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On Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790), Pt. 1, Book 1.
Kant thinks that finding something beautiful is different than merely liking it. It's a certain kind of liking, not dependent on your idiosyncratic tastes (like your preference for one color or flavor or tone over another) or on your moral opinions. He wants these judgments to be subjective in the sense that they're not about the object, but about the fact that people receive pleasure from it, yet he also wants them to be universal, so that if I (correctly) find something beautiful, then I expect others to feel the same way, and moreover, if they have taste, they should.
Of course this is all put into very difficult Kantian language with virtually no actual examples, so the regular foursome had a good time attempting to translate it to something you can get your head around. Read more about the topic and get the book.
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In the study of literature it’s common to find a work to be beautiful, but not pleasing. Not pleasing because what the author has to say or the theme of the work do not interest you.
There’s lots of poetry which I find beautiful, but I’m not interested in poetry. There are writers like Proust or Joyce, whose works are beautiful in aesthetic terms, but they don’t please me because, as I said above, I’m not interested in what they write about.
As Kant tries to hang more concepts on his transcendental deduction architecture developed in the Critique of Pure Reason, the architecture shows fault lines which began in the original architecture. These fault lines are refelected in the confusion the PEL four find themeselves in while providing an excellent reflection of Kant’s precarious and perplexing view of beauty. Kant wants aesthetic subjectivity (interest/desire/pleasure) to have a grounding that is universal and certain (disinterested), so he uses a modified/confused/confusing concept of the transcendental. He admits of pleasure being a correlate of beauty, though not necessarily for all people, because people have their own idiosyncratic interests. That pleasure is generated by the imagination, a faculty which synthesizes individaul experiences in order to be represented to the understanding (cognition). Kant attempts to ground his drive for secure, universal beauty in a combination of common sense (sensation that is common to man) and in the peculiar “freeplay.” He invokes freeplay as a kind of release of the clutch that disengages momentarily the rational architecture and engine of understanding (cognition) from the experiential synthesis of the imagination. These maneuvers reflect the limits of his transcendental deduction efforts, and are reflected in the un-natural concepts of “disinterested” beauty (as well as the “disinterested” morality of the categorical imperative). Kant reflects the rationalistic version of a brain in a vat by failing to adequately integrate his excellent observations of the function of the imagination and its syntheses, in order to present the full human condition.
Is it form that gives the sense of universality to Beauty, or is it the uniqueness of matter that gives Beauty the sense of universality? The upcoming podcast on the Sublime should shed further light on this fault line in Kant’s transcendental architecture.
if you guys did not get the message from Pirsig, rationalizing art is one of the few real oxymorons. beauty is affect thru and thru.
now, should any PELers want to study a serious philosopher’s treatment of the sublime, dump the Cartesian-Kantian adherents to the 13th century monk, Tommie, who morphed Aristotle’s anthropocentric take on reason as being the sole explanation for why I can live forever, but not my dog (who, as it turns out, also reasons – not surprising when you understand consciousness as the affect of experienced attention to a what-if-that-is-not-that proposition). go to whitehead’s treatment of contrast to see why those art loving humanities folk across campus are discovering Alfie.
btw, it is the same experienced affect of an affirmation/negation proposition thatt informs my dog to approach or flee that Thomists like Deacartes and Kant believe to be a solely human capacity necessary to gain eternal heavenly abode – the discernment that the beautific vision of god is the best thing ever. even better than a belly rub!
thanks fellas PEL at its and yer best, taking the work apart making sense of the pieces and than trying to put it all back in working order, reading as reverse-engineering plus a bit of critique to top it off; free-play/teloi/making-sense-of-creation I can see the outlines of the Whitehead show filling in….
Great episode, these were the kind of discussion that got me into PEL.
a copy/paste of ‘whitehead’s treatment of contrast’ yielded this gem: http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2232 …a good article from Shaviro also comes up.
Cobb is probably the most knowledgeable scholar of ANW today. this is fine reading for all, especially those who want to ‘feel’ what Alfie tried to express in writing (and failed at so miserably). serious readers of Pirsig will take pause when reading this take on Values, and will likely find themselves scratching their heads while muttering ‘what did Pirsig say that is not lifted directly from ANW’s work?’
i hope that dmf is right about an upcoming ANW episode of PEL. i further hope that the hosts will not resort to insecure ridicule when tackling the work of a profound thinker that was completely hidden from them in their schooling. a thoughtful treatment of Whitehead and his works by this PEL site could seriously usher-in a new found, post process theism, interest ln my boy, Alfie.
