I found my problem ideally stated in the intro to this book:

‘Imagine three people standing in front of a painting by Kandinsky or admiring
the sun setting over the sea. Suppose that one of them finds pleasure in looking
at what he or she sees and even calls it beautiful, whereas the second feels nothing
special and says so, and the third even says that the painting, or the sunset, is
downright ugly (which in the case of the sunset might be more difficult to
imagine). Given this situation, is it possible that all three of them have taste? Can
they all be justified in what they are saying? Can they all make “true” judgments
of taste, judgments that are correct or true in some sense? Or is it the case that
at most one of them can be right and the others must be wrong? Can we even
find out who is right and who is wrong, either by examining the object or by
engaging all three judges of beauty in a discussion of some kind?’

Wenzel points out that the critique is not about any ar4t object but about the judgement made by the viewer

”…beauty has its roots in an act of contemplation that takes into account that relationship. [beterrn object and beholder.] the judgement of taste, as Kant debelops it, s a sophisticated and reflecting judgement about our relationship to the object….

wenzell says

wenzel says beauty is in the at of contemplation of the object by the subject

what plays a role on the part of the object   is merely the ‘form’  ie its psatio-temporal structures.

Wenzel says Kant was to find new apriori justifying (ie they justify a jusgement that something is beautiful grounds

the grounds are the principle of sujective purposiveness???

in a ‘free harmonious play of our cognitive powers.

I read up to page 7 and this is what i can recall

theat the jusgement of beauty is not beauty in the oject  but is something o do with the realationship of the subject to the object

that Kant tried to give grounds for the making of a judgement of beauty

that i need to reread it anddothis again

Maybe that is what art is – the mind follows its own maze led by intimations but knows that the other is in his or her own maze, therefore anything found in a maze must be worked on by art in order to be communicable to the other in his or her maze

this is taken from the Washington Post

Pearls Before Breakfast: Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let’s find out.

By Gene Weingarten April 8, 2007

note to self – must check the rules about posting from online sources

Even at this accelerated pace, though, the fiddler’s movements remain fluid and graceful; he seems so apart from his audience — unseen, unheard, otherworldly — that you find yourself thinking that he’s not really there. A ghost.

Only then do you see it: He is the one who is real. They are the ghosts.

IF A GREAT MUSICIAN PLAYS GREAT MUSIC BUT NO ONE HEARS . . . WAS HE REALLY ANY GOOD?

It’s an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?

“When you play for ticket-holders,” Bell explains, “you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I’m already accepted. Here, there was this thought: What if they don’t like me? What if they resent my presence . . .”

He was, in short, art without a frame. Which, it turns out, may have a lot to do with what happened — or, more precisely, what didn’t happen — on January 12.

MARK LEITHAUSER HAS HELD IN HIS HANDS MORE GREAT WORKS OF ART THAN ANY KING OR POPE OR MEDICI EVER DID. A senior curator at the National Gallery, he oversees the framing of the paintings. Leithauser thinks he has some idea of what happened at that Metro station.

“Let’s say I took one of our more abstract masterpieces, say an Ellsworth Kelly, and removed it from its frame, marched it down the 52 steps that people walk up to get to the National Gallery, past the giant columns, and brought it into a restaurant. It’s a $5 million painting. And it’s one of those restaurants where there are pieces of original art for sale, by some industrious kids from the Corcoran School, and I hang that Kelly on the wall with a price tag of $150. No one is going to notice it. An art curator might look up and say: ‘Hey, that looks a little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt.’”

Leithauser’s point is that we shouldn’t be too ready to label the Metro passersby unsophisticated boobs. Context matters.

Kant said the same thing. He took beauty seriously: In his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Kant argued that one’s ability to appreciate beauty is related to one’s ability to make moral judgments. But there was a caveat. Paul Guyer of the University of Pennsylvania, one of America’s most prominent Kantian scholars, says the 18th-century German philosopher felt that to properly appreciate beauty, the viewing conditions must be optimal.

Souza was surprised to learn he was a famous musician, but not that people rushed blindly by him. That, she said, was predictable. “If something like this happened in Brazil, everyone would stand around to see. Not here.”

Souza nods sourly toward a spot near the top of the escalator: “Couple of years ago, a homeless guy died right there. He just lay down there and died. The police came, an ambulance came, and no one even stopped to see or slowed down to look.

(Pat animals gather round one of them who is injured/dying – and so do we in the  circumstances of a hospital bed/ a close relative  – think about the importance of framing  – what exactly is framing?  maybe a structuralist description of framing could be made?)

……………………………………………………..

Let’s say Kant is right. Let’s accept that we can’t look at what happened on January 12 and make any judgment whatever about people’s sophistication or their ability to appreciate beauty. But what about their ability to appreciate life?

