A Few Kant Quotes


Newberry

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Matus, you right about my "talking down" to you about art history, I suppose. Sorry about that. Honestly, though, I think that if you want to argue about abstract art and Kant effectively you need to broaden things. And in my first reply to you I mentioned the late, unlamented Victor. Your comments about car crashes, your refusal to look at Gorky or Rothko or other abstract artists, and so on, do remind me of his approach to things.

Jim, Thanks for your sincere reply. I'll take your suggestion under consideration and I'll look at some of these artists - but honestly things which tend to be considered modern art I mostly dislike. I can appreciate a work of art on many different levels, Pollack's works definately have some fascinating complexity to them, and sometimes some rich variations of color.

pollack.gif

A recent article in Scientific American argued that Pollack's work comes close to emulating fractal like repetition of scale, where immitators do not (the author was hoping to use his program to determine if a recently found possible Pollack was actually an original)

Pollock or Not? Can Fractals Spot a Fake Masterpiece?

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=can-fr...ls-spot-genuine

That might have been the 'look' he was striving toward, without explicitly being aware of fractals. If that is true, that is a level of execution I can appreciate his work for. But he has no objectively discernable themes, and I can appreciate a computer generated win amp visualization just as much, or more, than a Pollack work.

I like H.R. Giger's work in it's execution and style, but I hate his themes which seem nihilistic and vile.

IOBANL-14-Nevermore-8-03.jpg

Same for many of Dali's works. I find Christus Hypercubus interesting because it captured some the mainstream fascination with hyperdimensional physics at that time. The cross Christ is crucified on is supposed to be a 3D shadow of a four dimensional hypercube.

image100.png

So one can appreciate and find value in art on many different levels, my list might be (in roughly descending order of importance)

Theme

language that theme is conveyed in (objective / non objective)

artists efficaciousness in conveying that theme

artists technical skill required to make the work

style

complexity (how easily could it be reduced to an algorithm)

richness or diversity in color

originality / uniqueness

scale

historical context

I would be interested in hearing what others judge works of art on. The works of art typically considered 'objectivist' - classical like romantic with exquisite skill and superlative execution conveying good themes objectively with originality, etc - routinely completely capture me and tremendously move me and certainly give me that sublime feeling (without the horror) I recently traveled to San Francisco and visited the Quent Cordair fine art museum, it was my favorite part of the trip and I spent hours in there. I've never experienced anything remotely like that staring at any piece of modern art. If I did, I can only surmise it would require I internalized and embellished a whimsical valuation of 'art' that has little to do with anything I can rationally identify (transcending sense)

With regard to creativity, I remember N Branden saying something like the following in '72 or '73: "It's not particularly difficult to have creative ideas. But, making something of your ideas is very hard." And the great architect, Mies van der Rohe, said, "I don't want to be great, I want to be good." In other words, many, many people can sit around sparking off ideas all day, like the conceptualist/dada piece in your posting, but making something of it and really building your ideas into something is the real job. And that's why Wright concentrated on the Prairie Houses for 25 long years, and Braque and Picasso worked on analytical cubism for 7 years with very little obvious variation.

Jim Shay

I completely agree, as I think anyone involved in a creative endeavor would. That is, unless you embrace a mysical notion of the source of your inspiration. Again, these artists (writers, painters, whatever) immerse themselves in a sort of seance like 'automatic writing' they are not cultivating and productively refining a particular good idea over a long time with expertise which is what tends to resul in a superlatively executed work.

Edited by Matus1976
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Matus, I read the Pollack article. I have a fascination with fakes, as well as a number of books about them. It seems the fractal analysis has spoiled the party. I was hoping they were real. A painter in NYC, Bildo is his last name, painted a fake Pollack that fooled Clem Greenberg, Pollack's champion as a critic. It sold for $8500 20 years ago. A lot less that $140M recently paid for a real one. I understand what you say about the connection between Pollack and science, as well as between Dali and science, but it's not what moves me in art. Perhaps, though, "something in the air" at the time both the science and the art were done, was shared by them.