Cobb is a terribly weak reader/user of Whitehead and more interested in christian apologetics, Shaviro is a more serious reader (folks should read his related book on his website) and owes much to the profound philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers who isn’t pushing theology (or any other dancing wu-li master style pablum) and definitely worth a read or two if one has the time, if not this is an excellent recorded lecture along the same lines:
http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2013/10/melanie-sehgal-whiteheads-metaphysics-as-situated-metaphysics/
Cobb is not as crisp and clear as Griffin, but i think he does a decent job w/ ANW ideas. i usually enjoy reading the arts folk who write about ANW. comparing how artists and process theologians read him is kinda like multiply-interpretably poetry vs scholastic dogmatism. either group has a moving target, but the artists’ take on Alfie wins the most interesting/creative/adventurous prize
I liked Wes’s interpretation of this piece. I was trying to explain Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgement to myself, using Wes’s apparatus, and ran into a problem or two when I analyzed it, and would appreciate any comments or clarifications.
First let’s start with Kant’s notion non-aesthetic conceptual judgments. It is helpful for me to think of concepts as sets–even though concepts have more machinery than naive sets. Suppose there are two sets called LETTER and NUMBER, where LETTER={A,B,C,D,E} and NUMBER={1,2,3,4,5}. Now suppose you are wandering around, and in your perceptions, you notice the element D in the wild. You make a judgment when you decide that D belongs to the set LETTER. The act of ‘placing’ or ‘identifying’ an element within a set is analogous to making a judgment. In Kant’s language, this is placing the particular under the universal of the concept. LETTER and NUMBER are analogous to concepts.
Wes says that aesthetics judgments, for Kant, are about ‘revving’ up the cognitive faculties, stimulating them to begin to make judgments as above, but the cognitive faculties never complete the judgment because there is ‘surplus’ of content in the object (element) that cannot be placed within a concept (or set). For example, given the two sets above, if you find a G in the wild, and attempt to determine what set this belongs to, your cognitive faculties won’t be able to complete the judgment because no set contains a G. You will be able to perceive the G, in terms of its lines and shapes and size, but there is something about it (a surplus) that goes beyond your current concepts.
The representation of the G cannot be placed under a concept by the understanding, and Wes says that the ‘idling’ or ‘buzzing’ of this play between the representation and incompleted(my word) understanding generates pleasure. My problem with this reasoning, with respect to aesthetics, is that anything that we conceive of a ‘new’ seems to invoke this same sort of idling. If we lack a concept for the determination of an object—because that object is newly witnessed—then we ought to, by this reasoning, say that pleasure necessarily arises. But all that is new is not pleasurable or beautiful. Some new things are boring, revolting, terrifying, or simply indescribable but not pleasurable. The ‘buzzing’ of new things can lead to many different sorts of appreciation, and nothing isolates the beautiful other than an empirical experience of pleasure—a la Hume.
Another problem: Wes describes the ‘surplus’ of form in the object to give rise to the beautiful, but this surplus, once experienced as beautiful, should also begin to form its own new concept–even if we cannot name it–a concept which could be used by the understanding at a later time to categorize similar objects. These objects, which will be similar to the original beautiful object, would then not give rise to pleasure because they could be judged in a conceptual way. In some sense, this seems right, as the once beautiful can become a common thing.
I personally find circles beautiful, in a disinterested way. Is there form, in the circle, beyond my concept of the circle? The concept of the circle and its form seem to exhaust one another.
Fun stuff.
Marc,
I think composing a set and then placing the G outside of the set as the “surplus form” isn’t quite correct. The surplus content that is responded to a Beauty has no relation to the concept, and therefore no relation to the set, so G being part of the set or not is of no consequence for understanding it as Beautiful. My take on it is that it may be that G is admitted as part of the set but what Kant calls Beauty would be what has no necessary relation to the G as a G. Rather, it is the way we feel when interacting with that surplus content that is Beauty.
The idling or the buzzing, in my mind, regards the resistance placed on the mind based on the surplus content. Though resistance seems like the wrong idea. More like, the mind engages with the pause? A new object doesn’t cause idling or buzzing so much as a frantic search for the conceptual grounding needed to understand the object. This idea, though, would run counter to the examples given in the podcast about working through a mathematical proof.
