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art Philosophy

Aesthetic Relativity: Lascaux and Other Minds

Representational relativity is an epiphenomenon strongly supported by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (itself perhaps also, and ironically, subject to the representational vicissitudes and aesthetics of oscillating academic taste and cultures).

While we might never decompress exactly what the Lascaux cave art meant to its creators, the reflexivity of creative expression as a function of whichever cultural or cognitive field one inhabits is always constructively instructive. The representational relativity of any aesthetic artefact or context is as much a measure of our own adaptively stochastic subjective depth as it is of whichever inaccessible experience produced it.

From this, and by quite natural inductive extension, there is a salient lesson in that while we may never directly know the experience of any other mind, the value of art lies in its convergent approach to a shared appreciation of beauty, even if inevitably and necessarily from diverse Other positions in or as perspectival abstractions of time, space and/or place.

The extent to which the aesthetic and informational field of culture and art also inhabits us is a similarly interesting consideration. Aesthetic relativity is a function of ethics.

The prehistoric beauty at Lascaux.

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