In his 2003 book, Timeless Beauty: In the Arts and Everyday Life, British author John Lane writes about the loss of the appreciation for beauty in the modern world. The experiment at L’Enfant Plaza may be symptomatic of that, he said — not because people didn’t have the capacity to understand beauty, but because it was irrelevant to them.

“This is about having the wrong priorities,” Lane said.

If we can’t take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that — then what else are we missing?

(Pat compare a dream where we don’t have the option of ignoring the story/images in our mind but are rendered powerless to move)

……………..

“This was a superb violinist. I’ve never heard anyone of that caliber. He was technically proficient, with very good phrasing. He had a good fiddle, too, with a big, lush sound. I walked a distance away, to hear him. I didn’t want to be intrusive on his space.”

Really?

“Really. It was that kind of experience. It was a treat, just a brilliant, incredible way to start the day.”

Picarello knows classical music. He is a fan of Joshua Bell but didn’t recognize him; he hadn’t seen a recent photo, and besides, for most of the time Picarello was pretty far away. But he knew this was not a run-of-the-mill guy out there, performing. On the video, you can see Picarello look around him now and then, almost bewildered.

“Yeah, other people just were not getting it. It just wasn’t registering. That was baffling to me.”

(Pat – this has somethin to do with Kant – this man was aware of other people experiencing the music, was aware of their assessment of it, was puzzled by their assessment of it – has this something to do with relational aesthetics?  possible art app is a communal experience????  Is it t do with our awareness of the artist’s intention -here they thought he was plaing for coppers – in the concert hall they know he is playing to present a musical experience  – has this something to do with  ‘theory of mind’  note to self that it is probably very important to follow my own explorations and intimations that something is important and not to be diverted by other people’s assessment of the worth of ideas that occur even when that person is pleasant/to be admired/ in a ‘gateway’ position.  there is probably something necessary about the imperative to think  cf my earlier discussion of framing and whether the imperative to think is to think without framing which is what happened when Jill dissed my thinking.  Maybe art itself is down to a framing of the free thinking ie a second reworking of the original thinking which hones it and makes it accessible and imperative to others)

I have lost my thread here and will discuss this in a later post.  Here I note that while reading through the above the notion of ‘the infinite proliferation of language connotations’ vame to  my mind as relevant and was one of those paths which beckoned me to go down as I did not understand it/had not been able to concetize in words the hazy intimations to my mind that there was something to discover.  So I researched the infinite proliferation of language connotations on google and seemed to narrow it down to Barthes and I think it is to do with a writerly text.

I get lost in my own maze – but the maze has important value.  I love Barthes and will gush over him – and do not love inflated ‘art egos’

Writerly text

A text that aspires to the proper goal of literature and criticism: “… to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text” (4). Writerly texts and ways of reading constitute, in short, an active rather than passive way of interacting with a culture and its texts. A culture and its texts, Barthes writes, should never be accepted in their given forms and traditions. As opposed to the “readerly texts” as “product,” the “writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages” (5). Thus reading becomes for Barthes “not a parasitical act, the reactive complement of a writing,” but rather a “form of work” (10)

Kant responded to historical ideas which are also central to modernity.

Leibniz’s rationalism

spinoza’s rationalism

Christian Wolff’s rationalism +

mathematical truth  can have a status lacking in any other kind of knowledge because it is based on structures in nature ie it cannot be changed by empriical evidence

thus math is infallible

BUT

Hume said that modern sciene depends on empiical data which is gained via human perceptions so therefore are fallible

Kant took from this that his old idea of an inbuilt cosmic order ws dogmatic because this belief was not subjected to critical axmintion

Hume said all evidence for causality depends on ou perception of one thing happening after another

so any certainty in the new science is stilll uncertain cause based on our perception?

Kant tries to resolve his

he rethinks the relationship between mathematical necessity and contingent perceptions

the coj dealt with teleology

from Stanford encyclopaedia of philosophy:

Of particular interest, within Kant’s account of fine art, is his discussion of how beautiful art objects can be produced (§§46-50). The artist cannot produce a beautiful work by learning, and then applying, rules which determine when something is beautiful; for no such rules can be specified (see the sketch of the Second Moment in Section 2.1 above). But, Kant makes clear, the artist’s activity must still be rule-governed, since “every art presupposes rules” (§46, 307) and the objects of art must serve as models or examples, that is, they must serve as a “standard or rule by which to judge” (§46, 308). Kant’s solution to this apparent paradox is to postulate a capacity, which he calls “genius,” by which “nature gives the rule to art” (§46, 307). An artist endowed with genius has a natural capacity to produce objects which are appropriately judged as beautiful, and this capacity does not require the artist him- or herself to consciously follow rules for the production of such objects; in fact the artist himself does not know, and so cannot explain, how he or she was able to bring them into being. “Genius” here means something different from brilliance of intellect. For example, Newton, for all his intellectual power, does not qualify as having genius, because he was capable of making clear, both to himself and others, the procedures through which he arrived at his scientific discoveries (§47, 308-309).