Section 17, and the discussion of the Ideal of Beauty, hints at answers to your comment about surplus content being conceptualized. The surplus content, always interacted with through free play, by definition, prevents it from becoming a concept. I think Kant sort of avoids the question by saying “look, the whole system forecloses on the Ideal of Beauty (I guess the first remarks about vague beauty may sum up why), except in the case of man,” and then begins the whole normal Idea and the perfection of humanity which seems like some wild argument about how man alone can be an Ideal Beauty because he can align his purpose with perfection(then, is the Kingdom of Ends and the perfection of humanity through alignment by the categorical imperative an aesthical judgement, a judgement of Beauty, a judgement of the surplus content of man acknowledged as his perfectibility?).
Like you, I found this to be great fun to work with. It even makes me want to try on more Kant as my only other information came from the old PEL podcast on ethics. I’m looking forward to the myriad, or surplus, ways in which I am totally off-base here!
Joshua
Joshua, I think you’re right about how placing G outside the set isn’t quite right. Here’s another way to put it. Let us suppose we have the concept of an apple=A. Now any particular apple can be ‘reduced’ to the concept of an apple, a sort of Platonic form of an apple, plus some additional features. An apple may also have accidental properties p—it size, a dirt stain, a worm hole, etc—that are not necessary to the apple. We may also take that apple to be beautiful, according to Kant, such that it has surplus form which I will label #. So, our particular apple, call it a1, is a1=(A + p + #), where A is a necessary form/content of an apple, p are some accidental properties that can be conceptualized, and # is surplus content that cannot be conceptualized.
It appears that the key characteristic feature of # is that it cannot be conceptualized—is Kant saying that form that cannot be conceptualized always gives rise to the beautiful? Can’t there be non-conceptual form # that is not beautiful? And why would we say that a1, the particular apple, is beautiful? The aspects of the apple that allow us to call it an apple have nothing to do with it being beautiful, according to Kant, because these can be conceptualized. We would have to say that beauty ‘accompanies’ that apple, but the (conceptual) apple itself is not beautiful.
Appreciate your insights.
Marc,
As you stated, no set contains a G: “the cognitive faculties never complete the judgment because there is ‘surplus’ of content in the object (element) that cannot be placed within a concept (or set).”
I don’t think Wes is claiming that all that is beautiful is necessairily pleasurable and beautiful, but that what is beautiful pleasurable, not necessarily new, but not placed under a concept of the understanding, “buzzing.”
I don’t think that Kant is saying that “form that cannot be conceptualized always gives rise to the beautiful,” but sometimes, when form and individual receptivity prevails, the true surplus is experienced as beauty.
(P.S. The concept of surplus is foundational for a poststructural metaphysics.)
Thank you guys for this awesome podcast. This is the first of yours that I have heard, but the first of many.
I only started this podcast because I have a bachelors in philosophy and history-with a lot of papers written on Hans Georg Gadamer-and I finished it because I came to Madison/Middleton three years ago after college.
Keep up the awesome work. I will be listening.
Thanks for inspiring a philosophy guy who gave up to keep on reading.
Just finished Octavio Paz “Labyrinth of Solitude”, you interested?
Objet petit a (surplus object), anyone? Sounds like it:
“[H]e [Lacan] relates the objet a to what Kant called “der Gegenstand ohne Begriff,” the object without concept (not covered by any concept). The objet a is as such “irrational,” in the strictly literal sense of being outside all ratio, all relation as proportion. In other words, when a particular element resists being subsumed under a universal concept, the objet a, “what is in you more than yourself,” is precisely that je ne sais quoi which prevents this subsumption.”
— Less Than Nothing, “The Objet A Between Form and Content”, 11th paragraph
I enjoyed this episode, thanks. It was good to hear the core 4 presenters in conversation again.
After listening, I was left confused though as to whether things that weren’t directly sensed were excluded from conceiving beauty in this way, for example a poem about a flower might not be beautiful, but a flower could. I was wondering this about the same time the podcast raised that Kan’t thinking privileged sense, the visual in particular.
This was what I was hoping to get more of an understanding of. I’m a high school English teacher and I have a Noongar (Western Australian Aboriginal nation) creation story that I teach my students which I (with deliberate provocation) present as being beautiful. But I’ve been challenged by friends that I can’t say this because beauty is relative (which begs another – though more English and less philosophical – question, why saying this about, say, a Keats poem would be less problematic). So I really liked Kant’s move to subjective universality as a way of differentiating between interested and disinterested notions of beauty.
