[Newberry]

Every affection of the STRENUOUS TYPE (such, that is, as excites the
consciousness of our power of overcoming every resistance [animus
strenuus]) is aesthetically sublime, e.g., anger, even desperation
(the rage of forlorn hope but not faint-hearted despair). [Emphasis in the original]

The Critique of Judgement by Immanuel Kant, translated by James Creed Meredith

This post has been edited by Newberry: 12 July 2008 - 06:16 PM

[Newberry]

Philip Coates, on Jul 18 2008, 10:52 PM, said:

Michael, this is one of your best posts that I can recall: Very clear, clean, logical!!

Thank you!!!

You've laid out perhaps even more clearly (or at least showing all the steps) Rand's and Peikoff's point that "Kant was too smart not to know. He attacked values, civilization, etc. deliberately and cleverly."

If you said this analysis of motives was –absolutely certain- as R & P did, it would be psychologizing.

But you are apparently? offering it as an interesting hypothesis. I don't know enough to know if it is a valid hypothesis, but I find your explanation of it more plausible than I recall doing when Rand and/or Peikoff gave it as a certainty (the 'most evil man', etc.)

(I still think it would be possible that he was inconsistent and contradictory, as so many people are. Part of him an advocate of the enlightenment and even classical liberalism. And part of him an advocate of dark ages mysticism, etc.)

Hey Phil,

Thank you. It is quite a compliment coming from you.

You are right about the psychologizing part, and yes, I was trying to show it as a hypothesis.

Reading the reactions to the Kant's quotes set off a light bulb, hence the post.

Michael

This post has been edited by Newberry: 19 July 2008 - 06:23 AM

[Newberry]

Michael Stuart Kelly, on Jul 19 2008, 07:33 AM, said:

Newberry, on Jul 18 2008, 09:30 PM, said:

MSK has been deflected to comparing Rand to the Nazis.

Michael,

This is going to be a very painful post because I started thinking seriously of making a total retraction, then started mulling it over, then it got complicated. Total retraction would not be accurate, so at least I want to make a partial retraction.

Let's unpack this first, though. When you say "compare Rand to the Nazis," I think you are aware of how loaded that sounds.
Michael

Oh Michael, it cannot sound any more loaded than this: "Rand scapegoated Kant just as surely as Hitler scapegoated the Jews." But, the absurdity of this analogy was not my point. It was how successful Kant's language is in getting people off his back, and getting them to look for the culprit elsewhere. I think you fell for his trap.

Michael

[Philip Coates]

**presumption of innocence and good faith**

William, thanks for your insights in your post. I agree with one or two and disagree with one or two.

1. > defensiveness under criticism, difficulty in admitting error. [WSS]

I think you’re assuming that both MSK and myself really know we are wrong on some level of a particular issue and won’t acknowledge it. Why not presume one really believes what he is arguing for? Several examples:

--when I say someone is playing ‘gotcha’, I think it can be a bad method unproductive of good discussion to just wait to pounce on any error from someone you want to take down a peg, even if it is nitpicking or trivial or a side issue. But I don’t assume the person doeesn’t believe the nit to not really exist or has zero concern for the facts or is necessarily doing it out of revenge.

--when someone argues that Rand had feet of clay and the opponent argues that she was perfect, or someone argues that Kant was a monster and the opponent argues that he was contradictory and had some good points, why not grant the presumption of intellectual innocence and integrity, that in each case –-- no matter how stupid, or tone deaf, or blind to a piece of evidence, or sloppy in scholarship someone seems to be, or how outraged you are at their point of view ---- the person really strongly believes what they are saying?

2. > Now as for your disquiet at some ad hominem, why compound and extend the apparent error with a slashback?... unseemly squabbling.

Point taken. After I expressed my objection and position briefly (I don’t know if that’s a ‘slashback’), I shouldn’t continue harping on it.

3. > I don't see anything wrong with wondering psychologically why people act the way they do, but I don't always have to utter the wonderment or reach public conclusions -- not when I want a reasonably civil future discussion with the person I wonder about.

Very well put.

