ABSTRACT
Human beings in the course of their daily lives experience involuntary positive responses to congurations of embodied signs in the world, whether these responses are socially permissible or not. When the responses are permissible, we call each other’s attention to their source in the hope of creating a constituency of agreement with our own evaluations. So … the cognitive priority of embodied signs makes beauty a powerful category of value [which] … more or less guarantees that the pleasant surprises we experience in the presence of art will function as a hedge against habit and rhetoric – will routinely pre-empt the blandishments of vested interest, tribal authority, transcendental religion, metaphysical ethics, and abstract philosophy.