Pollack's paintings are monotonous to me. He's a mediocre colorist and his paintings never change density across their surfaces. I love some of the other abstract expressionists, though - Gorky, Kline, Still and others. Tom Wolfe analyzed their work in terms of space and decided that, when looking at them, one could imagine flying a spaceship through them. Maybe that experience could them a little less repulsive to you. It works with Kandinsky, too.

I like Dali. He was a terrific painter. I wonder about the tie-ins you mention regarding science. I suppose there's something to it, but it's not at all why I like him or Pollack or anyone else.

I've been to Quent Cordair twice, trying mightily to "get" it. Alas, I feel next to nothing for the art there. To me it's practically empty of the emotions I like in art. The paintings feel "contented" and sort of dreamy. They do portray a rational universe very well, I guess, although I think Mondrian did the same, only in more depth and with more excitement. I know you read the Quent Cordair paintings in ways that never occur to me. They're very well executed and do portray the values you listed as important to you.

From your list and the paintings shown I now have a much better idea of where your coming from. Thanks. I can't respond to your query about listing what I like in art, but I can list who I like. Here is a very abbreviated list, beginning 32,000 years ago and going to the present. The asterisks list my top 5, if I had to pick.

The cave painters of Spain, and some of them in France *

The painters of the Villa of the Mysteries, in Pompeii

Pierro della Francesca*

Antonello(a?) da Messina

Japanese screen painters circa 1500

Sanchez Cotan

Degas

Picasso

Braque*

de Chirico, 1906 to 1920

Malevich

Bonnard*

Morris Louis*

Richard Diebenkorn

Odd Nerdrum

Peter Halley

I'm far from N Branden's biggest fan, but I agree with him that there's a lot of emotional repression in Objectivism. I think it exists in a lot of the art some objectivists profess to love. Not in the romantic painters, so much, but definitely in the Quent Cordair work. To me, the temperature in those paintings is really cool, by and large. Perhaps you can enlighten me? As welcome an antidote as it may be to the crushing pessimism in most contemporary visual art, there's so much left out. Still, the art in the gallery is as respectful a kind of art as I have ever seen to a certain kind of goodness in humanity.

Jim

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Matus,

A few quick points:

On the issue of estimating an "object of fear" without fear, Kant and other thinkers of his time were referring to the fact that the object excites a sense of fear without actually being threatening. In other words, we view the object from a position of safety -- we know that we are not in imminent danger. If you think that feeling fear when viewing something like a gorge is due to a 17th or 18th century mindset, and not something that you'd feel as a modern person, then perhaps amusement park rides, like a very high roller coaster or Turbo Drop tower, might be something that you'd identify with as allowing you to feel a sense of "delightful terror" while recoginizing that you're actually safe. Do you see how the effects that such an "object of fear" might have on you could be judged "without fear," that your estimate of the experience could be above the fear (that is, assuming that you don't believe that anyone who enjoys the "delightful terror" of a Turbo Drop must have "mental problems")?

As for the issue of war, in the quote that I provided, Kant lists it as an evil, along with the Furies and diseases. Do you think that he also thought that the Furies and diseases, as evils, were "good," along with war?

In his comments on war, Kant is talking about aesthetic judgments, not moral ones. He is basically saying that grand conflict is more aesthetically powerful than everyday peace, that a sense of heroism, of feeling oneself to be above a thing of immense power or magnitude is more aesthetically pleasing or inspiring than feeling merely contented: A diplomat discussing positive revenue projections is less aesthetically satisfying than a warrior undaunted in the face of great dangers; tales of the daily business dealings of the well-fed folks next door are not as aesthetically satisfying as the tales of someone who displays great courage against powerful adversaries.

