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LondonArt -> What is interesting? (4/29/2008 3:46:59 PM)
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As the thread topic says, how do you define what makes a thing interesting?
In Insurmountable Simplicities Casati and Varzi initially offer the view that a thing is interesting if it has some unique attribute to set it aside from other things. However this theory of interest encounters two problems, which are then illustrated. Firstly, consider a list of all boring books ever published, arranged in chronological order. One of those books will be the first item on the list, the earliest known boring book. No other book has the quality of being the first on the list, so this unique feature makes the book interesting, and therefore we can remove it from the list as it is no longer a boring book. Another book is now first on the list, and we can continue thusly until we have removed every book (there is of course one obvious problem here, which Casati and Varzi do not address). Following this logic we soon find that everything ever is interesting, which renders the concept of interest somewhat meaningless.
The second issue is that this gives us only a technical sort of interest. To continue with the example of the books, whilst the book may hold the quality of being the first boring book, and therefore be interesting, that does not render its contents interesting. If we were searching for an interesting book to read, we could not use this criteria to select our reading material.
So, having established that merely being unique is not enough to make something interesting I put the question to everyone else: how do you define the quality of "being interesting"?
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