But it doesn’t feel right to apply it to writings about natural phenomena in the same way you would towards natural phenomena themselves, or images of natural phenomena (eg. painting, photographs etc.). Reading seems to engage in more cognitive work to be in agreeable (or pleasant, or whatever) in a disinterested way. Yet writing can also have harmony etc. that we could find beautiful, but this is the writing (the form) that we’d be finding beautiful though, right? Not the subject matter or content?
Similarly, I have this idea that power-generating wing-turbines “look” kind of beautiful. I lived in a coastal town in the south of Australia with what are seriously the most beautiful beaches in the world (in the vernacular AND Kantian senses of beautiful). There were wind farms on the coast. No problems. They didn’t seem out of place. In fact they kind of harmonised with it and added to its beauty. I’m guessing that because they rely on natural forces, the way many things in nature have evolved to do, they have some of the subjectively universal characteristics that make things beautiful.
And yet, in Australia there has developed a massive opposition to them (I don’t know if this is the same in the US?). Our government has just launched another inquiry into them, changing the terms of reference again in the hope some major problem can be found in them. Our federal treasurer has said that he “can’t think of anything more offensive than wind turbines.” In line with this, our Prime Minister has said “coal is good for humanity.”
I guess this isn’t a view that would see coal as beautiful. But what our socially and neo-coservative government down under *would* see as beautiful, I think, is an economic system that creates growth. To them, this has the sort of harmony that appeals to their minds, which are active in trying to bring order to things in the way they are. And wind turbines call that paradigm into question so they see them as ugly. But again, this isn’t an encounter with natural phenomena but with an idea (like a writing) about the natural phenomena.
It seems when I start thinking about the difference between “real” primary experience and secondary experience (my terms)(, I encounter this problem. Plus, I’m not really comfortable with this distinction between primary and secondary experience anyway as I kind of come from a post-structural background where everything is text – there is not essential primary/secondary distinctions.
Hi Heath, on one way of looking at Kant, anything that has a surplus content that goes beyond the conceptual may (although not always) give rise to beauty. The conceptual aspect of a poem, the part we make clear conceptual judgments about, are the words of the poem. However, the feelings and meanings that arise from a poem go beyond the words as objects and arise from the specific relationships between words. These relationships, and our appreciation of them, do not follow from conceptual judgments at all. We could never form a concept for every type of relationship between sets of words. So I would say that Kant would have no problem with attributing beauty to a poem or a song.
As for people who say that beauty is all relative, ask these people to point to the specific arguments for that belief (they will undoubtedly say that Jake thinks THAT is beautiful but Jane thinks it sucks, so therefor, everything is relative…And you can say, the fact that two people disagree, or multiple people disagree about something, does not imply that an objective answer does not exist. Some people say the earth is flat, others round, therefor its all relative? Then your friends will say, well, beauty is different, is all in the mind. Then you can talk about Plato and Kant who see things otherwise.
Not sure how I feel about wind turbines. I saw huge fields of these when driving through Texas. Gave me a sense of awe more than beauty or disgust.
Cheers
I loved the podcast and have a few thoughts after reading the comments.
The notion of a sensible surplus driving beauty is not accurate. The confusion comes, I think, when Kant insists that we do not have a concept for beauty. This seems to indicate that there is too much for our concepts to grasp. But it is not a matter of too much content, or even too much activity. It is that there is no rule for saying that a given presentation will produce this disinterested pleasure. You cannot say if a presentation has these properties, it will produce the feeling of beauty in us. Now this is an assertion by Kant, not an argument. Proving a negative and all that. But he tries to show that we can have universally valid judgments of beauty without any such rule in hand.
A better way to get Kant’s view is to say that *we* must take an aesthetic attitude to things in order for beauty to show up. That is, a sensible presentation can only be grasped as beautiful if we suspend all practical interest in it–or if in addition to our practical interest we pay attention to how it looks, sounds, feels directly. Once we choose to look at (or attend to) something in this way, we can also attend to the way it affects us and thus become aware of the nature of this engagement. Think of the time you look at a painting and move back and forth between its look and your own reactions. This is an intense, dynamic, open-ended process that is neither wholly “in” the painting’s qualities nor “in” yourself. It is an engagement between the painting’s sensible elements and your own efforts at looking, sensing, feeling, thinking, etc. You say the painting is beautiful, but what you are really assessing is the character of this engagement. I think this is what Kant means by indeterminate (it cannot be anticipated by a concept, a set of rules) and reflective (it assesses the object in terms of our engagement with it).
