A Few Kant Quotes

[Jonathan]

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]

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.

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

Edited July 21, 2008 by Newberry

[Newberry]

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

[Guyau]

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.philosophy.northwestern.edu/people/zuckert.htm

Edited July 22, 2008 by Stephen Boydstun

[Newberry]

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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:

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]

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.

[Brant Gaede]

It's mostly a matter of who pays how much for what. If there is a market for garbage people will produce garbage to sale. I might call it "reusable assets" collected by "sanitation engineers" or "art" made by "artists."

--Brant

[Ellen Stuttle]

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.

Likewise -- with THAT part of DF's statement. The part you didn't quote is, however, significantly more problematic. Although I agree that there's a large measure of "nonsense" in AR's basically uni-causal laying of all influences she didn't like in the modern world to Kant's door, asserting that "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" needs considerably more than a dismissive handwave to back up. Included in the backing up would have to be rather more detail as to just what this "evolution" supposedly is which would inherently have particular results. Why for instance didn't the identical evolution occur in non-Western cultures? And does the history of philosophy have nothing to do with the history of art? Is the thesis that art develops according to a separate evolution from that of philosophy? Or perchance that Kant's theorizing itself was part of the "evolution that is inherent in the human character"? Or what?

Ellen

___

[Newberry]

Ellen:

Likewise -- with THAT part of DF's statement. The part you didn't quote is, however, significantly more problematic.

hahaha, that was funny.

[Dragonfly]

Why for instance didn't the identical evolution occur in non-Western cultures?

For the same reason that during the last centuries science and technology have evolved mainly in Western cultures, more individual freedom and abandoning of century-old traditions than in the rigid hierarchical non-Western societies.

And does the history of philosophy have nothing to do with the history of art? Is the thesis that art develops according to a separate evolution from that of philosophy? Or perchance that Kant's theorizing itself was part of the "evolution that is inherent in the human character"? Or what?

Philosophy, art and science may co-evolve, the error is in thinking that philosophy determines the evolution of art and science. Artists and scientists are in the frontline, philosophy is hobbling behind. By "philosophy" I mean here the official discipline as practiced by philosophers, not the "implicit philosophy" of the ideas of individual people like artists and scientists.

[Matus1976]

"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" needs considerably more than a dismissive handwave to back up.

I second that, sure people would have been making crap like that anyway, but Kant seemed to have laid the philosophical ground work for that nonsense to actually be accepted and revered as "Art", without his influence, people would be making it, but no one would be hanging it on walls in frames and charging admission to it.

[Dragonfly]

I second that, sure people would have been making crap like that anyway, but Kant seemed to have laid the philosophical ground work for that nonsense to actually be accepted and revered as "Art", without his influence, people would be making it, but no one would be hanging it on walls in frames and charging admission to it.

Non-objective art is not the same as crap. No doubt a lot of crap has been made in that style, but that is true for other styles as well. Further, the story of the Emperor's new clothes is also already centuries old.

[james lee shay]

"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" needs considerably more than a dismissive handwave to back up.

I second that, sure people would have been making crap like that anyway, but Kant seemed to have laid the philosophical ground work for that nonsense to actually be accepted and revered as "Art", without his influence, people would be making it, but no one would be hanging it on walls in frames and charging admission to it.

This is without a doubt the biggest "reach" I've seen on this website. I think abstract art is great, sometimes, and I don't like or believe much of what Kant wrote. I'm sure my love for abstraction is "untainted" with regard to him. And the same is true for many of my artist and nonartist friends who like abstract art.

There was once a poster here who was banished for plagiarism. He wrote stuff like the above and justified it with lots of really misguided information, much of which he stole from others. What he and other write is unimportant, though, because the abstraction battle was fought and won by its proponants long ago, and the victory won't be undone. Posters on websites and objectivist "art critics" are wasting their time with regard to abstraction, and exist in some private vacuum they regard as "the real truth about godawful abstraction" or "the heroic defense of realist art against any and all philistines".

Jim Shay

[Ellen Stuttle]

"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" needs considerably more than a dismissive handwave to back up.

I second that, sure people would have been making crap like that anyway, but Kant seemed to have laid the philosophical ground work for that nonsense to actually be accepted and revered as "Art", without his influence, people would be making it, but no one would be hanging it on walls in frames and charging admission to it.

Matus, I'm not sure in what sense you're seconding that. I didn't call non-objective art "crap." (Neither did Dragonfly of course.) My point is that Dragonfly's bold assertion as to why we have non-objective art -- and as to the irrelevance of Kant to the development of the type -- is far from adequate to demonstrate the substance of the assertion.

I think that in the actual, factual historical development Kant has to have been relevant to the history of abstract art, considering the historic sequence Kant->Hegel->Marx in the history of philosophy and the known significance of Marx to some of the pioneers of abstract art, and I don't know how one could demonstrate what the development of art history would have been if it had been different from what it was.

