Derrida Economimesis: An outline and comments [not completed]

On one level Derrida's "Economimesis" is just a close reading of Kant's Analytic of the Beautiful in the Critique of Judgment (with some side moves to the Introduction).  It is sometimes difficult when reading this text to determine when Kant leaves off and Derrida begins.  There are many lengthy quotes by Kant and some of the explications of Kant are fairly straightforward.  Sometimes one gets the feeling that Derrida approves of what Kant is saying, but he may not outright say this.  Economimesis is a deconstructive critique of Kant's great work.  The strategy Derrida uses is to note various oppositions in Kant's thought and then show how those oppositions are questioned, sometimes dissolved, and so forth.  The reading is extremely difficult, but not without value. It appears in the textbook I am using this semester Continental Aesthetics:  Romanticism to Postmodernism, and I will cite from that.  I cannot pretend to be a Derrida specialist:  this is just my best effort to understand what is going on here.  I will number the paragraphs.

1. It is usually helpful in reading Derrida to focus on the key Derridean (i.e. in this case non-Kantian) terms being used.  For example in the first paragraph Derrida mentions politics and political economy, and of course this relates to the made-up term used as title to the essay.  Derrida observes that politics acts upon this discourse, although it does not play a prominent role in Kant's actual discussion.  A typical move for the deconstructionist is to show the underlying political context.  This is something that deconstructionism shares with Marxism.  Derrida suggests that the motifs here go back to Plato and Aristotle in one chain of discourse, and to other philosophical chains as well (for example, Marxism), although, now talking in a metaphilosophical may, the same concept will have a different meaning in different sequences, its identity based on the way it functions in the particular discourse.  He talks in the end of "elaboration, that is dislocation, by the structure of the parergon" which means simply that it is subject to deconstruction.
2. Production as Mimesis.  We pretend to find a point of departure in examples or locations which are neither empirical nor metaempirical.
3. These locations are motivated by the concept of economimesis, a term created to combine mimesis and economics, and although they seem unrelated to each other, there is a systematic link.  (The opposition between these two is deconstructed.  This may be the primary deconstruction of the essay.)  Further, with respect to economy, there is no opposition between economy of circulation (regular economy) and general economy (the use of the term "economy" that is much broader and metaphorical...relations of exchange on a broad cultural level.)  
4. The locations in the text are two statements about economics in the first restrictive sense, i.e. about salary.  Although such statements are rare in the text they are not insignificant.  The theory of mimesis is bracketed by these statements.
5. One is in section 43 of the Critique of Judgment where free art is defined in opposition to mercenary art.  The other is in 51 where the free arts are independent of salary.  
6. The first statement is related to the definition of art, which comes late in the book.  Kant had just said that natural beauty is superior to art from a moral point of view since nature speaks to us symbolically through its beautiful forms.  But this also leads us to think of nature as though it were art production.  
7. Kant seems to define art as not nature "thus subscribing to the inherited, ossified, simplified, opposition between techne and physis" and the related one between the play of freedom and mechanical necessity.  Derrida will work on deconstructing these distinctions as well.  His negativity about the opposition can be seen in the quoted adjectives.   He first observes that "analogy annuls this opposition" since, for Kant. Nature dictates what is free in production of art through Genius.  Genius receives its rules from nature.  Previous philosophers, especially Plato, have attacked imitation in art, but this is undermined, as it turns out that nature, in giving rules to the genius, "folds itself, returns to itself, reflects itself through art."  So, although direct imitation of nature is perhaps still condemned, there is this indirect imitation through nature's power over genius.  [I am not sure I agree with Derrida's analysis here since Kant seems to be saying rather that it is the nature of the genius that gives the rule to art, not some external nature, not nature in the wild, for example.]  So both the oppositions of physis (nature) and mimesis (imitative art) and physis and tecne (craft) are overcome.  Note that Derrida is saying that Kant is doing this deconstruction.  As in other writings there is a sense that everything Derrida is bringing out is already, strangely, there in Kant.
8.  Derrida speaks of "apparently irreducible oppositions" which are finally dissolved.  He also asks what political economy is advantaged by this dissolution.  I am not sure what this means:  perhaps a better political system, a freer less capitalist one would be advantaged
9. To dissolve them these oppositions must be produced and multiplied.  This is Derrida's methodology:  he shows more and more oppositions and then dissolves them.
10. An example of this multiplication is within art in general where the opposition forms a hierarchy in which one side is always classified as more valuable, for example one art as more properly art than another. (Collingwood could be said to make such a distinction, i.e. between amusement art and art properly speaking.)  Derrida will seek to dissolve this too.
11. Kant says that we should only call "art" the production of freedom by means of freedom, using free will and reason.  Thus the product of bees is not art.  This humanist theme treats animality in general under certain examples, in this case the bee, which is opposed to the human.  The human is always seen as associated with reason, freedom, etc.  The other is not.  The concept of art is constructed to raise man from "below."  So Aristotle argues that only man is capable of mimesis.   What this is leading to is a deconstruction (which is usually just a questioning) of the standard duality between man and animal.  Derrida also finds a "ruse" in this:  that what is unique to man is said to be grounded in absolute naturalism and "indifferentialism" which is to say that differentiation is effaced by opposition. The ruse is the effacement. Derrida wants to go the other way, replacing opposition with difference.
12. So bees have no art, or have it only by analogy.
13. Art is also distinguished from science.  This is another of the multiplying oppositions which needs deconstruction.  In art it is not enough to have knowledge to do it.  For science, to know is to know how.  But high-wire dancing is different:  it is not enough to know about it.  Art is like that, on this view.
14. For Kant, art cannot then be reduced to craft.  The craftsman exchanges the value of his work for a salary.  But art is liberal, free:  it is not part of economics, not exchangeable.  Derrida somewhat confusingly says that liberal art and mercenary art are not then opposite terms.  I think he means they are not exactly opposite since liberal art is considered to be more art, to have more value, and precisely because it does not have economic value.  Derrida will deconstruct this too.  Mercenary art is, for Kant, only art analogically.  And it is like the productivity of bees, lacking such things as freedom and play of imagination.  So the opposition here is play and work -- also to be deconstructed.
15. So, for Kant, free art is more human than salaried work as with the work of bees.  The free man is not homo oeconomicus.
16. 2. The free man may use the work of man insofar as he is not free.  This is, of course, the basis for capitalist exploitation.
17. 3.  But Kant also must distinguish reproductive and productive imagination, the later being free and playful.  
18. Poetry is the summit of fine art, taking productive imagination to its extreme.  But mimesis comes in here too since it "deploys the brute power of its invention only by listening to nature."  So nature replaces God in the enlightenment ideology:  we have now "onto-theological humanism."  Genius takes this productivity to its highest point:  it both gives rules and also (in a seemingly contradictory fashion) has rules dictated to it by nature.  Thus the distinction between liberal and mercenary art breaks with mimesis as imitation only to identify itself with nature itself freely unfolding.  The idea of genius as creating its own rules through nature is the key to Derrida's deconstruction.
19. The free play also offers enjoyment which should be distinguished from pleasure.  The definition that Kant uses to distinguish Fine Arts "does not proceed by symmetrical opposition" since Fine Arts do not all belong to the liberal arts some of which are Sciences.
20. What then characterizes the Fine Arts?
21. An art that produces the beautiful need not be beautiful itself.  But it is connected since "the relation to the product cannot, structurally, be cut off from the relation to a productive subjectivity..."  This is implied by the signature of the artist on his or her work.  So the beautiful is not only the object but also the work that goes into making it.  The signature is in the "parergonal thickness of the frame":  neither wholly out or in the work.  The beautiful is also in the passage between the process and the product: it "depends on some paregonal effect."  Thus Fine-Arts are "always of the frame and the signature."  Derrida thinks Kant would not endorse this but it is consistent with his system.
22.   To say an art is fine one implies "a repetition, a possibility of beginning again."
23. The repetition is of a pleasure.  Science cannot be beautiful just as art cannot have scientific value, and, for Kant, the beauty of a scientific statement would just be a witticism.
24.   Science must do without wit, art, beauty and pleasure.  But Derrida will seek to deconstruct this set of distinctions too.
25. He does this (i.e. shows how Kant himself deconstructs it) by turning to the Introduction where pleasure is in the distant origin of knowledge.  
26. This"immemorial time" is not a time of consciousness.  Here pleasure was not separated from knowledge.  We are led back to "the buried or repressed origin of science, that is to the science of science, to the point where all the distinctions, oppositions, limits remarked by the Kantian critique lose their pertinence."  Deconstruction is a matter of going back to this time.  Derrida notes sweeping consequences here.  [Is Derrida advocating something like Rousseau's return to the state of nature?]