So if it is not a surplus, what does drive beauty? Is there anything about the object (presentation) that makes it beautiful? Strictly speaking, no. Having such a definition would constitute a rule, a concept of beauty. The closest Kant will get to a definition or answer is form, specifically dynamic form. Beauty cannot be stilted and boring; it is always in some sense dynamic. On the other hand, it cannot be excessively active. I don’t think Kant can prove this; it is a matter of examining your own experience with beauty. But if you go with him on this, you can say with him that it is the form of the engagement between the sensible presentation and our minds/bodies (he says our powers of presentation, i.e. imagination and understanding) that gives rise to beauty. Our very experience of the painting takes a certain form–a dynamic back and forth–which we reflect on and enjoy as beautiful. Form is key because it transcends mere agreeable content (I like green stuff!) and approaches something like a concept, with its abstract structure. It gives us the form of conceptuality without the…conceptuality of form.
I think the question of poetry is great. Kant does not really address it, but I think he would have to tie it to imagination and argue that poetry taken aesthetically (again, you can treat it conceptually as well) conjures up specific sensible images and sounds for us to engage. Thus there is a kind of painting in poetry as well as a musicality, and you could treat poetry as an analogue to these arts. But the emotional beauty of much poetry would be very hard for Kant to handle. He doesn’t have a f’n clue what an emotion is. Everything for him stops at the mind, and beauty is, if not rational, entirely “heady.” I think one of his greatest followers is Merleau-Ponty, who brought much of this talk about judgment down into the body and into the dynamic movement, feeling, and sense of life itself.
What is beauty? Almost never the prose and literary stylings of philosophers
It seems like Kant’s insistence that judgment precede pleasure or follow pleasure is a false dichotomy. Can they not be contemporaneous? This would actually position aesthetics uniquely as opposed to moral or conceptual judgments which soon render pleasure (especially judgments of the good).
Temporal synchronicity makes sense but leaves the logical ordering of the two unclear. Either the judgment is a judgment about the pleasure, or (less plausibly) we feel pleasure in light of the judgment, or they’re somehow one and the same thing (which makes no sense prima facie, but one could maybe deny that the pleasure here is purely a feeling, that all legitimate human emotions involve cognitive components, such as my feeling guilty or indignant involves a host of cognitive commitments and isn’t just a feeling), or they’re concurrent yet logically distinct, which sounds like really, there’s just the pleasure, and the judgment is an epiphenomenon that we attribute to the experience post facto (which after habit sets in becomes a matter of interpreting our feelings through this lens of judgment) because we feel the pretentious need to justify our feeling.
I think the two sentiments probably co-evolve within the physical brain, such that the brain chemicals/neurons that perform aesthetic judgments and those which derive pleasure from aesthetics overlap and/or feedback between each other.
I also think the two can be independent but meaningfully related – such as if both are triggered by a prior mental structure, such as some part of the visual cortex.
Obviously you can resolve some of the sequencing questions with sufficiently advanced neurology.
I also think the possibility that there’s something conceptual (or simply influenced by conceptual-level processes) about aesthetics should be considered seriously. I have a lot more respect (including beauty-finding) for Django Reinhardt’s music or the Seagram Building in NY as a result of my knowledge about them. I have gained the barest amount of respect (and beauty-finding) for Jackson Pollack as a result of learning more about him. Either I am very confused about beauty or Kant is.
It’s been about sixteen years since I’ve read this piece, but it seems to me that Kant is doing a lot of mental gymnastics to get around the subjective notion of informed refinement as it informs valuation of an object, and how that’s unavoidable. Basically, I think there’s some seriously essentialist notion of subjective “purity” at work here that Kant is attempting to shoehorn into the objective, thus making it universal to a certain extent. Which, really, comes off as a way of making apologetics for snobbery, while never really addressing the idea of subjective refinement of taste; that is, he’s attempting to equate subjective cultural refinement with nature. And though I understand that you guys make great efforts at making the most charitable interpretations of a given text as possible, I’d love to see a segment similar to Read It and Weep’s “King of Bullshit Mountain” segment when you encounter cognitive dissonance within a text. Maybe that wouldn’t be fair to the historicity of an 18th century text, but it would make for great entertainment.