Ellen

Edit: PS: I used "abstract" instead of "non-objective" in the above paragraph, because Jim Shay had meanwhile posted talking of "abstraction" in art. What Newberry was talking about to begin with was Post-Modernism, which I don't think is meant as equivalent to "abstraction" in art but instead is a later development in the lineage from what's called "abstract art" (a term I find weird anyway -- isn't all art "abstract"? -- but that's another issue).

If I understand the sequence right, we had "Abstraction" and then "Modernism" and then "Post-Modernism"? Yes? No?, art experts here.

___

Edited July 22, 2008 by Ellen Stuttle

[Newberry]

Ellen:

I think that in the actual, factual historical development Kant has to have been relevant to the history of abstract art, considering the historic sequence Kant->Hegel->Marx in the history of philosophy and the known significance of Marx to some of the pioneers of abstract art, and I don't know how one could demonstrate what the development of art history would have been if it had been different from what it was...

If I understand the sequence right, we had "Abstraction" and then "Modernism" and then "Post-Modernism"? Yes? No?, art experts here.

Chronological order doesn't work so easy, Kandinsky's Black Spot (abstract), 1912; Duchamp's The Fountain (the urinal), 1917, forerunner to the postmodern movement; Malevich, White on White (abstract), 1918. Picasso would paint a cubist work and neo-classical work in the same year, which bursts the idea that he went from realism towards abstraction. The history is not a neat progression, rather I think individual artists pick up ideas that appeal to them, and if their interest and spirit holds, they simply run with it, or exhausted the idea or visual idea.

And, its a funny providence of art, but artists don't necessarily explicitly translate aesthetic theory into art works--but they can grasp aesthetic theories by what other artists do. It feels a lot like osmosis, you absorb the ideas through visuals. It's like being up on fads, and fashion styles.

Edit: PS: "... isn't all art "abstract"?"

Edited July 23, 2008 by Newberry

[Brant Gaede]

I like Monet.

Does "Objective Art" take in Stalinist realism (crap) and Nazi what-else-can-you-call-it (crap)?

--Brant

[Matus1976]

I second that, sure people would have been making crap like that anyway, but Kant seemed to have laid the philosophical ground work for that nonsense to actually be accepted and revered as "Art", without his influence, people would be making it, but no one would be hanging it on walls in frames and charging admission to it.

Non-objective art is not the same as crap. No doubt a lot of crap has been made in that style, but that is true for other styles as well. Further, the story of the Emperor's new clothes is also already centuries old.

What "art" means to each individual is a subjective preference, but if the word "Art" is to have any consistent and useful meaning, than yeah, non-objective art IS the same as crap, of course, in varying degrees. Art can be appreciated on many different levels, style, execution, complexity, colorful richness, and on the message or non message it is trying to convey, and how well it conveys that message. Art indistinguishable from randomness is not art, it is crap, it is intellectual vomit. Give me a useful definition for art that includes New York City trash collected and hung on a wall in a frame and Rodin's "The Kiss", a definition that has any merit or worth beyond some self referential mystical notion and I'll reconsider my position.

[Matus1976]

This is without a doubt the biggest "reach" I've seen on this website.

Come now, really? You must not have been around very long (checking) your profile says you joined yesterday. So my biggest reach isnt much of one I suppose I'll have to try harder ;)

I think abstract art is great, sometimes, and I don't like or believe much of what Kant wrote. I'm sure my love for abstraction is "untainted" with regard to him. And the same is true for many of my artist and nonartist friends who like abstract art.

You do not need to be explicitly familiar with Kant or Plato to have ideas they promulgated integrated into your ideas of art.

I have not seen any "abstract" art (in the sense you are using it, I think) that I have ever liked, in fact for most of my life the very existence of it, and the fact it was called "Art" made me not like any art. But good art, imo, uses 'abstraction'

There was once a poster here who was banished for plagiarism. He wrote stuff like the above and justified it with lots of really misguided information, much of which he stole from others. What he and other write is unimportant, though, because the abstraction battle was fought and won by its proponants long ago, and the victory won't be undone. Posters on websites and objectivist "art critics" are wasting their time with regard to abstraction, and exist in some private vacuum they regard as "the real truth about godawful abstraction" or "the heroic defense of realist art against any and all philistines".

Jim Shay

I was here for the disgusting Victor debacle, but what does this have to do with anything? Are you suggested my comment is plagiarism? Or are you just taking us down a ride on your train of thought complete with track jumping and derailments?

Can you define your use of "abstraction" here, so we can be sure we are talking about the same thing?

[Ellen Stuttle]

Chronological order doesn't work so easy, Kandinsky's Black Spot (abstract), 1912; Duchamp's The Fountain (the urinal), 1917, forerunner to the postmodern movement; Malevich, White on White (abstract), 1918. Picasso would paint a cubist work and neo-classical work in the same year, which bursts the idea that he went from realism towards abstraction. The history is not a neat progression, rather I think individual artists pick up ideas that appeal to them, and if their interest and spirit holds, they simply run with it, or exhausted the idea or visual idea.

