Kant, aesthetics, objectivity repost requested

S

Saina Nieminen

Saina Nieminen
I seem to remember reading some interesting stuff about that on therapy, but can't find it anymore so I assume that was from before a huge part was deleted. Would anyone still have that information saved somewhere? If not, would you mind discussing Kant again?
 
originally posted by Otto Nieminen:
Kant, aesthetics, objectivity repost requestedI seem to remember reading some interesting stuff about that on therapy, but can't find it anymore so I assume that was from before a huge part was deleted. Would anyone still have that information saved somewhere? If not, would you mind discussing Kant again?
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I need more energy fro that. Keep asking though. Maybe it'll bring Zul out of retirement.

I've always thought of Kant vis a vis wine in terms of his general approach to epistemology, not purely aesthetics, which isn't my philosophical specialty.

Prof. Loesberg will probably have more to say and I'd like to hear it.

I would love to see this dovetail into a discussion of how to view consensus as an emergent property with some sort of epistemic value, but that's a personal thing.
 
I would love to see this dovetail into a discussion of how to view consensus as an emergent property with some sort of epistemic value, but that's a personal thing.
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Oh no, I think we'd all love to see that!
 
I remember getting into specific discussions over aesthetic issues. I'm not sure I can just sort of start a thread about aesthetics. I'd feel like Pip when Miss Havisham orders him to play. Someone say something that claims to define art, though, and I'll try to jump in.
 
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
Art is what I like.
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As yet, insufficiently controversial. Are there works of art you don't like? Are there objects that some people consider artworks that you don't? Do you have criteria for making distinctions between artworks and non-artworks or between successful and unsuccessful works of art? Do you think your dislike of puppies is an aesthetic judgment or some other kind? In either case, why? And why do people care about these questions (this is not a rhetorical question: a good aesthetic theory should have an answer to it)?
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
I remember getting into specific discussions over aesthetic issues. I'm not sure I can just sort of start a thread about aesthetics. I'd feel like Pip when Miss Havisham orders him to play. Someone say something that claims to define art, though, and I'll try to jump in.
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Wine isn't art.

And see my take on qualitative judgment, quantifying it, and the emergent truth value of that hierarchy.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Are there works of art you don't like? Are there objects that some people consider artworks that you don't? Do you have criteria for making distinctions between artworks and non-artworks or between successful and unsuccessful works of art? Do you think your dislike of puppies is an aesthetic judgment or some other kind? In either case, why? And why do people care about these questions (this is not a rhetorical question: a good aesthetic theory should have an answer to it)?
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Yes, there are of course many works of art I don't like. Not sure whether I would declassify some supposed art pieces, though; a lot of it for me has to do with intention. (Weaned perhaps excessively on Dada and Surrealism. I would even call Damien Hirst's obnoxious bling-bling hysterics art, c'est dire.) My dislike of puppies can be filed more under OCD: they slobber! they pee! they lick you with germs, etc. And they're no good at art. (See intentional non-fallacy.)

Please tell me your answer to the last question.
 
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Are there works of art you don't like? Are there objects that some people consider artworks that you don't? Do you have criteria for making distinctions between artworks and non-artworks or between successful and unsuccessful works of art? Do you think your dislike of puppies is an aesthetic judgment or some other kind? In either case, why? And why do people care about these questions (this is not a rhetorical question: a good aesthetic theory should have an answer to it)?
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Yes, there are of course many works of art I don't like. Not sure whether I would declassify some supposed art pieces, though; a lot of it for me has to do with intention. (Weaned perhaps excessively on Dada and Surrealism. I would even call Damien Hirst's obnoxious bling-bling hysterics art, c'est dire.) My dislike of puppies can be filed more under OCD: they slobber! they pee! they lick you with germs, etc. And they're no good at art. (See intentional non-fallacy.)

Please tell me your answer to the last question.
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Well, I wrote a book mostly answering the last question. A telescoped version of the answer is that the value of art is not a value in artworks but in something achieved by aesthetic apprehension, which is, in Kantian terms, a way of looking at things with indifference to what they are, what purposes they serve and all other usual ways of looking at them. And the point of doing that is the ability to entertain different questions, judgments, conclusions then purposive thinking allows, some of which may, in a non-aesthetic way turn out to be valuable.

Nathan is write that wine is not art. Because taste is sensual, and because sense-pleasure is opaque, there can't be objective judgments about a wine's quality. If one agrees in advance about certain non-sensual objective criteria(wine should always reflect terroir, or even, wine should always be red), one can then, with limitations, measure whether those criteria have been met, but the truth of the criteria isn't pre-given and won't be establishable merely in terms of the value of wine.

If you are Kantian, for similar reasons, it will follow that while one can produce an accurate analytical description of what people do when they make aesthetic judgments, and that description will tell you why those judgments are valuable, you can't objectively evaluate artworks. This doesn't mean that you can't evaluate anything or that relativism follows. Remember, it was Kant who said this. It means that for aesthetic apprehension to work, it matters that artworks aren't subject to this form of quantitative qualification. And boy, if that is true of artworks, which have an element of intelligibility to them, it is far more true of wine.
 
I would like to read your book in order to follow the full thread of your thought. Of course, to me the Kantian viewpoint is painfully rigid, if aesthetic pleasure can be conceived of as a form of minor hedonism and not an intellectual jouissance. Strip love of art of the spark of discovery, etc.

Wine is absolutely not art, mass produced fodder as it is. An artisan craft, at best. Art, at a stretch, maybe only in the sense of some 1960s silk-screen artiste. I'd sooner label SFJoe's morell risotto art.

What I have never kenned, actually, is the desire to apply univeral rules to the experience (one assumes affective) of aesthetics. Aesthetics are (is?) extraneous to the tensions of societal life, thus to my sense ruled by an inessential logic. They will not salt our bread or grow our potatoes, but we might like Yves Klein's blue more than we like Matisse's reds.
 
The idea that Kant took art to be about a special kind of pleasure is the common reading of him, but not I think correct. He thought that a certain apprehension of the world that was what he thought of as an aesthetic apprehension had as one of its concomitants pleasure, but that's not quite the same thing.

In any case, you give me the delightful opportunity to shill for my book, unless the politburo rules it out of place. You can find it on Amazon France here:

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www.amazon.fr
 
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