So, I guess the question that I’d have from that would be, do you suppose that Kant is performing some bullshit mental gymnastics — id est, willful cognitive dissonance — to excuse elitist snobbery here?
Otha,
I see Kant addressing a very real aspect of experience–the way things can appear beautiful to us, and the ways in which this is both subjective or private and shared, public. Exhibiting a painting in a museum, or pointing to a view of nature for someone else to look at, both of these mean “I see something interesting that I think you will find interesting too.” Where does the interest lie, and why do we expect others to share it? The interest is not practical, e.g., “I think you will benefit from this.” And yet there is in the experience something interesting, fascinating, attractive. It is a playful, open-ended experience that seems to have no direct, conceptual basis and yet engages our concepts and thinking in a dynamic way. (Is there some conceptual basis for the beauty of a melody, a rule for beautiful music? Kant thinks not.) And when this playful engagement pleases us, we expect others to experience the same kind of engagement and pleasure–or else why point to a landscape or to a painting for others to see? Why play music for others to hear? I think these are the phenomenological aspects of experience that Kant is trying to make sense of. One might dispute this account of experience, but if not, then we can recognize that Kant is at least not making shit up just to finish his theory. He is trying to answer real questions emerging out of real, shared experiences. As for the way his answers relate to the rest of his philosophy, that’s a much bigger conversation.
You lads might appreciate this documentary by Roger Scruton on Why Beauty Matters
What struck me listening to your show is that it sounds like Kant is trying to make what is beautiful ‘correct’ such that if we all thought correctly we would probably find the same things beautiful. Maybe I misunderstood. But that is obviously problematic even if you did share identical sympathies in many regards as it depends on what time you lived in, what certain images/sounds were linked to in your life etc. A 13th century monk is not going to find much to admire in an Australian aborigine’s dot paintings I suspect.
Scruton is a classic case of a very conservative but humble philosopher raising something I think is often overlooked as to the purpose or at least a purpose of beauty and why a lot of what passes for art today is arguably harmful for our flourishing.
One thing that struck me listening to your excellent discussion of this was how the ideas in Kant’s Critique of Judgment might lie right on top of how Kierkegaard’s work is often described. Here is my understanding of what one might find in a “Kierkegaard for Dummies” summary regarding the three lives a person lives, moving from one kind of life to another through a “leap of faith.”
1. The aesthetic life consists of immediacy–the present, language-defying (except perhaps very imperfectly via poetry and other expressive art), beauty, intensely subjective, intuitive. You love yourself, you expect good immediately, and you strive with yourself and your perceptions.
2. The ethical life consists of the intersubjective–logical, language-based, sacrifice of self to the society, “rise above the self.” You love reason and universality (intersubjectively defined), you expect good sometime in the future (delayed gratification, if at all), and you strive with the world and the people in it.
3. The religious life, or the life of faith, is completely different. The individual rises above the (intersubjective) universal which places the “single individual in absolute relation to the absolute,” and this creates the paradox of faith. You love God, you expect the impossible, and you strive with God.
These descriptions seemed, to me, to line up quite nicely with the aesthetic, the beautiful, and the good as Kant delineated them. The middle suggests, perhaps, a way to approach the apparently paradoxical notion of a universal subjectivity — recast it as an ethical formulation, and expand the notion of “self” outward to encompass the community. A good example of this is the scientific community: the use of language and negotiated standards/metrics/peer-review-processes/etc. to develop a set of universals that can exist and be honored without the more-narrowly-defined self needing to derive aesthetic pleasure from them (though of course they could also do that as well). Criticism of those who “lack taste” can be re-cast ethically as anti-social behavior.
Good stuff. Still catching up!
I wish I weren’t late to this party! Good episode!
Why is the idea of purposiveness framed as – it seems like it’s meant for us to see it’s beauty or however you say that. It reminds me of the kind of “mindedness” the world has that you guys talked about with…..Sartre? It’s the idea that because we can take in certain things that there must be some quality that makes it like us. Why not the other way around? Why not say that we are designed in order to appreciate what is? Or that what we appreciate is a result of what something that is done by a like mind…or something like that? I’m sure this is a totally ridiculous question but – it seems like if you think that there is this mysterious purposiveness then it’s kind of self centered in a way. Like what I see and experience and think beautiful is all there is. I don’t know….I just don’t really understand that idea and why it’s so prevalent in philosophy.