As well as the point about public denunciation or public conclusions if you want good ongoing relations, I think your use of the word ‘wondering’ is a good one. That’s the key difference between *psychologizing* (assuming there is only one possible explanation of behavior inside someone’s head – honest error vs. dishonesty vs. evasion vs. defensiveness for example) and *speculating* (let’s see, someone could be dishonest or simply have a blind spot or not able or ready to see an error, etc., etc...it seems more likely it is this one based on this other evidence...).

There’s also the issue of benefit of the doubt in the presumption of innocence and good faith -- but that would require another post. It’s all a subcategory (a very important one for one’s relations with people) under the very wide topic of benevolence.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Newberry, on Jul 19 2008, 07:40 AM, said:

But, the absurdity of this analogy was not my point. It was how successful Kant's language is in getting people off his back, and getting them to look for the culprit elsewhere. I think you fell for his trap.

Michael,

Clever, but no cigar. I didn't fall into Kant's trap and, no, this is not proof that he is the most evil human being who ever lived or that he has some kind of almost supernatural efficacy at penetrating people's souls and corrupting them.

I don't know if it was clear, but I loathe scapegoating, regardless of who does it. I used rhetorical excess to emphasize that and went overboard. It had nothing to do with Kant's ideas.

I don't know if he ever discussed scapegoating.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

The trick is to say "I don't agree" (and explain and go on), not to write endless lenghty posts complaining about people who don't do it or see it one's way. Be primarily unto one's self. Otherwise it's not so much about the ideas as (ineffectively) channeling and controlling. I'm 64 years old and if I, for instance, decide for whatever reason sufficient to me, to write a digression from a thread within a thread I'm simply going to do it and there's no point complaining about it, at least regarding what I personally will do the next time; I'll do it again if I want. The best and right thing then for anyone who takes exception is to simply say, "Oh, that's just Brant being Brant" (Or Phil being Phil) and staying with what one wants to stay with.

--Brant

This post has been edited by Brant Gaede: 19 July 2008 - 03:25 PM

[Newberry]

Phil:

Quote

--when someone argues that Rand had feet of clay and the opponent argues that she was perfect, or someone argues that Kant was a monster and the opponent argues that he was contradictory and had some good points, why not grant the presumption of intellectual innocence and integrity, that in each case –-- no matter how stupid, or tone deaf, or blind to a piece of evidence, or sloppy in scholarship someone seems to be, or how outraged you are at their point of view ---- the person really strongly believes what they are saying?

Well said Phil.

I really hope that the Objectivist movement can grow in this manner.

[Bill P]

Newberry, on Jul 20 2008, 06:44 AM, said:

Phil:

Quote

--when someone argues that Rand had feet of clay and the opponent argues that she was perfect, or someone argues that Kant was a monster and the opponent argues that he was contradictory and had some good points, why not grant the presumption of intellectual innocence and integrity, that in each case –-- no matter how stupid, or tone deaf, or blind to a piece of evidence, or sloppy in scholarship someone seems to be, or how outraged you are at their point of view ---- the person really strongly believes what they are saying?

Well said Phil.

I really hope that the Objectivist movement can grow in this manner.

Michael -

Ah, yes. Imagine another sequence of events, with the response to the Kelley Libertarian Supper Club being very different. Perhaps with a sharp exchange of opinions, but no separation, no need to condemn individuals, or to label ideas as evil.

With the "closed system" thesis having been rejected by people taking into account Rand's own expectation that others would ADD TO Objectivism.

With the archives open for study --- digitized, online.

With no airbrushing to remove the purged and thereby deny reality.

Perhaps we can go forward now. Some of the recovery will await the next generation.

Bill P (Alfonso)

[Jonathan]

Newberry, on Jul 18 2008, 08:06 PM, said:

You ask that rhetorically.

That's a good example of you not giving a straight answer.

But, no, I was not asking the question rhetorically. As often as I've seen you praise and promote the idea of the grandeur of your soul while pondering the inferiority of others', I don't think it's unreasonable of me to assume that when you say that you and I have fundamental differences in our "cores," you mean that I see your non-straight answers to my questions as non-straight answers because a person with a soul as deficient as mine naturally can't grasp the ideas of someone who has a soul as pure and wonderful as yours.