27. So, for Kant, the Fine Arts give pleasure and not enjoyment, science gives neither, and the fine arts (small letters) give pleasure without enjoyment.  [This distinction between Fine Arts and fine arts is not familiar to me in reading Kant.]
28. Mechanical art neither seeks nor gives pleasure:  it is opposed to aesthetic art which ends in pleasure.
29. Aesthetic art, too, splits into hierarchic species:  there is aesthetic art that has no relation to the beautiful, e.g. the agreeable arts, which have enjoyment as their aim, whereas the Fine Arts seek pleasure without enjoyment.  The arts of enjoyment include conversation, party games, etc.
30. Pure pleasure without empirical enjoyment belongs to judgment and reflection.  Derrida seeks to deconstruct this distinction too [as I have in my work in everyday aesthetics].
31.  This pleasure is according to the order of a society, a reflective intersubjectivity.
32. So what is the relation with economimesis?  This taking pleasure belongs to the essence of man capable of pure non-exchangeable productivity...not in terms of use value or exchange values (to use the terms of Marx.)
33. "nevertheless this pure productivity of the inexchangeable liberates a sort of immaculate commerce"  i.e. universal communicability between free subjects.  This is the pure economy of the free man.
34. Mimesis comes in since a certain "as if" re-establishes it at the point where it appears detached.  Fine Arts must have the appearance of nature, must resemble effects of natural action:  the purposiveness of its form must seem to be as free as if it were the product of pure nature.
35. What is the scope of the "as if"? (436)
36.   The less pure productivity depends on nature the more it resembles nature: mimesis here is not the representation of one thing by another:  not the relation of two products but of two productions, two freedoms.  The artist then imitates acts of nature.  So the mimesis displays the identification of the human with the divine, a commerce between divine and human artist.  The commerce is mimesis "in the strict sense, a play, a mask, an identification with the other on stage" not a copy.  So true mimesis is between two producers.  Imitation, by contrast, is servile.
37. This secures the hierarchical opposition between free and mercenary art  "Economimesis puts everything in its place, starting with the instinctual work of animals without language and ending with God, passing by way of the mechanical arts, mercenary art, liberal arts, aesthetic arts, and the Fine-Arts."  That is, it establishes the hierarchy.
38.  So the structure of mimesis effaces the opposition between nature and art.  [I find this confusing since in the preceding paragraph it established a hierarchy.  Is hierarchy different from opposition?]  We rediscover the root of pleasure in knowledge.  Derrida then diverges to a discussion of Aristotle on mimesis.  For Aristotle mimesis is essential to man.  But Kant thinks imitation is aping:  the ape cannot mime.  So Aristotle is back at the joining of knowledge and pleasure.  He sees man as different from other animals in being good at imitation, and taking pleasure in it.
39. Why are Aristotle and Kant different here? They are not so different.  Kant does not exclude the unity of pleasure and knowledge:  he merely re-assigns it to the unconscious at some immemorial time.  Also, here, nature is an art and natural beauty a product of that.  Kant says nature was beautiful when it was seen as art and that art cannot be beautiful unless we are conscious of it as art but see it as nature.  
40.   Art is beautiful to the degree it is like productive nature.  Kant again has led us back to a time before his critique and before all of the disassociations and oppositions. 
41.    "The beautiful brings productive nature back to itself, it qualifies a spectacle that artist-nature has given itself.  God has given himself to be seen in a spectacle,  just as if he had masked - had shown - himself."   This paragraph is difficult.  It may be indicating a theology.  Derrida speaks of "an immense liberality which however can only give itself in itself to be consumed."  I wonder whether this is something he favors, i.e. as a virtue.
42.   But how can man's freedom be said to resemble that of God? It resembles by not imitating.
43.  The mimesis can only proceed by exemplars.
44. Thy genius naturalizes economimesis.  It is produced and given by nature. It is a gift of nature.  "Nature produces freedom for itself and gives it to itself" and in giving non-conceptual rules of art, i.e. exemplars, the genius reflects nature.
45.   The originality of the genius and its exemplarity must incite a certain imitation (back to Aristotle)  but one that avoids plagiarism.  We have free imitation of a freedom of genius which freely imitates divine freedom.  [Note that this is a rejection of Plato in that the string of imitations does not reduce freedom]  Kant distinguishes between imitation and copy, the two terms only being different by one letter.
46. Then when nature has "detached genius" everything is naturalized, interpreted as nature, "the content of empirical culturalism, the political economy of art"...[it is not clear what is happening here]
47. The second remark on salary distinguishes between the orator and the poet.
48.  The poet is at the summit analogous to God.He gives more than he promises.  He breaks the circular economy (traditional economics.)  A transeconomy is a general economy of the subject says Nick Mansfield.
49. Economesis "unfolds itself there to infinity" as in Hegel:  "An infinite circle plays [with] itself and uses human play to reappropriate the gift for itself."  This may refer to Hegel's Absolute.  The poet receives from nature/God the power to give more than he promises.   This "surplus value" makes its return to the infinite source.  [I wonder whether Derrida believes in God.  This sounds a bit too mystical for my taste.] And this passes through the voice.  [The next part is very poetic and the only thing one can do is quote.]  As a result the opposition between restricted and general economy is effaced.  He speaks of "passage of the infinity between gift and debt."  What is debt?
50.  Giving more than he promises is something conceptual.  The genius is not paid but God supports him with speech and in return for gratitude.  God gives him surplus.
51. This is poetic since God is a poet.  [Why doesn't Derrida deconstruct this hierarchy God/poet too?]
52. This structure has its analogue in the city:  the poet must eat, must sustain the labor force.  He receives subsidies from the sun-king, Frederick the Great.  Kant's use of Frederick's poem is no accident.  There is an economics behind this, and a hierarchy.
53.  The poem of Frederick describes the overabundance of a solar source.  The various helio-poetics of Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Bataille form an analogical chain.  
54. Derrida quotes from the poem and Kant's footnote about Isis as Mother Nature:  here the concept of virtue diffuses many sublime and restful feelings which not definite concept can match.
55. Exemplorality.  Perhaps we are approaching the embouchure..
56.  opening onto economimesis.
57.   pure productivity is "a sort of gift for itself of God who makes a present of himself to himself"
58. The analogy between God and Poet finds its origin in the logos, reason, word, the embouchure.
59. Now it must be deconstructed.
60. Nature furnishes rules to genius as orders.  The discursive metaphors in the text (nature says) are analogies of analogy: nature is properly logos towards which one must always return.  "Analogy is always language."
61. Genius agrees to be nature's secretary, inspired.  It has no concept or knowledge.  
62.  Nature also the the product of the divine genius.  Productive imagination creates a second nature.  Genius, first nature, and God.  "Such hierarchical analogy forms a society of the logos, a sociology of genius, a logoarchy."  
63. What does it mean for analogy to be a rule.  Derrida gets very poetic/witty here:  "It means what it means and that it says that it means wheat it wants and that it wants what it wants, for example,"
64. To continue:  "It is by example that it means that it means and that it says that it means that it wants and that it wants what it wants by example."  
65. Analogy between the rule of art and the moral rule:  that analogy is the rule.    But the articulated play of this analogy is itself "subject to a law of supplemenarity"
66.   The purpose-lessness leads us back to ourselves:  we seek purpose within:  we slurp, giving ourselves orders which no longer come from outside.
67.   This is a movement of idealizing interiorisation:  for Kant we seek it in our ultimate purpose.
68.  Not finding our purpose in our aesthetic experience we fold ourselves back towards the purpose of our Da-Sein (Heidegger: Being in the World):  we are there to respond to a vocation of autonomy/morality.  There there of our Dasein first determined by this purpose.
69.  Here analogies multiply concerning the language of nature. We take a moral interest in the beautiful of nature:  for nature harbors a principle of harmony between its productions and our disinterested pleasure:  a harmony between purposiveness of nature and our delight.
70. How does one announce the adherence between adherence and non-adherence?  Derrida is speaking here of the adherence of interest and disinterest.
71. By means of signs.  This is the "primary place of signification in the third Critique."  Nature announces to us by signs and traces there must be a harmonious agreement between its purposiveness and our disinterested delight.  
72. Meditation on this pleasure provokes a moral interest in the beautiful.  Derrida:  strange this interest taken in disinterestedness, moral revenue from production without interest, moral surplus value of the without, related to the trace and sign of nature.  We may be assured our stocks are on the moral rise.
73. The account may seem too studied regarding the interpretation of the cipher of beautiful natural forms.
74.  The without of pure detachment is a language nature speaks to us:  but this, in common with Heraclitus, causes the parergon to strain.
75.   The in-significant non-language of forms, silence, is a language between nature and man
76. The charms\, colors and sounds for example, also seem to converse:  the white color of lilies dispose us to ideas of innocence.
77.  The trace and wink of nature do not have to be objectively regulated by conceptual science.  It is our interest in nature's communicating that matters:  we believe in the sincerity of the ciphered language.  And what speaks through the mouth of the poet also must be veridical.  If a poet speaks of a nightingale's song but it is really a trickster, that is ignoble.  Oral examples are important here:  Kant says it is ignoble to confine ourselves to eating and drinking.  Exemplorality is exemplary orality.  There is an allergy i the mouth between pure taste and actual tasting. But would not disgust, turning against actual taste, be the origin of pure taste?
78. 
    