Shortly after 9/11, I heard several pundits talking about the fact that the attacks had brought the people of the U.S. together, that people had set aside their differences and felt a sense of unity and patriotism, which were good things. They saw a new spirit in America that resulted from the terrorist attacks. Do you think that the pundits therefore thought that "terrorism is good"?

Years ago I had a heart wrenching conversation with a female acquaintance who had been raped a few of years earlier. After telling me her story she mentioned that the ordeal had made her stronger. If you had been there, would you have been disgusted because you thought that she felt that rape was good and that all women should be raped because it would make them stronger?

Beyond the comments above, I'm not much interested in continuing the discussion with you. We're covering the same ground, and I feel like I'd be explaining how you've misinterpreted my last explanation of how you misinterpreted my previous explanation, etc., and I get the impression that you're not even reading and comprehending the information that you post, let alone the stuff that I do.

If you're seriously interested in these ideas about beauty and the sublime, I think that you should actually read the works of Kant, Burke, Shaftesbury, Longinus, etc., and supplement them by reading expert analysis on those thinkers and some art history as well (preferably written by non-Objectivists). I really don't have the interest or energy to try to deal with the web of confusions and misrepresentations that you've spun based on your not having read the thinkers we're discussing, and based on your apparent zeal for defending some notion of what "sublime" should mean.

Speaking of which, though, I would still be interested in hearing details of your theory of the sublime. You say that it's the "highest form of beauty," yet you still haven't defined beauty or explained precisely what you mean by its having a highest form. (By which standards is something beautiful, and by which standards does something of beauty qualify as an example of beauty's "highest form" -- high enough in beauty to be called "sublime"? Can you give some examples of borderline cases -- works of art which are highly beautiful, but just barely not quite beautiful enough to qualify as "sublime"? And can you explain the need to take a modern layman's usage of "sublime" and impose it on philosophy, where it has had a different and more specific meaning for centuries? What purpose is there in making "sublime" basically mean the same thing as "beauty"? Should we also impose other layman's usages on philosophy? Perhaps we should insist that "metaphysical" should mean nothing more than "abstruse, difficult to understand, recondite," because that's the most common layman's version of it, rather than "pertaining to the study of the nature of existence"?)

J

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I can't respond to your query about listing what I like in art, but I can list who I like. Here is a very abbreviated list, beginning 32,000 years ago and going to the present. The asterisks list my top 5, if I had to pick.

The cave painters of Spain, and some of them in France *

The painters of the Villa of the Mysteries, in Pompeii

Pierro della Francesca*

Antonello(a?) da Messina

Japanese screen painters circa 1500

Sanchez Cotan

Degas

Picasso

Braque*

de Chirico, 1906 to 1920

Malevich

Bonnard*

Morris Louis*

Richard Diebenkorn

Odd Nerdrum

Peter Halley

A couple of weeks ago I was spellbound by a painting by Nerdrum at the Gehry-designed Weisman Museum. Very Rembrandtish in color and brushwork.

While I was there I roughly sketched the interior of the museum's face which I've heard Objectivists falsely claim has no relation to the exterior forms. I'll post scans if I can find the time to clean up the drawings a little first.

J

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[...] English sentences are not the same as formal logic. Example: "he did not die while the doctor had made a mistake [but while he was poisoned]" [...].

I have to laugh. That isn't an English sentence.

"While" sounds somewhat like the German word "weil", which means "because". But "while" is like the German "während", except that in English, "while" is used only as a conjunction and not as a preposition ("during" is the corresponding preposition). In that case German fails to make the preposition/conjunction distinction that English makes, but then there's also a case where it's the other way around: the German words "vor" and "bevor" both correspond to English "before", except that "vor" is only a preposition and "bevor" is only a conjuction.

(And while we're remembering not to be deceived by such resemblances, let's recall that German "Gift", spelled and pronounced exactly like English "gift" (but always with a capital initial "G" since it's a noun) means something quite different.)

