Jonathan Posted March 31, 2015 Share Posted March 31, 2015 You are really not getting this.I'm not getting it?!!! Hahahaha! You've just now started discovering what the Sublime is, while resisting understanding it every step of the way, and now, after having read just a tiny little bit on the subject, suddenly you're an expert, and I'm not getting it!! Hahahahaha! Assclown!An emotion is an automatic response to reality, given one's level of rationality, judgment of existence and his values.I gave examples of a. possible existents b. possible responses -- which you take literally. War, a canyon, fear, awe, etc.Are you really this literal? I could as easily have said "Love, of destruction and war"..."Elation, at the night sky..."Kant posited Sublimity as two forms, "mathematical" and "dynamical", and 3 "kinds" of Sublimity:the noble, the splendid and the terrifying.The question is:To whom? For whom?Answer: For any viewer who experiences the "terror that delights." That's what the Sublime means.A primitive man in the jungle sees a solar eclipse. By all that he hears from myths from elder members of his tribe and by what he experiences, contrary to all his known norms of daylight and darkness, he would be terrified. Omens, angry gods and the rest. His terror is very valid as an emotional response -- and also reasonable, in terms of the little he knows - and the much he doesn't know.How does he know it is not the end of his world?That would not be an example of the experience of the Sublime, since the man has not experienced his "estate as exalted above" the fearful object!A modern man sees the same eclipse and has the emotion of wonder (without fear) at the vision, and also marvels at its rarity, how man has learned to predict eclipses, know their nature and so on. Also valid emotions, based on his rationality.(And if a modern, educated man feels primitive, superstitious fear it would expose how much he is irrational).That would also not be an example of the Sublime. Do you know why? Think it through. Set aside your eagerness to condemn, and try very hard to understand what conditions are necessary for someone to experience the Sublime.How many examples do you need to get this?How many examples do I need in order to get your misinterpretation of the Sublime? I already get it. I got it before you started blabbing about it. I've seen others, just like you, have the same frantic misinterpretations.One reader would feel admiration for Howard Roark, while another could feel cynical disdain for him. Another might have no emotions at all.It's the same character, yes? What's the difference? Yes. Different minds.And none of those feelings would be examples of the Sublime. The philosophical aesthetic concept of the Sublime has a specific meaning. It does not mean feeling "admiration for Howard Roark." It also does not mean feeling "cynical disdain for him." It doesn't mean having "no emotions at all." The Sublime only occurs when an individual feels the "terror that delights."Kant combines all men together, denying the identity of consciousness as a whole, and ignoring the individual, variable contents of EACH man's consciousness.No, Kant does not do that. You haven't read Kant, and you're talking out of your ass. You still haven't grasped the very simple concept of the Sublime because you're hatefully opposed to grasping it.Once more, an existent in reality (however grand, loud, massive, vast) is not The Sublime.That's Kant's position! You didn't know that, did you? Because you haven't read him!"The Sublime" is a fancy ideal for what a person ~should~ feel as a result of perceiving something.What in the hell are you talking about?! The Sublime has nothing at all to do with what a person should feel. Neither Kant, nor anyone else, has taken a normative or moralistic position on what anyone should feel. The term "Sublime" is descriptive, not prescriptive or normative. Seriously, Tony, stop arbitrarily making shit up.Therefore his Sublimity is divorced from man's mind, a "Platonic form", dreamed up by Kant (and others). It is Primacy of consciousness and subjectivist, iow.Wrong. Your frantic, uninformed, willfully ignorant ideas are what are divorced from "man's mind" and from reality. You're infested with blinding hatred and the refusal to know."It is...about feeling one's power and strength in the face of powerful forces..."Yes? Why? Does this emotion trump the mind? Does Kant insist it is so?No, Kant does not take the position that emotion trumps the mind. Where do you come up with this crap? Kant's position, if you would bother to read it, is that the delight of the Sublime derives from our having our ability to reason stimulated -- to get our minds around what was seemingly incomprehensible.Read, Tony. Learn rather than emote. Understand rather than produce page after page of panicked, non-sequitur, nonsensical assumptions and conclusions. Please, start practicing Objectivism, and bring some rationality to trying to understand the subject.J Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