Newberry, on Jul 18 2008, 08:06 PM, said:

Could you perhaps ask the question in a kinder way?

Would my doing so get me a straight answer from you?

Newberry, on Jul 18 2008, 08:06 PM, said:

I am guessing your reply is in the negative, that you do think that the essence/core of someone can be taught.

I don't know what you mean by someone's "essence/core," which is why I was asking for clarification.

You brought up the idea of differences in people's "cores" as an explanation of why your non-straight answers appear to be non-straight answers to me, which would imply that you think that your non-straight answers are actually straight answers, but only to people who have "cores" similar to yours.

Before agreeing or disagreeing with your views on essences and cores, I'd need to know more about them, such as how much of your own behavior you believe that you can't control -- which types of things can't you learn or unlearn -- due to their being impeded by your core. I mentioned the specific example of your believing that you had gotten a clear perspective on me and my tastes in art by looking at a painting that someone else had posted but that I hadn't commented on. Is making such idiotic assertions something that you can be taught not to do, or do you believe that it's one of the unteachable, unreachable aspects of your "core"?

J

[Jonathan]

Here's an interesting segment from Michelle Marder Kamhi's What "Rand's Aesthetics" Is, and Why It Matters, from the Spring, 2003 issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, pages 415 and 416:

Quote

Immanuel Kant's influential Critique of Judgment tended to shift the focus of aesthetics to more general questions of beauty and taste, relating them not only to the fine arts but also to other artifacts and to Nature as well. In doing so, he pursued concerns that had occupied British philosophers such as Lord Shaftesbury, Frances Hutcheson, and David Hume. Kant's most frequently quoted aesthetic dicta -- regarding beauty's "purposiveness without purpose," its "freedom from a concept," and the "disinterestedness" of aesthetic judgments -- pertain to sections of the Critique dealing with beauty and taste in general, not with art per se. As Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer ([1982] 1989, 309-10) have observed, these sections "are directed at objects of nature [not art], and this has made it singularly difficult for contemporary theorists to assimilate Kant's work, for they have read these passages as it Kant was talking about art. Only very recently has the philosophy of art begun to ... integrate Kant's actual insights about art."

Often overlooked in philosophic discussions of aesthetics has been the fact that in the sections of the Critique (43-53) in which Kant deals specifically with the (fine) arts, he observes, in part, that the value of a work depends not simply on its "beauty" but on its presenting what he terms "aesthetic Ideas" ([1790] 1957, 392-94). He seems to mean by this expression something like perceptual embodiments of important concepts -- much as Rand ([1965b] 1975, 20) holds that, through the "selective re-creation of reality," art "brings man's concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly, as if they were percepts." In Kant's words:

by an aesthetical Idea I understand that representations of the Imagination which ... cannot be completely compassed ... by language ... [and] is the counterpart (pendant) of a rational Idea ... The Imagination (as a productive faculty of cognition) is very powerful in creating another nature, as it were, out of the material that actual nature gives it ... ,and by it we remould experience, always in accordance with analogical laws ... Such representations of the Imagination we may call Ideas, partly because they at least strive after something which lies beyond the bounds of experience, and so seek to approximate to presentation of concepts of Reason (intellectual Ideas), thus giving to the latter the appearance of objective reality.6 ([1790] 1957, 426)

Although Kant included both Nature and art in his aesthetic considerations in the Critique of Judgment, therefore, it is clear that he viewed the two spheres as governed by somewhat different principles. And contrary to the implications of his propositions regarding beauty in general, his view of art seems to have incorporated a cognitive function similar to that postulated by Baumgarten. Much like Rand, for example, Kant distinguishes (44) between merely "agreeable art" (she called it "decorative") -- which functioned on the level of immediate "sensations" -- and "fine art," which served to stimulate reflective thought. Such crucial distinctions have too often been ignored by both critics and aestheticians."