You all wanted to know this. Right? -- Mike Hardy

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[...] English sentences are not the same as formal logic. Example: "he did not die while the doctor had made a mistake [but while he was poisoned]" [...].

I have to laugh. That isn't an English sentence.

"While" sounds somewhat like the German word "weil", which means "because". But "while" is like the German "während", except that in English, "while" is used only as a conjunction and not as a preposition ("during" is the corresponding preposition). In that case German fails to make the preposition/conjunction distinction that English makes, but then there's also a case where it's the other way around: the German words "vor" and "bevor" both correspond to English "before", except that "vor" is only a preposition and "bevor" is only a conjuction.

(And while we're remembering not to be deceived by such resemblances, let's recall that German "Gift", spelled and pronounced exactly like English "gift" (but always with a capital initial "G" since it's a noun) means something quite different.)

You all wanted to know this. Right? -- Mike Hardy

Most grammer, like most speling, is tyraney, tyraney of the teachars! Mike reins expert supreem in a field of non-arbitrary arbitrary constructs constructed to in hance state power through the DOE! Make a choice, Mike! Anacrist or control freek!? (Just jellousy.)

--Brant

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"While" sounds somewhat like the German word "weil", which means "because".

You're right, I have confused the English word with the German almost-homonym.

Is "because" what you always mean when you use "while"? I've often noticed that "because," judging from the context, seems to be what you mean, but there are times when just substituting "because" for "while" in your sentence doesn't seem to work.

For example, consider the sentence about mathematics which I quoted from your post #269:

"It is in mathematics that you cannot state that something is true only while you haven't found yet evidence that falsifies the statement."

I first tried substituting "because" for "while," but I didn't think you'd consider not yet having found falsifying evidence sufficient for considering a scientific statement true. (You were contrasting science and mathematics.) So then I thought that what you probably meant was "as long as" instead of "only while." (But then that had problems, too, as I was trying to point out.)

I tried to search your posts for the word "while" to find other examples, but the search function apparently won't work for conjunctions (or for prepositions, pronouns, and articles; not finding any results for "while," I became curious and tested further to see if a sampling of other words in those categories gave search results).

Ellen

___

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I can't respond to your query about listing what I like in art, but I can list who I like. Here is a very abbreviated list, beginning 32,000 years ago and going to the present. The asterisks list my top 5, if I had to pick.

The cave painters of Spain, and some of them in France *

The painters of the Villa of the Mysteries, in Pompeii

Pierro della Francesca*

Antonello(a?) da Messina

Japanese screen painters circa 1500

Sanchez Cotan

Degas

Picasso

Braque*

de Chirico, 1906 to 1920

Malevich

Bonnard*

Morris Louis*

Richard Diebenkorn

Odd Nerdrum

Peter Halley

A couple of weeks ago I was spellbound by a painting by Nerdrum at the Gehry-designed Weisman Museum. Very Rembrandtish in color and brushwork.

While I was there I roughly sketched the interior of the museum's face which I've heard Objectivists falsely claim has no relation to the exterior forms. I'll post scans if I can find the time to clean up the drawings a little first.

J

Jonathan,

I'm glad you mentioned Odd Nerdrum. In the spirit of providing artists' first-hand thoughts on the debate here about the roots of modernism and the rejection of the figurative tradition as seen in 19th Century Romanticism, below is a quote in which Nerdrum traces the "problems with modernism", in his view, back to Plato, way beyond Kant.

"Plato, the great-great-grandfather of Modernism, speaks with contempt of "Mimesis" - the imitation of nature. Ideas, and the one, single truth, is the only good and the only beauty, which is also what Christianity based its world view upon. Everything else is evil. Aristotle picked ""Mimesis" up from the ground and made the word shine again. For many hundreds of years, craftmanship was also a part of the concept of "Art". This is no longer the case. Only ideas count. And the predominant art world has been brutally uniform, either you go along or you are out. All the cultures existing as remains from the past have been badly treated. But, one should bear in mind that even the Renaissance grew out of such a reminiscence, almost obliterated by the authoritarian Middle Ages."