william.scherk Posted March 31, 2015 Share Posted March 31, 2015 (But there is much more to emotions than are dreamt of in Kant's philosophy).Sure enough. And it would be fair to say that there is much more to emotions than are dreamt of in Rand's philosophy, nu? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
anthony Posted March 31, 2015 Share Posted March 31, 2015 I've little interest but for the amusement in learning Kant's fanciful notions of emotional experience("terror that delights").(Hey, why not "joy that terrifies"? "hate that loves"? Observe other self-contradictions in other writings of his - like on morality - too).I've experienced what human emotions are, and I know what are the great emotions - and often, why.For this you don't have to be a genius.Work out the consequences and implications of Kant's mysticism for yourself.I've eventually picked up where the puzzling religious reverence (of many) towards art comes from.J. for that I thank you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
william.scherk Posted March 31, 2015 Share Posted March 31, 2015 I've little interest but for the amusement in learning Kant's fanciful notions of emotional experience("terror that delights").https://youtu.be/SvuQqNrjIYM?t=306Ninety seconds of "Terror that delights"! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Selene Posted March 31, 2015 Share Posted March 31, 2015 Being quite ignorant of Kant's works, I found this lady's paper helpful on the "Sublime" issue...http://www.academia.edu/516793/The_Moral_Source_of_the_Kantian_Sublime Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jonathan Posted March 31, 2015 Share Posted March 31, 2015 I've little interest but for the amusement in learning Kant's fanciful notions of emotional experience("terror that delights").(Hey, why not "joy that terrifies"? "hate that loves"? Observe other self-contradictions in other writings of his - like on morality - too).It's not Kant's fanciful notion. How many times do you have to be told? Does anything make it through? Kant merely addressed an existing issue. And he made the same observations that you have on this thread! So, he's somehow evil for taking the same position that you took, but you're virtuous for taking it?!?!?!I've experienced what human emotions are, and I know what are the great emotions - and often, why.For this you don't have to be a genius.You're definitely not a genius!Work out the consequences and implications of Kant's mysticism for yourself.One of the "consequences and implications" of Kant's notion of the Sublime is that you agree with it without knowing it, as evidenced by your earlier comments on the subject. Another is that Rand unknowingly adopted the Sublime as her signature style, as you keep forgetting while condemning the concept.I've eventually picked up where the puzzling religious reverence (of many) towards art comes from.J. for that I thank you.Are you talking about Rand and her reverence for the Kantain Sublime?J Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jonathan Posted March 31, 2015 Share Posted March 31, 2015 I've little interest but for the amusement in learning Kant's fanciful notions of emotional experience("terror that delights").https://youtu.be/SvuQqNrjIYM?t=306Ninety seconds of "Terror that delights"!Exactly! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Selene Posted March 31, 2015 Share Posted March 31, 2015 I've little interest but for the amusement in learning Kant's fanciful notions of emotional experience("terror that delights").https://youtu.be/SvuQqNrjIYM?t=306Ninety seconds of "Terror that delights"!Exactly!Kant's solution is that, in fact, the storm or the building is not the real object of the sublime at all. Instead, what is properly sublime are ideas of reason: namely, the ideas of absolute totality or absolute freedom. However huge the building, we know it is puny compared to absolute totality; however powerful the storm, it is nothing compared to absolute freedom. The sublime feeling is therefore a kind of 'rapid alternation' between the fear of the overwhelming and the peculiar pleasure of seeing that overwhelming overwhelmed. Thus, it turns out that the sublime experience is purposive after all - that we can, in some way, 'get our head around it'. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moralist Posted March 31, 2015 Share Posted March 31, 2015 I've eventually picked up where the puzzling religious reverence (of many) towards art comes from.J. for that I thank you.People are hardwired for religious reverence, so for secular leftist libertines, it's art......or their government......or government art funding. Greg Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