79.  

Paragraphs 34 and 35 in Kant's Critique of Judgment

Paragraph 34 stresses that there can be no objective principles of taste.  Such a principle would make it possible to deduce by syllogism that something is beautiful.  But Kant believes that to experience beauty I must immediately feel pleasure in the presentation of the object, and not be persuaded of its beauty by proof.  Critics, as Hume says, may reason better than cooks, but they still cannot expect to establish the value of a work of art by way of proof.  They can only expect their judgments to be based on reflection on the proper state of their immediate pleasure or pain in response to the object.  Kant stresses that all precepts and rules need to be rejected here.  (This may go against Hume, who does allow empirically grounded principles of taste.)   

To be sure, reasoning can help critics perfect and extend their judgments of taste.  But rather than finding a universal formula, critics, when acting according to their proper role, investigate the cognitive faculties and their practice of making judgments, as well as explaining, by examples, the form of purposiveness which "constitutes the beauty of the object." (The latter seems to be what we normally expect of critics, although to see the objects of criticism as simply examples seems to put it the wrong way around.)  

The critique of taste, then, is "the art or science of reducing to rules the reciprocal relation between the understanding and the imagination in the given representation." This is a phenomenological point, a point about the structure of our experience of an aesthetic object.   The representation in our mind, say of the Virginia State House by Thomas Jefferson, will exhibit in it this relation between understanding and imagination.  The reference to "reducing to rules" is puzzling since we are supposed to reject objective principles, but see below.  The reciprocity of the relation is also explained below. 

The critique of taste will explain the accordance or discordance between the two faculties, imagination and understanding.  It is an art if it only shows by examples; whereas it is a science if it derives this possibility from the nature of these faculties.  Here, by “science,” Kant means the sort of thing he is doing is doing here.   He calls this "Transcendental Critique."  The Transcendental Critique derives the subjective principle of taste as an a priori principle.  This is all Kant means by "reducing to rules." As art, the critique of taste applies physiological (psychological) rules concerning how taste actually proceeds.  He also thinks it "criticizes the products of beautiful art..." although it is not clear how it could do this.

 

#35 The principle of taste is the subjective principle of judgment in general.  

The subjective condition of all judgments is the faculty of judgment itself.  For beauty to exist there has to be an accord of the two representative powers: the imagination and the understanding.  And “because no concept of the object lies here at the basis of the judgment, it can only consist in the subsumption of the imagination itself…under the conditions that the understanding requires to pass from intuition to concepts.”  Moreover, “because the freedom of the imagination consists in the fact that it schematizes without any concept, the judgment of taste must rest on a mere sensation of the reciprocal activity of the imagination in its freedom and the understanding with its conformity to law.”  This is hard to parse out.  The judgment of taste rests on a feeling in which we judge the object by the purposiveness of its representation in respect of the furtherance of the cognitive faculty in its free play.  In taste there is subsumption not of intuitions under concepts but of the faculty of intuitions, that is, the imagination, under the faculty of concepts, the understanding.  This is freedom harmonizing with conformity to law. To discover the ground of a deduction of taste we need to consider the form of this kind of judgment.

This all goes along with the tenor of the rest of the Critique of Judgment.  Taste is a yin-yang thing:  it involves both the imagination and the understanding, both freedom and law in a reciprocal relationship.  Kant elsewhere talks about the need for academic training for the genius artist, a similar kind of balance.   

Kant says "the judgment of taste is not determinable by concepts" for "it is based only on the subjective formal condition of a judgment in general."  He further says "the subjective condition of all judgments is the faculty of judgment itself."   

It is puzzling exactly what is going on here.  I think that Kant is stressing that in judgments of taste there is a movement from intuition to concepts as we also find in objective reasoning, and yet the concepts at the end of the line are indeterminate and hence not true concepts of the understanding.  Later, these will be referred to as aesthetic ideas.  

What however should we make of the following sentence: "It [the judgment of taste] must therefore rest on a feeling, which makes us judge the object by the purposiveness of the representation (by which an object is given) in respect of the furtherance of the cognitive faculty in its free play."  Kant seems to be saying that the judgment of taste rests on some fusion of the purposiveness in the object with the sense that free play furthers our cognitive powers, a fusion of something seemingly objective and something else seemingly subjective.   It is also hard to know what it means to subsume the faculty of intuitions under the faculty of concepts so that the first "in its freedom harmonizes with the latter in its conformity to law" and how this relates to appropriate appreciation of an art object. 

Well, as you can see, I have not fully understood these two chapters, but this is the best I can do for now.