So, perhaps we can trace the roots of modernism back to Plato. I think Ayn Rand would like that. Perhaps this aligns with Matus' thinking, too.

As I've said here before, I'm a big fan of a lot of modernism. Jim

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Most grammer, like most speling, is tyraney, tyraney of the teachars! Mike reins expert supreem in a field of non-arbitrary arbitrary constructs constructed to in hance state power through the DOE! Make a choice, Mike! Anacrist or control freek!? (Just jellousy.)

--Brant

OK, now I'm trying to figure out whether "Anacrist" means "anti-Christ" or "anarchist"......

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Most grammer, like most speling, is tyraney, tyraney of the teachars! Mike reins expert supreem in a field of non-arbitrary arbitrary constructs constructed to in hance state power through the DOE! Make a choice, Mike! Anacrist or control freek!? (Just jellousy.)

--Brant

OK, now I'm trying to figure out whether "Anacrist" means "anti-Christ" or "anarchist"......

Both! you cognative foolish purveyor of precisionist absolutas! Don't you see the comunicative flaxibility of sloppy langauge? With ONE word I gave you TWO conceptuals!

--Brant

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  • 1 year later...

I'm reading Paul Guyer's Kant, and I thought that these passages (from pages 310 and 311) might be of interest to some on OL:

...Kant now emphasizes that we are sensuous as well as rational creatures, and therefore need sensuous as well as rational presentation and confirmation of the conditions of the possibility of morality. He explicitly acknowledges this three years after the Critique of the Power of Judgment, when in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason he asserts "the natural need of all human beings to demand for even the highest concepts and grounds of reason something that the senses can hold on to, some confirmation from experience or the like" (RBMR, 6:109). In Kant's mind, the deepest connection between aesthetic and teleological experience and judgment is that both give us sensuous images of morality and a feeling of its achievability that can supplement and strengthen our purely — but also merely — rational insight into its demands and the possibility of our fulfilling them.

...Kant's interest in aesthetic phenomena is precisely his view that the freedom of the imagination that we experience in our encounter with beautiful objects can give us a feeling of the reality of the freedom of the will that we can only postulate within purely moral reasoning, and the natural existence of beauty can give us a feeling that nature is hospitable to the achievement of our moral goals as well, again something we can only postulate in the moral theory of the highest good — aesthetic feelings with an emotional impact that can support the effect of pure reason upon our sensible side.

J

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As long as I'm typing from Guyer's Kant, here's Guyer (from pages 294-5) on Kant on war (which underscores the futility of trying to divine a philosopher's ethics or politics from an aspect of a part of segment of his aesthetics):

We cannont leave Kant's political philosophy without discussing his 1795 pamphlet Toward Perpetual Peace...

...Kant first writes that even in a condition of warfare among any kinds of states there are certain "preliminary articles" that can eliminate causes of future wars, such as the prohibition of dynastic acquisition of states, standing armies, national debts for making war, "forcible interference in the constitution and government of another state," and "acts of hostility as would have to make mutual trust impossible during a future peace," such as assassinations, encouragement of treason within another state, and so on (PP, 8:344-6). But in the long run, Kant holds that there can only be perpetual peace if all states become republics governed by the will of the whole people rather than by the whims of autocrats, especially, as is already implicit in the first preliminary article, autocrats who regard whole states as their personal property, which can be enlarged or put at risk entirely at their own choice.

The three "definitive articles" for perpetual peace are thus that "The civil constitution in every state shall be repubican" (PP, 8:349), that "The right of nations shall be based on a federalism of free states" (8:354), and that there shall be "Cosmopolitan right" consisting in "conditions of universal hospitality" (8:358). Under the last of these articles Kant launches a powerful attack upon the rampant European colonialism of his own time, arguing that no matter what the cultural and political conditions of another region are, foreigners have no more than the right to visit in order to offer their goods and ideas, never a right to establish themselves forcibly in another people's territory no matter how exalted or crass their aims may be.

