Superman and Dehumanity Part V — On Aesthetics

Continued from Previous.

Are the rules of drama subjective, conventional, or objective? The short answer is a qualified yes: a heavily qualified yes.

The first qualification is that any work of art follows the conventions of its genre, and these conventions, being conventions, are subjective from the point of view of the universe, but objective from the point of view of the individual. Like the rules of chess, the rules for how to write a sonnet cannot be changed by an individual. If you play a game where the pawns move backward, it is not chess; if you write a poem where not of 14 lines of ten syllables in iambic pentameter ending with a rhyming couplet, it is not a sonnet. Call it something else.

The second qualification is that personal matters of taste cannot be fully removed from the question. This does not mean we should fall into the opposite error of assuming all aesthetics is merely personal taste and nothing but: and yet it means that any conclusions admit of doubt, mayhap of grave doubt.

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