Interested in learning more?  See my book:  Thomas Leddy The Extraordinary in the Ordinary:  The Aesthetics of Everyday Life.  Broadview Press, 2012.  Available at Amazon in paperback, and an electronic version at google where you can also find most of the first 32 pages including the table of contents.  You can also buy it from Broadview. 

JAAC Special Issue on the seventy-fifth anniversary part 1

I had originally titled this blog "Aesthetics Today" with the idea that I would make comments on up-to-date material, and in reality it became a place for me to try out any ideas I had in aesthetics.  But today I want to comment on something quite up to date -- the special issue of the The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism titled "Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Issue."  There will be nothing terribly organized about these comments and I will not try to summarize the claims made by the various authors since these are readily available in the abstracts they have provided.  I will begin by saying that this issue is well worth reading.   I will proceed article by article. 

Kathleen Marie Higgins writes in "Global Aesthetics -What Can We Do?" on something very dear to me -  the idea that aesthetics should not just be limited to Western aesthetics but should include in a systematic way aesthetic theories from throughout the world.  Last year I taught a Philosophy of Art class for the first time with this emphasis.  Higgins had already been an influence on me by way of a textbook she put together several years ago called Perspectives on Aesthetics.  It was partly an interest in global aesthetics that led me to think more and more in the late 80s and early 90s about everyday aesthetics.  For instance, I early wrote a paper on gardens as art which was in response to a paper by Mara Miller (who later wrote an important book on gardens as art), and Miller is also a specialist in Japanese Aesthetics.  Yuriko Saito's work has also long had a very strong influence on my own not only in her interest in Japanese aesthetics and everyday aesthetics but also in her work on the aesthetic of the natural environment.  In my World Aesthetics class I also incorporated many articles on various aesthetic traditions form the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics.  I will close with one quote from Higgins:  "We might take our expanded horizons as points of departure for new theories that relate to similarities and differences....If 'aesthetics' is interpreted as being global in scope, new theoretical discussions are likely to proliferate..."  (346)  Global Aesthetics, as described so well by Higgins, can only enhance aesthetics generally speaking.  Ultimately aesthetics should be global, and we are right now making baby steps in that direction.

Paul Guyer "Seven-Five Years of Kant....and Counting"

Guyer's work in aesthetics, especially on Kant, is very high quality.  I have been reading his history of modern aesthetics which has been a rich source for me of instruction and insight.  In this work Guyer explores the history of Kant scholarship within the JAAC.  Guyer, I believe rightly, places considerable emphasis on Kant's notion of "aesthetic ideas."  In this regard, it is interesting to think that there is a metaphysical dimension to Kant's analysis connected with Kant's thought that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good because, as Guyer puts it, "of analogies between the experience of beauty and moral experience, above all the analogy between freedom of the imagination and freedom of the will." (360)  I find something intriguing about this.  Perhaps there is a deep tie between the two in terms of the notion of freedom:  it seems that when we are truly creative in art, or feel fully engaged in the experience of art, or of nature, we experience ourselves as free.  I do not quite understand the relationship between this freedom and moral duty, but I suspect that behaving morally is a matter of treating one's life as an other-centered art, the "art of living" as Liu Yuedi puts it.  

I am not happy however with Guyer's second point, which basically advocates an idea of Kant's that the naturally beautiful provides a  sign that nature "has our own interests at heart."  This, it seems to me, is precisely the kind of metaphysics Kant tried to overcome in the Critique of Pure Reason.  Whereas Guyer thinks that "perhaps in fact...it is...natural for us to make such reflections" i.e. reflections that there is a God-like being who has our best interests at heart, I think that we need to avoid this illusion (as Freud rightly called it).  Nature does not care about us.  There is no evidence that it cares about anything.  At best the only thing we can say is that we cannot avoid thinking of the world as possibly guided by goodness and that this may somehow be an overlay on our feelings of freedom associated with creative activity and in the art of living.  Only the later can provide any grounds for self-improvement.

Guyer's overall thesis, however, is well taken: as he concludes the paper:  "Kant's aesthetic theory ...combines logical and linguistic analysis, psychology and phenomenology, and metaphysics in both the older and the newer sense."  I would only argue that the metaphysics in the older sense problematic.  However, there is great value in Kant's metaphysics in the newer sense.      

Saito's Everyday Aesthetics revisited: call for the in-between

So it has been ten years since Yuriko Saito's Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2007) came out, a seminal work in the burgeoning new field of everyday aesthetics.  She will be having a new book on the topic coming out soon.  But perhaps now is a time to revisit some of the issues raised especially in the first chapter of Everyday Aesthetics with the understanding that this is not necessarily her current position.  The chapter is titled "Neglect of Everyday Aesthetics."  It is available here.  Most of what Saito says in this chapter I agree with and it should be understood that the purpose of this post is simply to use her piece as a jumping off point for reflection, as I have in the past.  Saito makes a strong distinction between two kinds of experience in everyday aesthetics. One kind is the "stand out" experience, roughly similar to Dewey's idea of "an experience."  The second is another set of reactions we might, and often do, have to sensuous and/or design qualities of objects.  These would include the reaction of seeing an object as dirty and wishing to clean it up.

I accept Saito's expansion of the concept of the aesthetic to include these kinds of responses.  There is a dialogue going on here since Saito may have been partly inspired in this by an early article of mine on neatness and messiness as aesthetic qualities: “Everyday Surface Aesthetic Qualities:  'Neat,' 'Messy,' 'Clean,' 'Dirty',” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53:3 (1995) 259-268.  This was reprinted in The Aesthetics of Human Environments  ed Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant (Ontario:  Broadview Press, 2007).  What I currently want to push is an in-between dimension of aesthetic experience, something between the two extremes Saito posits:  a domain that I believe is fundamentally important not only for everyday aesthetics but for aesthetics in general.  In the tradition of Karl Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts and John Dewey in Art as Experience, but also of Thich Nhat Hanh on mindfulness, I want to call for expansion of this in-between domain, one that overcomes the alienation (usually based on exploitation as Marx would put it, or inadequate social arrangements as Dewey would put it) that characterizes experience at the low or "practical" end of the aesthetic spectrum.  I also see the three levels of aesthetic experience,  (1) the practical, (3) what I will call, after Buddhist thought, the mindful, and (4) the special/extraordinary, as dynamically inter-related.   So, whereas Saito favors a dichotomy between spectator-like experiences and experiences that "prompt us toward actions, such as cleaning, discarding, purchasing..."  I posit this, the middle "mindfulness," realm.  Following Nhat Hanh in his discussion of washing dishes with mindfulness and Marx in his notion of non-alienated labor, I think that there is a problem at the lowest level of the aesthetic:  a problem if the cleaning or discarding is not mindful, the purchasing is based on false consciousness in a society of consumerism (as critical theorist followers of Marx argued), and so on.  Low level activities of the sort that happen when one cleans for entirely functional purposes or purchases clothes just for comfort, usefulness, or getting ahead, become enhanced when they are mindful of aesthetic qualities. This means that I favor a notion of low-level contemplation, for example contemplative as opposed to mindless shopping. Whereas Saito associates the idea of contemplation only with the high level of fine art experience or contemplation of natural beauty, I think that mindful washing of dishes, for example, is contemplative in its own way.  

One difficulty here is that Saito associates contemplation and disinterestedness and with rejection of the proximal senses of taste, smell, and touch.  This is not my approach:  I see contemplation as applicable to multi-sensory experience.  Contemplative aesthetic experience of sexual intimacy for example is the preferred mode. Thus, on my view, one can take an aesthetic attitude towards everyday phenomena, and this can be a more valuable, actually is generally a more valuable, way to approach such phenomena, as long as it does not interfere with getting the job done.