(p. 363):

...As Kant famously writes:

When the consent of the citizens of a state is required in order to decide whether there shall be war or not (and it cannot be otherwise in [the republican] constitution), nothing is more natural than that they will be very hesitant to begin such a bad game, since they would have to take upon themselves all the hardships of war (such as themselves doing the fighting and paying the costs of the war from their own belongings...); on the other hand, under a constitution in which subjects are not citizens of the state, which is therefore not republican, [deciding upon war] is the easiest thing in the world; because the head of state is not a member of the state but its proprietor and gives up nothing at all of his feasts, hunts, pleasure palaces, court festivals, and so forth he can decide upon war, as upon a kind of pleasure party, for insignificant cause. (PP,8:350)

J

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  • 4 years later...

Ellen:

This is the best I can do -- not much help, I'm afraid. ;-)

Ellen, I found your reply brilliant.
Blush. Thank you.

Perhaps I can solve a kind of puzzle. I view Kant's theories of sublime in art evil, based on what I know. But I don't expect anyone to hold my opinion unless they understand PM art and Kant's aesthetics in the same or similar way as I do. Since there is no physical evil involved, it is not a case for a court of law. Undoubtedly psychological evil is a whole other ballgame. In a way I find no contradiction that I can hold those ideas evil and others do not.

That does "solve a kind of puzzle." I understand what you're saying. I can think of similar issues where I see horrible consequences of some theoretic viewpoint and others don't see what I see and I don't expect them to see what I see, since they haven't my context of perspective.Ellen___

Ellen, going back through some threads, in doing so I am again impressed by your thoughtfulness.

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  • 3 years later...

Below is my recently published piece on Kant’s concepts of the sublime. What is new is a better context though I think my original premises still hold true. 

Making Sense of Kant's Senseless Sublime

In the last decade of the 18th century Beethoven composed his 1st and 2nd piano concertos, Goya etched the series Los Caprichos, Jacques-Louis David painted The Death of Marat, and Mozart composed the Requiem in D Minor and the great Jupiter Symphony. These works coincided with the French Revolution, and together they guided European culture away from the extravagant art of Rococo exemplified by the sweetly-colored paintings of Boucher and Tiepolo, with their floating florid nymphs, cupids, silks, and princesses.

KantArticle2

Jacques-Louis David, Death of Marat, 1793. The period of the French Revolution marked a new period of art with more gravitas.

 

This was a paradigm shift from the superficial to gut wrenching passion, as if Western art was going back to its roots in the dramas of Aeschylus and Euripides; answering the big questions of what is the good and what is important while at the same time elevating the creative process by innovation and superlative skill. This wasn't for the faint of heart. The artists would have to face inner turmoil and outer rejection as they attempted to get patrons to sponsor wildly dramatic depictions of death, war, and executions, which didn’t lend themselves to the decorative palace dining room.  Risking their livelihoods the artists bore down in this new direction. With this revolutionary spirit we can see the need for a new aesthetic to champion and reflect an Age of Enlightenment.

The Sublime the Absolutely Great

The year 1790, when Beethoven was 20, also marked the publication of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment. It famously compares and contrasts the aesthetic values of Beauty with that of the Sublime. The treatise identifies Beauty representing the lighter more sensual pleasing side and the Sublime addressing what is the "absolutely great beyond all comparison." Kant wanted to free the Sublime from the constraints of art and launch it into the world of the mind unfettered by perception, form, or realization.

Kant: “Perhaps there is no sublimer passage in the Jewish Law than the command, ‘Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image, nor the likeness of anything which is in heaven or on the earth or under the earth. . . . ’”

J. H. Bernard, the translator of the 1914 edition and whose quotes on Kant we are using, summarizes Kant's Sublime: "Nothing in nature is sublime; and the sublimity really resides in the mind and there alone. Indeed, as true Beauty is found, properly speaking, only in beauty of form, the idea of sublimity is excited rather by those objects which are formless and exhibit a violation of purpose."