-----

Kant's discussion of the pleasant, the good, the beautiful and the sublime also pertains to sections of the Critique dealing with taste in general, not with art per se.

J

[Ellen Stuttle]

Michael Newberry,

I'd like to say something in particular addressed to you about the issue of Kant, and his "evil," and your hypothesis -- presented in your post #129.

I don't think that your hypothesis is correct. I don't think that Kant was out to destroy anything. I think that his over-arching goal was to save something which he felt was threatened. (See my post #134.)

But I'm terribly reluctant to try to dispute issues of Kant with you in particular, given that you've said that you've carefully studied Kant's writings on aesthethics and that views you've come to in your studies and thinking about what he wrote are important to your own approach to art.

I have a highly squeamish feeling about arguing with an artist about anything close to that artist's sources of inspiration. I'm so well aware of how delicate those sources are. I feel intensely reluctant to pose challenges when those sources are so obviously working.

I'll remind you of a comment I made earlier about Ayn Rand, on the initial Schipperheyn thread:

Ellen Stuttle, on Oct 21 2007, 08:03 PM, said:

The "Catch 22" to the thought experiment is that she wouldn't have been Rand if she'd done that. It's like asking her to have been two different people. The dramatic contrasts of good and evil were so much part of her dramatic power. I don't think she could have written the way she wrote (and I mean her novels, too, not just her non-fiction) if she'd viewed the history of thought in the way you suggest.

(The "thought experiment" to which I was referring had been posed by Phil, here.)

You applauded my observation about AR, saying:

Newberry, on Oct 22 2007, 01:30 AM, said:

Ellen,

This is such a great observation.

Michael

I would not have wanted to try to change anything in AR's approach to life, philosophy, art -- as strenuously as I disagree with her on some issues, and as much as I wish that she hadn't published a few of the things she published, and that she hadn't made a few of the comments she made, including her the "most evil man in mankind's history" remark about Kant. In other words, although there are some things which she wrote which I could wish had been left out, I'd have had no desire to have tried to change her approach, her way of thinking and writing, because she couldn't have produced what she did produce had she had a different approach.

I feel the same way in being reluctant to engage with you in arguments against aesthetic theories which I think might be of significance to the wellsprings of your own artistic work.

I hope you understand what I'm saying.

Ellen

PS: I was writing this post when J's post [two] above was being written. [He meanwhile added another post.] I'm talking about something different from the issue between Jonathan and you, Michael. I share J's viewpoint that you respond often with apparent put-downs of those who don't share your views. It isn't this feature of your replies which I feel loathe to address. It's the, I suppose I could describe them as "root" theories which seem to me, from what you write, to be close to the sources of your own inspriation.

___

This post has been edited by Ellen Stuttle: 20 July 2008 - 02:43 AM

[Jonathan]

Newberry, on Jul 12 2008, 05:27 PM, said:

Genius: "(3) It cannot indicate scientifically how it brings
about its product, but rather gives the rule as nature. Hence, where
an author owes a product to his genius, he does not himself know how
the ideas for it have entered into his head, nor has he it in his
power to invent the like at pleasure, or methodically, and communicate
the same to others in such precepts as would put them in a position to
produce similar products. (Hence, presumably, our word Genie is
derived from genius, as the peculiar guardian and guiding spirit given
to a man at his birth, by the inspiration of which those original
ideas were obtained.)"

The Critique of Judgement by Immanuel Kant, translated by James Creed Meredith

It could be argued that Kant is talking about inborn talent, but for him to state that an art genius does not know what they are doing is bullshit. Two great examples that counter Kant's thesis, are the Julliard Master Class given by Maria Callas, the 3 CD set should be available by Amazon. And, The Cannon, a treatise of proportions for sculpture, by Polyclitus, we only have references to that, and the copy of the sculpture that illustrated the treatise.

Michael,
How does your idea of "core" differ from Kant's notion of "genius"?

J

[Newberry]

Bill P, on Jul 19 2008, 10:01 PM, said:

Michael -

Ah, yes. Imagine another sequence of events, with the response to the Kelley Libertarian Supper Club being very different. Perhaps with a sharp exchange of opinions, but no separation, no need to condemn individuals, or to label ideas as evil.