‘a new philosophical focus on how human practices affect the ways in which the world is understood’.

I think this means that the world and how we talk about it are not crystal clear and unproblematic.  our human perception colours what we see, understand, feel.  It isnt a case of a what which is talked about objectively by a ‘who’  but the ‘what’ talked about by the who is dependent on the who and is never seen without the who.  and is never seen for what it is  by the who  and maybe does not exist without the who??

this reminds my of heisenbergs uncertainty principle 1927

‘The uncertainty principle is one of the most famous (and probably misunderstood) ideas in physics. It tells us that there is a fuzziness in nature, a fundamental limit to what we can know about the behaviour of quantum particles and, therefore, the smallest scales of nature. Of these scales, the most we can hope for is to calculate probabilities for where things are and how they will behave. Unlike Isaac Newton’s clockwork universe, where everything follows clear-cut laws on how to move and prediction is easy if you know the starting conditions, the uncertainty principle enshrines a level of fuzziness into quantum theory.’http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/nov/10/what-is-heisenbergs-uncertainty-principle

Gosh this is hard

and

to be continued (gtihatbc)

continued

louis markos lecture

louis markos says that very important notion in Kant is that aesthetic judgement is free of all purpose, agenda etc; is subjective – ie of the individual; but because it is free of agenda, it is also universal.  why do we need this paradox?

like burke  if we want to set up a framework of talking about aesthetics, it must be universal???

markos says ‘taste’ is different – it does have an end outside itself -that of gratification so does have a purpose.

okay so is this where I am going wrong ?  for me art must be gratifying I must feel that special something – maybe I have been mistaking this gratification and raising its status above what it deserves.  for example I needthe buzz of a human reference in art which is why so much abstract stuff leaves me cold and not a bit judgemental.  Maybe there is something else which I dont have (see earlier post on feeling inadequate qua art appreciation)

okay markos goes on to say that there is ahigher taste and this is a taste that focuses on form.  (pat, notice that the link between greenberg’s isolation of form as the only thing peculiar to painting; and notice that abstract art has to do with form only)

for Kant taste that focusses on form is free and aesthetic

why?

markos says it is becasue a poems form may be studied as an end in itself as a purposeless purpose

formalism is good fodder for the aesthetic

more later

Monday 24

Louis Markos

says that Kant says that aesthetic judgement is both subjective and universal and it is universal because it is free from all ideologies.  it has to be subjective or it is not free but if the subjective realm is to offer itself as a sustem for systematic study it must be universal (where in coj does he says this  there is a need for references here or maybe I can pick it up in other commentaries on coj)  Like burke if it is not universal then why do it swhay study aesthetics?

LM stresses that all this is not to do with the object but with the subjects perception of it.

the sublime according to LM

two kinds of sublime:

the quantitative and the qualitative

qualitative is with feelings of infinity

qualitative is to do with too much chaotic we cannot deal with it – our intuition cannot grasp it

tha qualitative/beauty turns to understanding and understanding turns sense data into concepts                      the quantitative/sublime turns to reason and reason takes the concepts and turns them into higher laws

imagination deals only with feelings but as soon as we start to think about our feelings we have moved into the realm of understanding bnecause as soon as we think abou our feelings we bein to notice parallels, make concepts etcetera  and/but when we start to think about our thinking we get into reason

the qualitative sublime occurs when we feel fear/awe in front of an overwhelming power  but actually not in front of any actual danger when it just becomes terror.  In this qualitative sublime, our imagination finds itself inadequate to withstnd this power so it turns to reason to help

(pat here I note that evolution meant that our cognitive faculties were shaped by the environment in which we evolved, is tailored to that environment and excludes other possibilities so our perceptions are entirely subjective  cf different animals perceive different ranges of colour according to their evolutionary needs – this then would argue that there can be no universal beauty)

I have to read Kant’s Critique of Judgement if I want to find out more.  It is daunting.  So I have to find ways into the text.

came up v early in a google search and is just what I need.  It deals with the issue of disinterestedness and aesthetics and the modernist challenge to Kant.

more later when I get this together

Just here, I want to say how many thanks are due  to the many teachers who introduced me to new ideas and also to youtube, the internet where there is such generous sharing of knowledge from top quality thinkers.  That’s the thing I think – that top quality is available to so many people in an accessible fashion.  Yes, I gush and am proud of it.

I will list all the sources I have found useful in a later post.

also i need to listen to

https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/4-kants-critique-judgement-lecture-1

I like this way of writing/thinking very much.

It is slow

led by my own mind

I know that my mind would not lead me very well if I hadn’t had all that being led by other people’s minds before

satisfying because I don’t have to exclude ideas which I find interesting

satisfying because I still feel that I might explain something to myself

it would be a bonus if other people found it relevant to their thinking