Actually, then, I disagree with the notion that actions such as cleaning, discarding, and purchasing without any contemplative dimension are "typically the way in which aesthetics functions in everyday life."  They may in fact be typically the way in Western alienated capitalist society.  But they may not be in other societies, for example in Denmark or Bhutan.  Moreover, a better society would be one in which the contemplative or disinterested dimension of aesthetic experience of the everyday would be enhanced.  So, to put the point in another way, when Saito says that she wants to include not only aesthetic experiences of art, however broadly defined, but also "those responses that propel us toward everyday decisions and actions without any accompanying contemplative appreciation" (11) I would count this domain as, yes, aesthetic, but only at the very lowest level, and not something to be encouraged.  It is at the mid-level, where responses such as cleaning and choosing are not "almost automatic" as Saito puts it, but are mindful and at least minimally examples of contemplative appreciation because mindful of aesthetic qualities, that a happy life is constituted.  (I also think that other things that Saito says in her first chapter are actually more in accord with this position.) 

I understand the motive behind Saito's dichotomy: the need to move away from the hierarchy in which everything is seen in terms of Western fine art.  Saito eloquently demolishes that position. What I am offering is hopefully the dialectical next stage.  As with Saito, I also think my approach is more in accord with a multi-cultural, global viewpoint.  But this is because I think that in most traditional or tribal cultures, and in many other non-Western cultures, the middle, mindful, aesthetic domain, plays a more important role in life.  I agree with those people who believe that we should be more like the Navajo or the Bali people in their approaches to aesthetic experience, as much as we can given the Western-based world that surrounds us.  It is the Western mindset that promotes the dichotomy of humdrum practical vs. high art aesthetic.  I think that ultimately both Saito and I wish to undercut this dichotomy.

I also agree with Saito in attacking the tendency to see the aesthetic either as "highly specialized and isolated from our daily concerns, namely art, or else something trivial and frivolous, not essential to our lives, such as beautification and decoration" (12) and I agree that the low-level experiences that we are both interested in are important for practical purposes.  

However, although we both want to "restore aesthetics to its proper place in our everyday" lives (12), and reclaim its status in shaping the world, I wish to do so by encouraging and enhancing mindful and contemplative approaches to the everyday, whereas Saito is concerned that these approaches are too associated with an art-centered approach to aesthetics.  I agree that art-centered aesthetics can "compromise the rich diversity of out aesthetic life" but am not convinced that it always does.  Nor am I convinced that what she calls "experience-oriented aesthetics" (12) is detrimental to a sound everyday aesthetics as long as "experience" is not just understood in such a way as to privilege the distal senses or extreme forms of disinterested approaches to aesthetic objects. 

I also agree with Saito that "art is almost always regarded [in Western aesthetic theory] as the quintessential model for an aesthetic object" (13) and I believe that she is absolutely right to pursue this line.  (This makes me consistent with her quote from my 1995 article in support of her position.)  Saito presents an excellent discussion of the problems of art-centered aesthetics in the section with that name.  

My only caveat would be a response to Korsmeyer's approach to the aesthetics of food. Saito quotes Korsmeyer with approval as saying "the addition of taste and food to the domain of established aesthetic theory presents problems:  both inevitably come off as distinctly second rate, trailing the distance senses and fine art."  I just cannot agree that it is never right to understand food in terms of fine art:  my own view that something like the El Bulli dining experience is at the same level of high art as the best example of Japanese tea ceremony, and for the same reasons.  We must not turn our Western prejudices against the proximal senses into a determination of what makes fine art:  i.e. that fine art must use the distant senses. 

Nor do we have to see all food preparation as fine art in order to concede that some is.  Those who see the highest level Michelin star type dining experiences as somehow second-rate in relation to fine art painting are missing the point.  Saito further quotes Korsmeyer that "the concept of art, dominated as it is today by the idea of fine art, is a poor category to capture the nature of foods and their consumption." (17)  This just seems a category mistake since food as a category is broad like photography as a category.  Most photography is not art, and even less is fine art, and yet this does not mean that photography cannot be fine art. Similarly if we want to broadly capture the nature of foods and their consumption it would be best to focus not on El Bulli but on the vast number of practices involving food.  I would venture to say that virtually any social practice:  dance, food, music, video games, advertising, religious ritual, etc., can have a fine art manifestation (can be a product of genius, in Kant's sense).  But most dance, food, music, etc. is not fine art.  In any case, I would not want to, as Korsmeyer puts it, "divert attention from the interesting ways in which the aesthetic importance of foods diverges from parallel values in art." (18)  Of course one of the things that food as fine art does is focus our attention on such "interesting ways" just as dance as fine art focuses our attention on features of dance that differentiate it from other art forms.       

Saito further quotes Wolfgang Welsh as holding that sport, for example, "cannot substitute for Schonberg, Pollock, or Goddard" which, in my view, is just plain silly, since (1) no one is calling for substitution, and (2) the correct comparison class is master artists. It is not sports against Pollock, but Pollock compared to the El Bulli master chef, Adria. 

Saito is also excellent in his list of various things that are associated with the paradigms of classical Western art and which do not apply to everyday aesthetics.  Putting the point negatively, she says that there are various features that make certain everyday aesthetic phenomena non-art, like "absence of definite and identifiable object-hood and authorship, our literal engagement, transience and impermanence of the object, and the primacy of practical values of the object" (17) although I am somewhat concerned about the notion of "primacy of practical values" which can be interpreted in different ways.  

Saito's discussion of frames as unique to art as opposed to everyday aesthetics is of particular interest.  Ronald Hepburn had once noted that non-art objects are frame-less and that we then become the creator of the aesthetic object:  the frameless character can, as Saito puts it, "be compensated by exercising our imagination and creativity in constituting the aesthetic object as we see fit." (19)  I agree with this, but then I also think that this means that we are then virtually framing the object and thereby treating it as if it were a work of art at least in respect to being something that is now unified and has an imaginative/creative dimension, although this time introduced to some extent by ourselves as viewers.  This is why I say in my book that artists are the greatest experts in the aesthetics of everyday life.  They are constantly seeing landscapes for example as if they were works of art by framing them and exercising their imaginations in the process.  It is interesting in this regard that Saito's examples of such framing (a baseball game, the streets of New York, and drinking tea) read like a poet's appreciation of these things.  She has a fine poetic sensibility.  But poetry is an art form.  Moreover, when she says "in appreciating the smell and taste of green tea, I may incorporate the visual and tactile sensation of the tea bowl, as well as the sound of slurping" I note that this is exactly how one ought to appreciate tea in the setting of the Japanese tea ceremony, which Saito elsewhere recognizes to be an art form. (15)  

Saito admits that "In constructing the object of our aesthetic experience in these cases, we do select and specifically attend to certain ingredients in our perceptual field, just as we do when we appreciate art as art." (19)  The difference in her mind is that, in art, we determine this based on social convention and "institutional agreement" not on the basis of "our personal preference, taste, and inclination."  And she is right at least in that there is some greater degree of institutional agreement in the realm of art, but it strikes me that this is only a matter of degree and that there certainly a lot of relying on "our own imagination, judgment, and aesthetic taste as our guide" in art as much as in everyday life. Moreover, as Saito herself has described, there are some everyday practices that involve a lot of institutional agreement, for example sports and cat beauty contests.

