniquely individual objective entities. For a fundamental physical property like 'bigness,' there might be quite significant agreement between several observers on the ideal of bigness, but it should be obvious that more abstract 'properties' can be perceived which give rise to far more heterogenous ideals.