william.scherk Posted March 31, 2015 Share Posted March 31, 2015 (edited) I've little interest but for the amusement in learning Kant's fanciful notions of emotional experience("terror that delights").https://youtu.be/SvuQqNrjIYM?t=306Ninety seconds of "Terror that delights"!Exactly!I absolutely love going on that old rickety-seeming, lurching and swooping wooden coaster. It has no security-harness or leg-holds, just a lap-bar over a plain banquette seat. As you can see from the video, it is one of the classic 'airtime' coasters in North America. It is engineered to thrill, similar in a way to the many 'mountain platforms' that have been built in recent years (the most terrifying to me would be the Pas dans le vide in the French Alps).For those who haven't watched the brief video ... this is Airtime!I am no more educated on the evul Kant than is Adam, except for the arguments given here and at places like ARCHN, RoR, SOLOpassion, OO, THEFORUM, etcetera. I have none beyond a shallow understanding of Kantian Sublimity: if you gave me the mike and the subject Sublime, I would fake my way through it by trying to conjure up states of emotion akin to what my loose grasp suggests underlies the adjective. I would hand the mike off at the earliest opportunity, with flop-sweat and a sigh.In my 'sublime on one foot for five minutes' I think I would go with visuals first, ask my listeners to close their eyes and transport themselves in their imagination. For those with vivid imaginations in the six senses. I would try to draw them to the time of Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, to be among the first sophisticated travelers on the Alp Tour, and I would perhaps lard the rhetoric with charms such as vast, magnificent, terrific, awesome.For those who can, I suggest attempting to engender the kind of feeling such a vivid imagination could deliver -- not in this time and space, where we can fly over the Alps on Google Earth while taking a dump, but back when the Romantic movement celebrated the sublime feeling, described the exquisite thrall, engaged the highest climber at the summit, potent and in control, examining the world surrounding and beneath and beyond.There is a depiction at Wikipedia's page on Sublime** that someone thought would best illustrate that time and place and quality of sensation:The best I can do with my own stunted imagination to feel The Sublime feeling everyone is talking about is to consider full-screen images of such places as A Step Into Emptiness ... SInce I am not an Objectivist nor a great fan of Ayn Rand's literary style, I might be exempt from the feeling of the Sublime that can be conjured up with her prose, but the gushy romantic style does kind of approximately designate for me the Randian emotion one could feel if exalted by the same things that gave her exalted feelings. From The Fountainhead and from Goodreads:“I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.” You see, I am an atheist and I have only one religion: the sublime in human nature. There is nothing to approach the sanctity of the highest type of man possible and there is nothing that gives me the same reverent feeling, the feeling when one's spirit wants to kneel, bareheaded. Do not call it hero-worship, because it is more than that. It is a kind of strange and improbable white heat where admiration becomes religion, and religion becomes philosophy, and philosophy — the whole of one's life. The greatest thing about "sublime" is that it has multiple connotations, it is a richly embroidered word qua concept. It still has punch in everyday discourse, It's an above-and-beyond kind of feeling or incumbent quality of emotion that seems to be a paramount, top of the hierarchy kind of mental thing. We can but evoke a human sense of the Sublime -- it does not rest in the thing itself, but in the human heart.Take heed then of Rand's emotions, her highest emotional state, and keep Kant on the backburner for later scorching. Show me what evokes sublime feelings in you via works of art per Kahmi's criteria ... help me conjure up that feeling in myself.______________________________** This explains my flop-sweat; if I used this as crib-notes, I know my audience would quickly shout me down with "WhataboutKANT?!!" objections:In aesthetics, the sublime (from the Latin sublimis) is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation. Edited April 1, 2015 by william.scherk Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