If I remember correctly, the condemnation of Kelley from Schwartz was at the same time as the Berlin Wall coming down, interesting choice of priorities--it was more import to condemn Kelley as evil than to celebrate the Wall coming down.

You write: "...or to label ideas as evil."

Aside from the word "label" I think that their are great ideas, good ones, so so ones, bad ones, and evil ones. Perhaps being an artist, psychological states, or the human spirit is just as important to me as real life.

There are evil assholes out there that try to extinguish "light bulb" sparks of someone's soul. They may think they are well intentioned, but just try recommending to a young artist that he would be better off being an accountant for his dad's law firm. I find that advice evil, and it is more about the advisor's issues.

Psychologists, teachers, family can do evil psychological damage to the young by pushing their pet, unsuccessful theories to justify their unhappy lives.

I, for one, don't have any problem discussing that ideas, as blueprints to implement, can be evil.

Quote

With the "closed system" thesis having been rejected by people taking into account Rand's own expectation that others would ADD TO Objectivism.

With the archives open for study --- digitized, online.

With no airbrushing to remove the purged and thereby deny reality.

Perhaps we can go forward now. Some of the recovery will await the next generation.

Yes, this will all be good stuff.

About 5 years ago, a director of very large contemporary art museum told me that since the 50's and 60's there has not been a moral revolution in the arts--passionate artists certain about where they were going, and what was wrong with the culture. Moral ideas are all about good and evil. So I think there is a place for these intense words.

Michael

This post has been edited by Newberry: 21 July 2008 - 06:47 AM

[Newberry]

Jonathan, on Jul 20 2008, 01:09 PM, said:

Michael,
How does your idea of "core" differ from Kant's notion of "genius"?

J

Genius for Kant and others is about a supreme quality, he just doesn't think the artists can qualify it. One's core is about your identity.

[Newberry]

Ellen,

Thanks for your exceptionally thoughtful post. I am at the end of a very long day--and need badly to turn in.

Michael

[Stephen Boydstun]

For a translation of Kant’s Critique of Judgment into modern English, turn to the translation of Werner S. Pluhar (Hackett 1987).

Section 9 of the Translator’s Introduction is titled “Judgments about the Sublime.” Good start.


---Other Helps---

In Chapter 5 of Frederick Beiser’s The Fate of Reason (Harvard 1987), find:
“The Kant-Herder Controversy and the Origin of the Third Kritik”
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/067429503X..._pt#reader-link

In Manfred Kuehn’s Kant: A Biography (Cambridge 2001), pages 344–48 of the section
titled “The Critique of Judgment (1790): ‘Functionality without a Purpose’”.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0521524067..._pt#reader-link

In the thick of it:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1559174
http://www.philosoph...ple/zuckert.htm

This post has been edited by Stephen Boydstun: 22 July 2008 - 08:13 AM

[Newberry]

Ellen Stuttle, on Jul 20 2008, 04:40 AM, said:

I don't think that your hypothesis is correct. I don't think that Kant was out to destroy anything. I think that his over-arching goal was to save something which he felt was threatened. (See my post #134.)

I read that post, but I don't have an opinion about Kant's other philosophical views. I am not familiar with with his other writings, and I don't have enough interest in general philosophy to pursue them to my satisfaction.

Rand has a lovely comment about not bothering to examine a folly, but to observe its results. The 20th Century art world is loaded with shockingly silly stuff. The prestigious, and pretentious, Turner Prize winners for example. It is virtually impossible to find good explanations for how this PM art has come about, and its revolutionary break with art as we have known since the time of man. My hypothesis, to be found in Pandora's Box series, about the theoretical basis for PM art is to be found in Kant's theories of the sublime. I think it is the best explanation out there. Contrast that to one of the leading theories, that the advent of photography lead painters away from copying nature. Here, I won't go into why that amuses me greatly.