So I agree with Saito when she says "We can appreciate the aesthetic value of a chair, an apple, a landscape, and rain as if the were a sculptural piece...[etc.] by becoming a pure spectator/listener.  However, more often than not, we experience a chair not only by inspecting its shape and color, but also by touching its fabric, sitting in it, learning against it, and moving it, to get the feel for its texture, comfort, and stability." (20) I just think that this just is what aesthetically contemplating what a chair is, what it is to be a "pure spectator" and that seeing it as if it were art must also take into account that in looking at a painting, for example, we, as Dewey observed, are subliminally aware of all of the other senses, and that the intensity of the color is that all of that other information is in some way contained in the color, and then seeing it as it functions in life, is also part of the background information subtly contained in great art.  It is just that, here, that stuff is no longer backgrounded.  One of the most poetical and best said passages in Saito's book is her description of eating an apple, except that she starts wrongly by saying that it is "our typical experience of an apple."  It is not your typical experience in alienated Western perception.   Here is what happens to Saito:  it is perceptual experience of eating an apple that is mindful:  "starts by beholding its perfect round shape and delicate colors ranging from red to green and holding it in our hand to feel its substantial weight and smooth skin.  Then we proceed to engage all of our senses and enjoy the crunching sound when we first bite into it, the contrast between the firmness of its contents and the sweet juice flowing from it, and, of course, its smell and taste."  This is the approach to an apple that a great chef would take, as well as a great poet.  It is an approach consonant with the tea ceremony approach to drinking tea.  It is a deeply contemplative approach to eating an apple very unlike the ordinary way we just consume food.

There is also the issue of conventions.  It is not as though there are no conventions in the experience of non-art.  Saito experiences three ways of appreciating raindrops.  One of them is "we may experience rain by sitting under the hanging roof of a Zen temple, looking out on its attached rock garden, attending to the way in which the surface of each rock glistens with wetness and nothing the elegant movement of raindrops..."  She stresses that, of the three way of appreciating rain, one the "singing in the rain" approach, and the third being that of John Muir in Yosemite, all are legitimate.  I agree, and yet each is a convention, and the one associated with the Zen temple is very immersed in the entire Zen aesthetic and even in a certain architectural aesthetic interestingly similar to what Heidegger speaks of when he describes a Greek temple experienced aesthetically.  So, it is wrong to say that "in all these examples, there is no institutional or conventional agreement" and that the only guide is what is more rewarding:  this sort of business is not as individualistic.  Finally, it is also just plain false that "experiencing a chair or an apple as a piece of sculpture ...is likely to be less interesting and satisfying than more normal ways of experiencing them" since all of the power of an Edward Weston photograph is based on the way in which doing so can be very interesting and satisfying, and, again, largely because he manages to capture, using only visual means, what it is to touch and eat the vegetable he photographs.  Again, although Saito is right that it does not matter when or under what light I observe a painting by Cezanne of Mt. Sainte-Victoire and it does matter when I view the actual Mt. Sainte-Victorie, I know this especially now because i have spent a lot of time looking at Cezanne.  Cezannes's painting of the mountain would not make any sense if it were not the case that he could paint it over and over again because it has different aesthetic qualities at different times.  (25)  Again, it is the dynamic relationship between the aesthetics of the everyday and the aesthetics of art that is most evident here.  

But where our area of disagreement comes up the most is exemplified when Saito says "We clean our kitchen and bathroom for hygiene, cook and eat food for sustenance, and pick our clothes for protection and comfort." (26)  Maybe the word "for" is ambiguous here, but my immediate reaction is that this is just false. I spend a lot of time doing all of these thing and I can only think of hygiene, sustenance, protection and comfort and some of the functions served by these activities...often not the most important ones.  I clean my kitchen mainly for the pleasure of getting it clean, and because I have been influenced by Nhat Hanh, secondarily for the pleasure in the rhythm of the process and the attendant aesthetic qualities, then thirdly because I want my wife to be happy with the results, and maybe fourthly for hygiene -  sure, of course, you want to eliminate the germs that might give you food poisoning....this is in the category of unimportant precisely because so obvious.  

So now to Kant.  I don't want to get deep into Kant interpretation here, and there is a lot of room for disagreement, but it strikes me that Saito's disapproval of his notion of the disinterested attitude in application to everyday aesthetics seems based largely on her understanding of what Kant means by "pure."  She thinks that Kant means that pure or "free beauty" is "more legitimate" than dependent beauty.  And yet Kant does not say so.  We Americans have associations with "pure" that Kant may not have had with the German word it translates.  Saito admits that Kant also has a concept of dependent beauty but thinks that he requires us to "surgically remove" functional value in order to appreciate the everyday.  But this is not how he treats architecture, or any of the arts, all of which he sees as examples of dependent beauty, with the possible exception of music without words.  Although I wholly agree with Saito that "in our everyday, normal interaction with a utilitarian object, the aesthetic and the practical are experienced as fully integrated" I am not convinced that Kant would have held otherwise.  (26)   Going beyond Kant, I think it would be better to say that in approaching the everyday aesthetic object we need to bracket practical considerations to see it as purposeless, to capture the "pure" aspect of the experience in free play, but that we need also to toggle between that and the other, dependent, aspect of the aesthetic object when it is an artifact and not a free beauty of nature. (How we ought to appreciate nature is not under consideration here.)  

Kant however was notoriously disregarding of the near senses, color (which he called mere "charm") and of the pleasures in practical activity.   Dewey, however, with his anti-dualist stance, would not have disregarded these things.  So this is why I join Saito against Kant when she says "the aesthetic value of a knife consists not only of its visual qualities, but also of its feeling in my hand, determined by its texture, weight and balance, but also of its feeling in my hand, determined by its surface texture, weight, and balance, but most importantly by how smoothly and effortlessly I can cut an object because of the material, shape, length, texture, and weight of the blade and handle."  (27)  Saito here stresses not the fact that the knife functions well but "the way in which all the sensuous aspects converge and work together to facilitate his use."  (27)  All of this, and the entire paragraph in which it appears, is, I think, a major contribution.

50 Voices of Disbelief, and an argument for a Spinozistic universe

Winter break is time for me to read some things I might not get around to during the school year.  My retired doctor brother in law, who shares my atheism, gave me a book for Christmas (a bit of irony there, I know) called 50 Voices of Disbelief:  Why We Are Atheists.  I love this book and would have it give it four stars on Amazon if I were reviewing it.  One of great things about it is that it covers a wide range of perspectives on disbelief, and most of these short essays are well-written too.  I read it from front to back, which seems strange since one could just pick and choose, but doing so assures that you get all of the perspectives including some that are pretty unfamiliar, for instance a couple on atheism in India. 

There is very little I can find to disagree with in this book...maybe a bit to knit-pick on, for example the claim by one author that teaching religion to children is child abuse.  I was brought up as a Christian, but although I rejected belief in God by the time I was fifteen I would hardly call my Christian upbringing child abuse.  It was even probably good for me to react against something as I was growing up:  it helped with my self-definition, figuring out who I am or was.  Prior to disbelieving in God I used to take long walks talking to God, asking for replies about the big questions.   I didn't get any answers, but then that led me to try to answer the questions myself.  Along the way I was influenced by such writers as Russell, Nietzsche and Sartre.  I was also influenced by the American transcendentalists:  Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, none of whom were atheists but all of whom questioned theism.  My struggle with belief was a major factor in my becoming a philosopher.  Each atheist has his or her own story about how he/she became an atheist, and that is part of what I like about 50 Voices. 