anthony Posted April 1, 2015 Share Posted April 1, 2015 William in full flow, is unequalled. Good thoughts and pictures man. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brant Gaede Posted April 1, 2015 Share Posted April 1, 2015 I've little interest but for the amusement in learning Kant's fanciful notions of emotional experience("terror that delights").https://youtu.be/SvuQqNrjIYM?t=306Ninety seconds of "Terror that delights"!Isn't that comrade Sonia bringing up the rear?--Brant Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Selene Posted April 1, 2015 Share Posted April 1, 2015 Rand is known for her admiration for Victor Hugo:Tuesday, June 30, 2009Ayn Rand on Victor Hugo: You may read any number of more "realistic" accounts of the French Revolution, but Hugo's is the one you will remember. He is not a reporter of the momentary, but an artist who projects the essential and fundamental. He is not a statistician of gutter trivia, but a Romanticist who presents life "as it might be and ought to be." He is the worshipper and the superlative portrayer of man's greatness. If you are struggling to hold your vision of man above the gray ashes of our century, Hugo is the fuel you need. One cannot preserve that vision or achieve it without some knowledge of what is greatness and some image to concretize it. Every morning, when you read today's headlines, you shrink a little in human stature and hope. Then, if you turn to modern literature for a nobler view of man, you are confronted by those cases of arrested development—the juvenile delinquents aged thirty to sixty—who still think that depravity is daring or shocking, and whose writing belongs, not on paper, but on fences. If you feel, as I do, that there's nothing as boring as depravity, if you seek a glimpse of human grandeur—turn to a novel by Victor Hugo."Ninety-Three", The Ayn Rand Column, p.42In William's like to the Wiki on Sublime had at the bottom a category link to Victor Hugo: Victor HugoVictor Hugo touched on aspects of the sublime in both nature and man in many of his poems (Poems of Victor Hugo). In his preface to the play, Cromwell,[16] he defined the sublime as a combination of the grotesque and beautiful as opposed to the classical ideal of perfection. He also dealt with how authors and artists could create the sublime through art. Both the Hunchback and Notre Dame Cathedral can be considered embodiments of the sublime as can many elements of Les Misérables.[citation needed]A... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Newberry Posted April 1, 2015 Share Posted April 1, 2015 I think it would be nice for the concept of the sublime to be updated for man made things and leave off the fear component as the thing, and replace that with something like wonder or an ascendent elevated feeling. Works that fit with my view of the sublime are:Aeschylus' Oresteia. A young man overcoming insanely adverse circumstances to be justly reprieved in the end by the by the new code of justice in the new democracy of Athens.Michelangelo's David. The moment of being ready for great things to come.Puccini's Turnadot. Amazing synergy of inventive orchestration, melody, chorus, two vying sopranos, and a glorious end in which love is victorious.Beethoven's Ninth. Ode to Joy.Schipperheyn's Zarathustra. The moment when Zarathustra realizes the concept of free will.Atlas Shrugged. The ultimate freedom and release of understanding and throwing off those that want to enslave you.Rembrandt's Danae. A a moment of woman lit by the glow of her lover.They all have the component of successful resolution at the end: the lovers unite, justice and freedom are served, and moments of wonder and bliss. And artists' means also match the the elevated ends of their works. Both the ends and means are in sync.If it were obvious and easy to do there would be a lot more works on this scale. I think a positive and passionate view of the world is the hardest thing to achieve in art. Mainly because it is more demanding in the sense that it doesn't allow for mistakes yet requires startling execution. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Newberry Posted April 1, 2015 Share Posted April 1, 2015 Viktor Frankl "Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."Viktor was a good and wise man.GregVery wise indeed.These couple of weeks here on OL I have been spending extended times in the space between stimulus and response. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Newberry Posted April 1, 2015 Share Posted April 1, 2015 I've little interest but for the amusement in learning Kant's fanciful notions of emotional experience("terror that delights").(Hey, why not "joy that terrifies"? "hate that loves"? Observe other self-contradictions in other writings of his - like on morality - too).I had a hearty laugh at that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Stuart Kelly Posted April 1, 2015 Share Posted April 1, 2015 I can't make any intelligent comment on Kant's idea of the sublime vs. beauty (vs. pleasurable vs. good) without reading and understanding him first. My real problem with Kant is that he is excruciatingly boring to read. I've tried several times, but it's like slamming up against a brick wall and expecting to knock it down. So I went on YouTube. The following lecture of about 30 minutes gave me an overview in plain modern language of what Kant was getting at, not just with the sublime (which apparently has a quantitative version and a qualitative one), but the entire Critique of Judgment. It's not the same thing as reading the book, but at least I now have some kind of outline that I believe is accurate. I can build a