So it doesn't really matter if Kant was stupid, envious, happy, a genius, good, evil, a dreamer, or a destroyer. He followed through with his concepts of the Sublime, which are the antitheses of the general concepts of beauty. I don't see how western culture could have gone in the PM direction if no one had come up with such atrocious ideas in the first place.

Quote

But I'm terribly reluctant to try to dispute issues of Kant with you in particular, given that you've said that you've carefully studied Kant's writings on aesthethics and that views you've come to in your studies and thinking about what he wrote are important to your own approach to art.

I have a highly squeamish feeling about arguing with an artist about anything close to that artist's sources of inspiration. I'm so well aware of how delicate those sources are. I feel intensely reluctant to pose challenges when those sources are so obviously working.

Thank you for the compliment and the sensitivity about creation. It has been an interesting time putting up this thread. It is mirroring a major project that I just started.

A great model has offered me credit for as many hours as I need, which could be 80-100 hours. Here is an unfinished study.



It will be a life sized painting, behind the man will be a black hole, like a tunnel, that leads to oblivion. The black hole represents to me Kant's theories of the Sublime. Our hero, will be unscathed, well away from gravitational pull of the hole, heading forward on his own path. I will be accenting his forehead, his eye sight, his heart, and his hand reaching forward spanning the earth in front of him.

Quote

I feel the same way in being reluctant to engage with you in arguments against aesthetic theories which I think might be of significance to the wellsprings of your own artistic work.

I hope you understand what I'm saying.

Yes, I understand that and appreciate your thoughtfulness.

Quote

PS: ...I share J's viewpoint that you respond often with apparent put-downs of those who don't share your views. It isn't this feature of your replies which I feel loathe to address. It's the, I suppose I could describe them as "root" theories which seem to me, from what you write, to be close to the sources of your own inspriation.

You are understanding an important element to creativity.

Michael

[Ellen Stuttle]

Newberry, on Jul 21 2008, 11:37 PM, said:

It will be a life sized painting, behind the man will be a black hole, like a tunnel, that leads to oblivion. The black hole represents to me Kant's theories of the Sublime. Our hero, will be unscathed, well away from gravitational pull of the hole, heading forward on his own path. I will be accenting his forehead, his eye sight, his heart, and his hand reaching forward spanning the earth in front of him.

As if rediscovering, reaffirming, reclaiming the earth after a crushingly enclosing inimical darkness.

The sketch conveys what I'm sensing is your experience of the art-world influences from which you had to emerge to produce your own vision.

Newberry, on Jul 21 2008, 11:37 PM, said:

Rand has a lovely comment about not bothering to examine a folly, but to observe its results. The 20th Century art world is loaded with shockingly silly stuff. The prestigious, and pretentious, Turner Prize winners for example. It is virtually impossible to find good explanations for how this PM art has come about, and its revolutionary break with art as we have known since the time of man. My hypothesis, to be found in Pandora's Box series, about the theoretical basis for PM art is to be found in Kant's theories of the sublime. I think it is the best explanation out there. Contrast that to one of the leading theories, that the advent of photography lead painters away from copying nature. Here, I won't go into why that amuses me greatly.

So it doesn't really matter if Kant was stupid, envious, happy, a genius, good, evil, a dreamer, or a destroyer. He followed through with his concepts of the Sublime, which are the antitheses of the general concepts of beauty. I don't see how western culture could have gone in the PM direction if no one had come up with such atrocious ideas in the first place.

My belief is that there's a lot more to the explanation than Kant's theories, but mostly I'm just going on vague hunch. As I've said, I'm not familiar with Kant's writings on aesthetics. Nor do I have more than a smattering of knowledge of how the development went in the visual arts. (I have a better idea in music.)

I had an experience two years ago, however, when I was in Budapest for a symmetry conference, an experience which has stayed with me and haunted me. I've been thinking about it again since I posted the post to which you were replying.

I described this on another thread, back in early March '07 -- here.

I'll re-post what I wrote:

Ellen Stuttle, on Mar 3 2007, 04:33 AM, said:

Jim Shay said:

Kramer writes that the combining of Communism and the Russian avant-garde created "one of the most bizarre intellectual alliances in the annals of the modern era: an art movement that owed much to the irrationalist, anti-materialist doctrines of the occult [P.D. Ouspensky], and was empowered by the Leninist leaders of the Revolution to create a new culture in the name of dialectical materialism."

