Back on my aesthetic materialist bullshit

 

Not long ago, Colin Drumm asked "What is the difference between idealism and materialism?"

Here's my brief reply, slightly edited:

They are two aesthetics, or two families of aesthetics. Which you prefer is a matter of taste. 

People who prefer idealism prefer unities, isomorphisms, structures that are reducible to simple elements. The ideal of idealism is an everything that is reducible to nothing. 

Materialists prefer it when something about what they see is not reducible to a pattern - when something doesn't fit, and eludes our ability to see it as an iteration of a larger whole, our ability to comprehend it, understand it, or sometimes even describe it.  This doesn't necessarily imply structurelessness; it may imply novel structure.

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