better understanding as I go along on that. I looked up the lecturer, Louis Markos, and he is a Christian apologist. However, I did not detect any Christian influence in his discussion of Kant. On the contrary, he sounds like he is delighted he figured out what all that convoluted prose means and he wants to let everyone else in on it. Or at least his interpretation of it. Others who are more familiar with this can decide if Markos gave a fair overview. From my position of knowing very little, it sounds to me like he did. As I get more familiar, I may disagree with a point here and there, but so far it sounds solid to me. What's more, Markos is not boring, he is an entertaining talker. Part 1 Part 2 Michael Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Selene Posted April 1, 2015 Share Posted April 1, 2015 YouTube is another library that I also use."...a quantitative version and a qualitative one..." this aspect I also did not expect and the ladies paper that I posted up thread was quite clear on that also. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jonathan Posted April 1, 2015 Share Posted April 1, 2015 I think it would be nice for the concept of the sublime to be updated for man made things... Why? The word means what it means. It means what it has always meant. We don't change the meaning of words because Michael Newberry has an irrational reaction to them. His personal, subjective dislike of the concept due to his hostile misinterpretation of it is not a valid reason to change its meaning. And what does Newberry mean by wanting to update the Sublime to include man made things? It already does! ...and leave off the fear component as the thing, and replace that with something like wonder or an ascendent elevated feeling. Works that fit with my view of the sublime are... All but one of the artworks that Newberry proceeded to list do not fit his proposed new meaning of "Sublime." They include "the fear component," or are known to be based on stories which include "the fear component." Aeschylus' Oresteia. A young man overcoming insanely adverse circumstances to be justly reprieved in the end by the by the new code of justice in the new democracy of Athens. The "insanely adverse circumstances" are "the fear component." What would it be like without "the fear component"? Answer: It would suck. Michelangelo's David. The moment of being ready for great things to come. Goliath and his army are "the fear component." You know, war? The thing that both Tony and Newberry have stupidly accused Kant of loving? Since Newberry is referring to war and death in this instance as "great things to come," does that mean that he's actually the one who loves war? Anyway, David rises in the face of the fearful entities, and experiences his "estate as exalted above them." Therefore it is an example of the long-established meaning of Sublimity, and not of the new, irrational Newberrian Sublimity. What would the sculpture be like without the element of David rising to the dangerous challenge? It would suck. Maybe David, instead of fixing his eyes on his opponent while confidently readying his sling, would be prancing and leaping through the air with his head thrown back to kiss the butterflies while picking flowers? Would that be the Newberrian Sublime? Puccini's Turnadot. Amazing synergy of inventive orchestration, melody, chorus, two vying sopranos, and a glorious end in which love is victorious. Turandot is not a story in which "love is victorious." It is actually a story of shallow hormonal lust, in which the volition-lacking alleged "hero" deterministically goes gaga over an ice-cold bitch just because she's physically attractive, and for no other reason. She has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and is in fact a torturess and murderess. The alleged "hero" himself is quite a douche, in that he allows someone who truly loves him, Liù, to sacrifice herself so that he can mindlessly follow his dick instead of any rational values. As scholar Julian Budden put it: "Nothing in the text of the final duet suggests that Calaf's love for Turandot amounts to anything more than a physical obsession: nor can the ingenuities of Simoni and Adami's text for 'Del primo pianto' convince us that the Princess's submission is any less hormonal." And, again, "the fear component" is there. Beethoven's Ninth. Ode to Joy. That's the one example that I don't think contains "the fear component." (And I could be wrong about that.) Schipperheyn's Zarathustra. The moment when Zarathustra realizes the concept of free will. The story of Zarathustra contains a lot of "fear components," including an incomprehensibly ghostly fear component. Atlas Shrugged. The ultimate freedom and release of understanding and throwing off those that want to enslave you. Having to "throw off those that want to enslave you" is "the fear component." Big time. And the sheer number of people who wanted to enslave their fellow men makes the fearful entity