That connects to something which -- ever since I returned from a sojourn in Budapest (and briefly in Vienna) last August -- I've been periodically mulling over with the sense of having glimpsed hints of a mystery. We were in Budapest for an international symmetry conference. A number of Hungarians, surprise, surprise, given the convenient locale, were attending. Also a number of Russians. There are all these undercurrents between the Hungarians and the Russians, echoes of the post-WWII political situation with the Communists as rulers of Hungary. A certain amount of resentments still exist, although the Russian symmetrists were underground anti-Communists, as were their Hungarian colleagues.

The person who was prime organizer of the symmetry conference is a Hungarian physicist who's also a passionate lover of art (and of literature). He has a great deal of knowledge about the various art movements of 20th-century Europe, and he's long had connections within the art world. Near the end of the conference, one afternoon there was a lecture/art display he'd arranged featuring the work of a Hungarian and his disciples. This Hungarian, an old man now, had learned originally from someone in Russia -- and I think the someone might have been Malevich.

The Hungarian -- I've forgotten his name -- had formed an art...well, what to call it: school/community -- "temporary commune"; the students would live there for the summer. Each would have a "theme," a project pertaining to a prime shape and/or color. There was a lot of mystique of the shapes and/or colors. There was an intense absorption and commitment; devoted disciples. And I got this feeling of some sort of underground currents such that although the surface rhetoric sounded ok in Communist terms, beneath was a code language of dissent.

Naturally, not understanding Hungarian (or Russian), I don't know what was being said in conversations around and on the sidelines of the formal presentation which was being translated into English (English being the official language of the conference). But I felt that I was glimpsing a world which Americans could barely understand which the Hungarians and Russians knew the secrets of. And that in some strange way the art mystique was recognized by them as connected to those secrets.

See, my feeling is that there was something which started out not only serious but spirit-saving in its Eurpoean roots -- but which then became trivialized and silly as it migrated west, especially after it reached England and America.

I'm groping in what for me is a foggy landscape of influences. I hope I'm going to learn more about the undercurrents I sensed at that lecture/display in Budapest. I keep visualizing the room, the people, their expressions; bringing back details. Next summer another conference is scheduled. (The conferences are triennial.) If all goes well, Larry and I will be attending and I'll have a chance to probe for clues. ;-)

Ellen

___

[Dragonfly]

It's nonsense to claim that postmodernism/non-objective art is the result of Kant's theories. If Kant had never existed, we still would have non-objective art. It is the natural result of an evolution that is inherent in the human character. There have always been artists and composers who have been looking for new ways, pushing boundaries, trying things that haven't been done before, shocking contemporaries until the new and revolutionary became the commonplace and the new canon, to be replaced in its turn by newer methods and styles. Inevitably that evolution would lead to such a thing as non-objective art. No need to look for a scapegoat living centuries ago.

[Matus1976]

How about some more Kant quotes?

Kant's insistence on never using an person as a 'means to an end' has always resonated very strongly with me, and seemed so similar to Rand's "I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man nor ask someone to live for mine" that I was quite surprised to read later how much Rand despised Kant. But really this aspect of Kant (his Kantianistic respect for persons, vs the predominant utilitarianism of that time) was the only aspect I was familiar with at that time. His categorical imperative and insistence that duty is our purpose in life seems to contradict the kantinistic respect for persons, as duty implies people's lives are only to be used as a means to another 'higher' end.

Can some of the Kant advocates here give a little more detail on his primary works and what he was essentially trying to argue in them?

[Newberry]

Dragonfly, on Jul 22 2008, 10:34 AM, said:

There have always been artists and composers who have been looking for new ways, pushing boundaries, trying things that haven't been done before, shocking contemporaries until the new and revolutionary became the commonplace and the new canon, to be replaced in its turn by newer methods and styles.

I whole-heartedly agree with this statement.