As far as I understand, Kant believes that beauty is only something we can conceive of in the mind, and it is the fact that everyone has a subjective perception of beauty (or the sublime, rather) in their mind, which causes Kant to claim that there is a universal conception of some sort of beauty (beauty being whatever we conceive in our own minds). It is also from our apprehensions of beauty that we grasp our best understanding of the universe, and this freedom of subjective apprehension is reliant on the notion of "free-play," which unbinds us from the eidos.
What I find interesting about Kant's argument is that he creates a way to state there is a universal sense of beauty without specifying particular objects in the world that are universally beautiful. Basically he is saying that everybody finds something beautiful, but not everybody agrees on what that "something" actually is. Kant states that "beauty is experienced through the senses, but points us beyond mere sensation." I curious as to how Plato would respond to this idea. Because pointing beyond mere sensation doesn't necessarily imply the indication of an external or divine realm. I think Plato would suggest that any beauty we conceive strays us further away from truth if we don't acknowledge it as a representation of the eidos. I don't think Plato would be too keen on the idea of beauty being subjective though. Wouldn't Plato suggest that the only truth that is beautiful are absolutes (i.e. forms)?
Another thing that has been creating some turmoil for me is whether we should be trying to distinguish which critics and philosophers we believe have a in/correct theory of thinking. I felt that a huge reason of why we were trashing Wordsworth in class yesterday was because we were operating under the belief that Kant and Hegel were correct in their arguments and methods of thinking, and since we thought Wordsworth totally misinterpreted the truth (i.e. Kant and Hegel epistemology), we then accused him of being an idiot. Does Wordsworth have credible insight to offer, despite how he interpreted Kant and Hegel?
I don't think that there are correct of incorrect theorists. I do think, however, that some theorists do a better job of reading their predecessors and contemporaries than others do. Wordsworth does a really bad job of reading the German Romantics, whom he claims to draw inspiration from.
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