With an abundance of confidence Kant offered powerful arguments and moral righteousness to face painful choices and lead to a new era of the great unknown.

Pain

An interesting association that Kant attaches to the Sublime is that it inflicts spiritual/mental pain: "The quality of the feeling of the Sublime is that it is a feeling of pain in reference to the faculty by which we judge aesthetically of an object, which pain, however, is represented at the same time as purposive." ...Read more follow the link below:

https://atlassociety.org/commentary/commentary-blog/6225-making-sense-of-kant-s-senseless-sublime

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15 hours ago, Newberry said:

Duchamp's urinal is an example of Kant's Sublime?  OMG.

Did you actually read any of the material at the Tate site you linked to? 

Are you actually trying to make a cogent argument about Kant's views?  There are chimpanzees at typewriters hoping to reproduce Shakespeare.  Try and catch up.

 

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Linked photo sends you to the Tate museum's web project on the 'Sublime'

20 hours ago, Newberry said:

...

2068_10.jpg

Edited by william.scherk
Added front-porch sign to highlight the reading at Michael Newberry's link/cite (from his Op-Ed); click-and-go
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The Sublime, always fun! But so complicated in explanation. (e.g. the Tate site). And amazing, the associations you can pick up in a word. The man said it above, it doesn't exist in nature, it is all in our heads. But more to the point, can the Sublime exist in the art -of- Nature? In the hands of a master, of course, overpowering (etc., etc.) emotions will be evoked by such-n-such a grand subject, stylized with great talent. If the artist's motivation was inspired by notions of "the Sublime", well that's fine. In the end, there are exultant/terrifying themes presented in the work ... and then, in our heads. We need to steer out of Kant's reach and retake the Sublime as the significant, personal and real emotional cause it is, I think. "I have found it necessary to de-mystify the Sublime in order to raise it" - Kant might have said. (He didn't and wouldn't).

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Newberry's stubborn idiocy is astonishing. He's been corrected multiple times in multiple ways over multiple years, but still clings to his ridiculous, Rand-inspired/demented need to vilify Kant via a concept -- the Sublime -- that Kant didn't even invent, and a concept which encapsulates Ayn Rand's signature aesthetic style. Her art IS the Kantain Sublime (though she was ignorant enough to not be aware of it). Newberry's need to vilify Kant, so that he can feel himself as being exalted above the imagined destructive magnitude of Kant's influence, is also an example of the Kantian Sublime, and a confirmation of Newberry's craving it, adoring it, and practicing it. The same is true of Rand's other bleating little lamb here, Tony. Morons both. Proudly, willfully stupid.

Ha. Newbsie says that he is fighting for the "real Sublime," whatever he imagines that to be. And the Atlas Society is publishing his heroic screeds. The blind leading the blind again. Just like when Stephen Hicks tarnished himself by believing Newbsie's stupidity, rather than treating the subject of the Sublime with scholarly seriousness.

Intellectual self-immolation at its finest!

J

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  • 3 months later...

Newbsie has a recent piece:

https://www.poetsandartists.com/magazine/2018/9/1/facing-the-postmodern-art-world-1

The title isn't quite accurate. The article's theme is actually "Me, me, me..."

One very cool thing about it, though, is that the piece doesn't mention Kant!!!

Can you believe it? Could it be that our little Newbsie is learning, if even only slightly and very slowly?!!!

Seriously, here we have a snarly pissfest from Newbsie about his twisted notion of "postmodernism," but which doesn't blame Kant from Newbsie's standard, willfully wrongheaded, Rand-inspired/demented, dipshit misinterpretation/blaming of Kant!!! It's effing astonishing!!!

J

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