Thanks much for the reply and the info.

And, its a funny providence of art, but artists don't necessarily explicitly translate aesthetic theory into art works--but they can grasp aesthetic theories by what other artists do. It feels a lot like osmosis, you absorb the ideas through visuals. It's like being up on fads, and fashion styles.

I think that's mostly how it works in art, except that often the pioneers of what comes to be labeled as a trend have explicit theories -- which don't necessarily translate into what they in fact DO.

Edit: PS: "... isn't all art "abstract"?"

Glad you smiled. ;-)

I have other comments I want to make -- on both this thread and the other one you started -- but I might not have time for the next couple days. A busy couple days ahead on the Anti-AGWA front. ("AGWA" is Larry's extended, from AGW, acronym for "anthropogenic-global-warming alarmism" -- or, if written as "AGWAs", for "anthropogenic-global-warming alarmists.")

Ellen

PS to Matus: "Jim" is Jim Shay, who's previously posted on other art threads. He isn't a newcomer.

PPS to Jim: How come the new user account? Did you forget your password or something? Maybe you could get the new post added to your previous account, so as to maintain continuity for searches.

___

Edited July 23, 2008 by Ellen Stuttle

[Dragonfly]

My point is that Dragonfly's bold assertion as to why we have non-objective art -- and as to the irrelevance of Kant to the development of the type -- is far from adequate to demonstrate the substance of the assertion.

I think that in the actual, factual historical development Kant has to have been relevant to the history of abstract art, considering the historic sequence Kant->Hegel->Marx in the history of philosophy and the known significance of Marx to some of the pioneers of abstract art, and I don't know how one could demonstrate what the development of art history would have been if it had been different from what it was.

And that is just the point: if you don't know what the development of art history would have been if Kant had not lived, you cannot show that there is a causal connection between Kant's writings and abstract art. Cherry picking a few quotes here and there and linking them to establish a causal connection is not science. What does it mean that Marx may have been significant to some of the pioneers of abstract art? No doubt Marx has also been very significant to the pioneers of Soviet Realism. In the same way we can just as easily construct a link between Kant and Nazi art. Soviet realism and Nazi art are both examples of a realism that glorifies the heroic in man, and Nazism considered abstract art as "entartete Kunst", so we see a clear connection between Kant and the Objectivist theory of art, don't we? Of course this kind of reasoning is an example of pseudoscience, it ignores the well-known warning that correlation is not the same as causation. If there seems to be a link between event A and event B, supposing that A occurs before B, we cannot just conclude that A causes B. The link may be accidental, or may be due to a common cause of A and B, or the link may be established "backwards": an artist who wants to find support for his art theory may look in the literature of the past to find a justification for his ideas. It's not up to me to disprove that Kant was ultimately the cause of the emergence of abstract art, that is the task of the person who makes that extraordinary claim. Well, good luck.

[Guyau]

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?

Michael D,

I began studying the Critique of Pure Reason in the spring of 1971. Until very recently, I continued to study only Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Lately I have gotten the right books on my shelf for study of his ethical philosophy. Two of them I would strongly recommend are these:

Practical Philosophy in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant.

Mary J. Gregor, translator. 1996.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0521654084..._pt#reader-link

Kantian Ethics

Allen W. Wood

Cambridge 2008

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0521671140..._pt#reader-link

My first impression is that the end-in-itself Kant fixes on is rationality. As you know, the end-in-itself that Rand fixes on is life. Fertile ground here for a serious comparative study.

Kant notes for the clicking:

http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/ArticleDi...s/1904.shtml#14

http://www.solopassion.com/node/1857

http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/in...amp;#entry45835

~~~~~~~~~~~

In his JARS essay “Ayn Rand and the Metaphysics of Kant” (2000), George Walsh gives a brisk summary of the representations by Rand and by Peikoff of Kant’s philosophy and its sociological effects. For Rand’s remarks, the sources are “For the New Intellectual” (1961), “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology” (1966–67), “Brief Summary” (1971. The Objectivist 10(9):1–4), and “Causality v. Duty” (1974). For Peikoff’s remarks, the source is The Ominous Parallels (1982).

Prof. Walsh writes in his second endnote:

So far as the larger profession of Kant scholars is concerned, I am convinced that they would disagree sharply with the characterizations of Kant I have just cited from the Objectivist literature. Many are convinced that Kant was an advocate of reason. An advocate in what sense and against whom is another matter. The most recent case for Kant as an advocate of reason is to be found in O’Neill 1992, 280–305, especially 290. The author tells us that reason as vindicated by Kant will save us from the extremes of postmodernism on the one hand and foundationalism on the other.

O’Neill, O. 1992. Vindicating Reason. In The Cambridge Companion to Kant. P. Guyer, editor.

Edited July 24, 2008 by Stephen Boydstun