amorphous and of incomprehensible magnitude, therefore making the novel the perfect example of Kantian Sublimity. It instills in the characters, as well as in most readers, their will to resist. It allows them to get their minds around the seemingly incomprehensible foe, and to "regard their estate as exalted above it." Altas Shrugged is not just any type of Sublime -- not Shaftesbury's version, nor Addison's, nor Burke's, nor ever Longinus's -- but strictly Kant's version of the Sublime, due to its characters having the moral reaction of resisting and rising above the object of fear and magnitude. See, Newberry doesn't understand -- refuses to understand, actually -- that Kant's addition to the established concept of the Sublime was the heroism aspect! It was the experience of facing the challenge, and of rising to the occasion. As I've said many times in the past, Newberry won't let go of his condemnation of Kant, nor of his blaming Kant's ideas for the existence of the art that Newberry hates, because Newberry is so addicted to experiencing Kantian Sublimity that he needs to invent a villain of immense destructive magnitude so that he can experience the thrill of resisting it and standing up to it. Rembrandt's Danae. A a moment of woman lit by the glow of her lover. The story upon which it is based contains "the fear component." They all have the component of successful resolution at the end: the lovers unite, justice and freedom are served, and moments of wonder and bliss. And artists' means also match the the elevated ends of their works. Both the ends and means are in sync. Kant is the person who introduced the "component of successful resolution at the end" to the concept of the Sublime. If it were obvious and easy to do there would be a lot more works on this scale. I think a positive and passionate view of the world is the hardest thing to achieve in art. Mainly because it is more demanding in the sense that it doesn't allow for mistakes yet requires startling execution. If the new, irrational Newberrian version of the Sublime had been practiced by the artists who created the works above that Newberry listed, they would not exist as created, and definitely not on the "scale" that Newberry admires. In order to achieve that scale, Kantian Sublimity is required. Its power is the reason that Rand unknowingly made it her signature aesthetic style, and why Newberry unknowingly needs to create imaginary enemies that he feels that he can rise above. J Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jonathan Posted April 1, 2015 Share Posted April 1, 2015 My real problem with Kant is that he is excruciatingly boring to read. I've tried several times, but it's like slamming up against a brick wall and expecting to knock it down.Heh. That's true of most serious philosophers, but also of any profession or area of expertise when dealt with at the formal academic level. I look, and laugh, at the silly nit-picking and electron-chasing that has gone on here on this thread, which is comparatively informal. Think of what a formal presentation would face! The mind-numbing precision and care that scholars use when writing formally is due to wanting to pre-address and avoid that type of thing. They want to cover every detail of every inch of the ground, and to create a map which doesn't have a single molehill even slightly out of place.J Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jonathan Posted April 1, 2015 Share Posted April 1, 2015 I've little interest but for the amusement in learning Kant's fanciful notions of emotional experience("terror that delights"). (Hey, why not "joy that terrifies"? "hate that loves"? Observe other self-contradictions in other writings of his - like on morality - too).I had a hearty laugh at that. I had a hearty laugh at it too, especially considering that both Tony and Newberry "love to hate" Kant. Tony loves to hate Kant so much that, despite being told several times now, he still wants to believe that Kant invented the seeming contradiction of the Sublime, rather than that he provided a solution which reveals that it is not, and never was, a contradiction. Keep on loving to hate, children. J Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Stuart Kelly Posted April 1, 2015 Share Posted April 1, 2015 My real problem with Kant is that he is excruciatingly boring to read. I've tried several times, but it's like slamming up against a brick wall and expecting to knock it down.Heh. That's true of most serious philosophers, but also of any profession or area of expertise when dealt with at the formal academic level. I look, and laugh, and the silly nit-picking and electron-chasing that has gone on here on this thread, which is comparatively informal. Think of what a formal presentation would face! The mind-numbing precision and care that scholars use when writing formally is due to wanting to pre-address and avoid that type of thing. They want to cover every detail of every inch of the