But I cannot go along with the idea that education in religion is necessarily child abuse.  My parents were pretty liberal, however, and when I began to question Christian belief they were willing to discuss it and even eventually were willing to let me stay home from church.  I was the oldest and my younger siblings were still required to go to church:  and so when they came home on Sundays they would call me "sinner" but everyone knew that the source of that was envy for my being able to stay in my pajamas and read the Sunday paper.   There was an interesting experiment where my mother insisted that I go to some church if not theirs (they were Episcopalian).   I tried out the Unitarians since they seemed the closest to being atheists, and they did seem to be fine people, but I didn't fit in, and I had little tolerance to listening to prayers and singing songs from every part of the world as opposed to just the Episcopalian ones.  

Back to the issue of child abuse.  My parents spanked me sometimes when I behaved badly, and I do not consider that child abuse either, although it is popular to think so these days.  So maybe I have a relatively high threshold for "child abuse" attribution (at least for a contemporary liberal).  Occasional light spanking and compulsory church attendance just do not rise to that level.  

But what really struck me about 50 stories was how much atheists share in common.  All of the arguments against belief were familiar to me, and they were ones I also had considered when choosing not to believe in God.  I won't review them here:  read the book for that. Another thing I liked about the book is just the contrast between reading this or reading one of the big-time New Atheists, e.g. Dawkins, Dennett, and so forth.  There is a lot of ego and no little amount of smugness in those big books. They are valuable books, but it is good to get beyond them.  (By the way, I appreciate it that Michael Martin, my old teacher from Boston University, gets a fair number of mentions in this book.  Oddly, I did not know that Martin was an atheist when I worked for him as a grading assistant. Only years later did I discover his excellent atheist writings. Towards the end of his life we struck up a short correspondence about this....something I cherish now.)  

But back to the interesting uniformity point.  The blurb on the back of the book refers to "a stunning diversity of viewpoints," but what is evident to me is the opposite.  Hardly any of the writers would disagree with what is said by hardly any of the other writers.  Could reason or "being rational" yield such results?  The main issues of disagreement seems to be on how aggressive one should be:  some atheists believe in taking a really aggressive stance and others do not.  But there seems to be no disagreement about what is wrong about the various reasons offered for belief, at least none I could see on one reading.  (Some authors prefer certain arguments over others....that's about it...a matter of taste.)  

What a contrast to religious belief!  There you really do have great diversity.  However I am a natural skeptic and I find it uncomfortable to belong to a club in which everyone agrees on the fundamentals.  So let me throw a little discord into this happy party. 

The first complaint is that despite talk of diversity, it turns out that some major figures in atheism are left out of the conversation. Heidegger was supposed to be a major atheist and his name is not mentioned once.  Sartre?  doesn't appear in the index although de Beauvoir gets mentioned in one list (no actual discussion of her arguments or beliefs, however).  Nietzsche is mentioned only in passing, and the only author who says anything about him is Miguel Kottow.  He writes, "I don't think Nietzsche killed anyone, he just didn't like the current idea of a god who did not care about the lousy conditions most humans lived it." (235)  This is the strangest thing to say about Nietzsche and God, and one wonders where Kottow got this idea about this.  No references are given...so it is a mystery.  Freud turns up once, in an article by Tamas Pataki. Karl Marx gets two mentions, one more than Groucho!  Darwin however is covered frequently.  So you get the idea:  the book has a slant, only atheists of an analytic science-centric persuasion need apply.

This leads me to my second thought, one quote that I find thought provoking and a bit disturbing.  (Again, isn't it strange that this is the only quote in the entire book that does this to me...at least now after a first reading.)  It comes in an essay by Sean M. Carroll titled "Why Not?"  Here it is:

"Atheists do not believe in the existence of any categories truly distinct from the material world.  They believe that the world is made of 'stuff,' and that stuff obeys 'rules,' and those rules are never broken, and that's it.  Nothing more is required.  There may be categories which are not found within the basic building blocks of the world, but rather emerge from it, and serve crucial purposes in the lives of human beings - emotions, aesthetic judgments, rules of ethics and morality.  But none of these is separate, found outside of the world, or requires a truly distinct set of rules.  The physical universe is self-contained and complete."  (107)

I just can't subscribe to that.  I mean it all seems innocuous at first but doesn't it look pretty dogmatic?   Let's look at it line by line. One thing I am going to be suggesting is to at least experimentally look at all of this from a Spinozistic perspective, as a dual aspect theorist rather than as a materialist monist.  

"Atheists do not believe in the existence of any categories truly distinct from the material world."  A Spinozistic atheist, let's say one who rejects an all-knowing, all-good creator of the universe but does accept a spiritual "aspect" to reality, seeing reality as always two-sided, might not disagree of course, since the spiritual aspect of the world could not possibly be "truly distinct from the material world" but would disagree that all of the categories are categories ultimately of the stuff to which Carroll refers.

"They believe that the world is made of 'stuff,' and that stuff obeys 'rules,' and those rules are never broken, and that's it."  I have no trouble with the idea that the material stuff of the universe follows rules that are never broken, although I thought that quantum mechanics offers exceptions to this....still I never understand quantum mechanics, so I will accept it for now.  The problem I have is with "that's it."  So, this is reductionism:  the author is saying that the whole story of our lives is reduced to rules of the stuff.  But the author knows that this is not acceptable since he then brings in emergent entities which appear to follow rules of their own.

"Nothing more is required.  There may be categories which are not found within the basic building blocks of the world, but rather emerge from it, and serve crucial purposes in the lives of human beings - emotions, aesthetic judgments, rules of ethics and morality."  This looks to me like a contradiction.  Nothing more is required, but then, hey, something more is required.  We will cover up the problem with the phrase "emerge from it."  It turns out that almost all of the stuff that is important to us as humans falls into this category!   We must be talking about two very difference sense of "stuff" since the stuff that is important to me doesn't even count as part of Carroll's stuff.   At least it is not "required."  Required for what?   

"But none of these is separate, found outside of the world, or requires a truly distinct set of rules."   The Spinozist can grant this:  nothing of the important stuff now called "emergent" is "outside of the world" since after all, the world has two different aspects, the material and the spiritual.  But what about the idea of a "distinct set of rules?   Kant in his discussion of the artistic genius says that such a genius makes his (and it should also be "her," despite his youthful misogynous comments) rules, Critique of Judgment #49. How do these rules fit into all of this.  Is the work of a creative genius even possible under Carroll?  Apparently not.

"The physical universe is self-contained and complete."   Nothing ever changes I suppose.  Aside from the fact that "self- contained" is left unexplained, the notion of completeness...a rigid universe without the possibility of creative making goes contrary to everything that makes sense.  

Carroll goes on to say something very odd:

"Any consistent mathematical structure...is a possible universe; the job of science is simply to decide which one is right.  Here is a conceivable universe:  an infinite string of 1s and 0s, following the pattern of two 1s followed by a single 0, repeated forever....That's a universe.  It's not an especially interesting universe, and it is certainly not our universe, but its a possible universe.  The point being that there is no God serving as part of that universe, nor is there any reason for there to be.  And there is no God in ours, either."  (110)

How could he come up with this?  Clearly this posited universe is not only not our universe, it is not a Spinozistic universe.  God does not serve as part of the Spinozistic universe since the Spinozistic universe IS God.   This paragraph is not even an argument, although it has the appearance of one.  Somehow he is suggesting that since our universe is very much like the one proposed then since it is obvious that the one proposed has no God aspect than ours has no God aspect as well.  On what grounds does he believe that our world is very much like the proposed one?  It must be that subconsciously he thinks of our universe as really a giant computer that works with 1s and 0s, a machine.  If so, then the argument holds.   

I am not wholly convinced that the Spinozist view is correct, but until physicalist atheists can come up with something better than this I might be willing at least to entertain a very thin notion of God...not an eternal, all-knowing, all-good creator of the universe: that God is, or should be, dead.  I am simply talking about something like "the ground of creativity" which is itself the spiritual side of the material universe Carroll already accepts.   