ground, and to create a map which doesn't have a single molehill even slightly out of place.JJonathan,I basically agree, but I don't believe precision must by necessity be qualified with "mind-numbing." Not even good precision needs to be "mind-numbing." It is perfectly possible to have precision communicated in a simple and interesting manner. I do not find "mind-numbing" to be a virtue to aspire to as a writer. I think the mind-numbing part comes from a style that stays so much in the abstract when a sentence and paragraph unfold, from using big technical-sounding jargon-words for the simplest ideas, and from having to constantly second-guess the assumptions a discussion point is built on, it gets hard to visualize. That and translated archaic German grammar. At least those are some of my main difficulties. Those are the parts that are the most boring to me.As to precision? I, personally, don't mind precision at all. I find it boring to not know what I am before when someone gets precise, especially as it drones on and on in more of what I do not know.Thus I like to see the forest before I go in and start looking at trees and leaves, but I like looking at trees and leaves.Precision per se is not boring to me. (Don't forget that I have translated a crapload of technical manuals.) Precision without knowing where and how it fits in is.To your point on thoroughness, I will grant you I tend to find lists boring. I can only read one or two pages of a telephone book before my mind starts wandering. A lot of scholarly works are enhanced lists and that is probably in the nature of the author's intent to try to do a good job.Kant's style of writing is challenging to me in these regards.Of course I'm only talking about the parts of Kant's books I have tried to read. Maybe he gets better on simulating curiosity, ramping up the suspense, bringing ideas to life, whetting the intellectual appetite, referencing the big picture at confusing moments, making it all exciting, and so on in places I have not looked at yet. MichaelEdit: Let me plug a book that deals with a lot of the style issues I find boring: The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker.Of course I would never expect Kant to be written according Pinker's more interesting common sense academic recommendations. That would be silly. However, Pinker does nail a lot of the habits that put people in a coma when they read works by authors like Kant. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jonathan Posted April 1, 2015 Share Posted April 1, 2015 I think it depends on what subject of Kant's that you're reading. I didn't find the sections on the Sublime difficult at all. Many of his other writings, yes, but not those on the Sublime. J Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
anthony Posted April 1, 2015 Share Posted April 1, 2015 I think it depends on what subject of Kant's that you're reading. I didn't find the sections on the Sublime difficult at all. Many of his other writings, yes, but not those on the Sublime.JRight, it's not so hard.And right again, "the Sublime" is bigger than Kant.Schopenhauer is also interesting.-----"As with his philosophy as a whole, Schopenhauer takes his point of departure from Kant, praising him for deepening the subjective turn in philosophical aesthetics and thereby putting it on the right path.Like Kant, he held that the phenomenon of beauty would only be illuminated through a careful scrutiny of its effects on the subject, rather than searching out the properties of objects--such as smoothness and delicacy--which putatively give rise to the feeling of the beautiful."----[stanford](A rose is beautiful he wrote, for imparting "a feeling of disinterested pleasure").Follows is S.'s 'hierarchy' of Sublime and Beauty:# Feeling of Beauty - Light is reflected off a flower. (Pleasure from a mere perception of an object that cannot hurt observer.)# Weakest Feeling of Sublime - Light reflected off stones. (Pleasure from beholding objects that pose no threat, yet themselves are devoid of life).# Weaker Feeling of Sublime - Endless desert with no movement. (Pleasure from seeing objects that could not sustain life of the observer).# Sublime - Turbulent nature. (Pleasure from perceiving objects that threaten to hurt or destroy observer).# Full Feeling of Sublime. (Overpowering, turbulent Nature. (Pleasure from beholding very violent, destructive objects).# Fullest Feeling of Sublime. (Immensity of Universe's extent or duration. Pleasure from knowledge of observer's nothingness and Oneness with nature).[WikiPhilosophy]How can Schop too be hated? ya gotta love him, subjective and all ). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brant Gaede Posted April 2, 2015 Share Posted April 2, 2015 Michelangelo's David. The moment of being ready for great things to come.You don't know WTF you're talking about.--Brant Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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