      

"On Those Who Are Sublime" Nietzsche and his critique of Kant's aesthetics

Zarathustra saw a solemn person who was sublime, "an ascetic of the spirit" at whom he laughed because of his ugliness.  This chapter of TSZ deals with Nietzsche's critique of Kant (and possibly Hegel as well) on the sublime and the beautiful.  His main point is that the beautiful is more important than the sublime, although that idea only gets substance when played out in terms of the ideas of the overman and will to power.  Kant's notion of the sublime is rather odd in that, for him, when we appreciate the sublime (what he calls the dynamic sublime) we are really appreciating our own power as humans, we are appreciating the ways in which we transcend even the most terrifying aspects of nature: [from his Critique of Judgment]  "we willingly call these objects [bold, overhanging, and...threatening rocks...[etc.] sublime, because they raise the energies of the soul above their accustomed height and discover in us a faculty of resistance of quite a different kind, which gives us courage to measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness of nature" and, further, "nature is not judged to be sublime ...in so far as it excites fear, but because it calls up that power in us...of regarding as small the things about which we are solicitous [health, money, etc.]...and of regarding its might ...as nevertheless without any dominion over us..." ["even if the volcano destroys my home, I can rise above that":  a kind of Stoic philosophy]

This is what N. means when he speaks of the sublime person as having a "swelled chest" and being decked out with "ugly truths." The so-called "truth" of Kant's sublime man is really just a rather ugly anthropocentrism based on belief in a totally free and transcendent self or soul.  Moreover, beauty is somehow lost in all of this.  

Kant says that there are two main positive aesthetic qualities, the beautiful and the sublime, but for N., they are in dialectical competition...and the winner is not the sublime but beauty.  You would think that N., with all of his talk of the overman, would be more positive about the sublime.  Who more sublime than Nietzsche?  So the victory of beauty comes as a surprise.  But maybe that is because we usually misread Nietzsche, i.e. by way of Hitler.

Of Kant, then, Nietzsche would say:  "as yet he has not learned laughter and beauty."  That is, he takes himself too seriously.  And "out of his seriousness there also peers a savage beast - one not overcome." The sublime person is also in the act of withdrawing from the earth, which, Z. observes ironically, is not to his "taste."  

It is funny to see a reference to taste here.  Of course Kant discusses taste in a different place than he does the sublime, and he only advocates the idea that "there is no disputing about taste" with regards to that which is merely agreeable, not with regards to beauty.  It seems that N. has just misread Kant. Yet, although N. and K. agree that we may dispute about taste, K. may not be serious about that (and N. may see this.)  K. does not bother to set up or describe any disputes over taste, and one wonders what such a dispute would look like for K.  If someone says X is not beautiful and you disagree, you are free to show him (I suppose Kant thinks) that he has failed to be disinterested or to have focused on the look of purpose in the object, or has not allowed his imagination and understanding to go into free play. After all, when you say something is beautiful you are setting it up on a pedestal and expect, nay demand, that others agree. None of this seems to be much like a dispute in which people offer reasons. Instead, it all seems pretty ad hominem and detached from actually talking about the art object or other object of beauty itself.  

N.s comeback is simply: "But all of life is a dispute over taste and tasting."  (I love it that he added "and tasting" since this is very body-oriented and brings taste back from something purely mental where it seems to reside for most philosophers even today.)  The idea that all of life is a dispute over taste may be the same as the idea that whatever we are doing we are setting up values in opposition to the values of others.  We dispute, we argue, and that is what life is about, and this is true even with regards to morality. 

The claim extends aesthetics to all of life:  quite a radical claim. (So much for philosophy's relegation of aesthetics to backwaters.) To make it, N. must expand his notion of taste.  He does this when he says it is "at the same time weight and scales and weigher." These are the things we dispute over.  Moreover life is worthless (or at least not quite human) if we try to live without disputing over these things, over how valuable something is, over what scales to use in measuring value, and over the value of the person who does the weighing of value.  

So, for Z., the sublime person only becomes beautiful or obtains beauty when he gets tired of the anthropocentrism of his take on the sublime.  That sort of person would then be "tasteful" to Z.  That is, such a person has to turn "away from himself" and, of course, following Zs line, he must "jump over his shadow - ...into his sun." That is, he must overcome that miniscule thing which he considers his ego and find his true essence, which what would illuminate: essence can be seen as the overman, but not that it is individualize: his sun.  Z. does not want followers, or rather he only wants followers who follow their suns.

Nietzsche reiterates: "his [the so called sublime person's] happiness should smell of the earth, and not of contempt for the earth."  Kant would have us praise our transcendent souls in the experience of the sublime, but this is not to say "yes" to the earth, which, as we know, is the main message of Z.  Of Kant, and similar philosophers, like Hegel:   "He subdued monsters and riddles:  but he must still redeem his own monsters and riddles, changing them into heavenly children."  All virtues come from what was previously considered vice.  Further:  "As yet his knowledge has not learned to smile and to be without jealousy; as yet, his torrential passion has not become still in beauty."  Beauty will come when the passion of the hero philosopher is transformed into a serenity in which a smile is possible.  He must transform that which within himself would normally be called "evil."  And of course he must overcome, or transform, revenge [the greatest evil]...such an important move for Nietzsche. 

So desire is submerged not in satiety but in beauty, and the graciousness of the great-souled person is suffused with grace. Kant encourages us to be heroes, but the most difficult thing for the hero is to achieve the beautiful:  "No violent will can attain the beautiful by exertion."  Beauty is a matter of subtlety.  

One often associates Nietzsche with the Dionysian alone, but here is a call to the Apollonian as well.  One even imagines the traditional notion of Greek beauty that N. had overcome in his first book coming back in a way.  In Birth of Tragedy we learn that the Apollonian alone is not enough for great art.  But here we find that the sublime have to: "stand with relaxed muscles and unharnessed will" like a statue of Apollo, and that this is their most difficult task.  If you think you are sublime, you are caught up in ego, but to respond to this would be to unharness your will and relax your heroic muscles.  

Now we are prepared for a definition of beauty:  "When power becomes gracious and descends into the visible - such descent I call beauty."  Plato had seen beauty as a matter of ascent:  ascent to the Form of beauty.  N. gives primacy to will to power.  Will to power is not always cruel: sometimes, at its best, it is gracious, gift-giving, and this involves a descent from heights into the realm of the visible.  Beauty then is concentrated visible power found in the gift. The source of the gift determines the power of the beauty.  Thus "there is nobody from whom I want beauty as much as from you who are powerful," to which he adds that the kindness of the powerful should be their final "self-conquest."  (There is no separation of ethics and aesthetics here!)  Grace, graciousness, the creatively powerful individual, the hero of will-lessness, that which conquers itself:  these things form the new conceptual nexus of beauty.  We haven't seen a vision of beauty like this before, or since.  

The powerful (i.e. the powerful in creative action) are capable of "all evil" but then it follows that they should give forth good, a good that is quite different from that which comes out of people who are weak in creative power, and who think they are good just because they have no claws.  The gracious hero is then compared to a column which grows "more beautiful and gentle" and also internally harder and "more enduring" as it ascends.  

So, in conclusion, the sublime person (he who has accepted and lives by Kant's notion of the sublime) only can hope to "become beautiful one day" and thus have "godlike desires."  Although he  would then be vain,  he would would be suitable for adoration. The soul's secret is that only when she has been abandoned by the hero can she be approached by the "overhero."  The chapter ends here.