----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected]; [email protected] Sent: Mon, March 1, 2010 12:55:42 PM Subject: Re: "What is happening during an 'a.e.'?"
Free beauty resides in something with no concept of how the thing ought to be made,or what purpose it ought to serve-flowers, Grecian arabesques or music without words. Put it to the test. Try to make something for which there is no concept and no purpose. Impossible. I don't see how that can be. No matter what you begin to make, you can't avoid all sorts of associations, names, as-ifs, etc. That why I can't get the idea of purposelessness. Adherent beauty resides in things which come with a particular purpose and concept-people,horses (or cars), buildings. Again, this is too static and suggests that a thing remains a particular thing. It fits Kant's logic I suppose, to long for a state of beauty that is free from utility. But it doesn't square with reality. No matter what you say a thing is, a horse, or house, anyone can see it as a metaphor, as if it were something else. I mean horse could be the aim but could also be the word, or the sound of the word, or the goal of a 18C dandy, or an object in middle ground of the landscape painter's picture. We could go on and on. Free beauty results in a pure judgement of taste, adherent beauty results in a judgement of taste which involves reason. Kant goes on to say that taste gains by the combination of aesthetic with intellectual satsfaction,at which point it is possible to invent rules for the unification of taste and reason,which are not rules for taste alone. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with abstract or representation or naming. I think I got that formal stuff from Greenberg and his affection for Kant. Kant's reasoning vs. what? Uunreason, imagination, feelings? To me it means that Kant is not relevant to today even if he is very relevant to philosophy and its historical questions. Again, we can't separate feeling from reason anymore. wc In a message dated 3/1/10 8:40:53 AM, [email protected] writes: > . Free and adherent, formal, abstract vs. representational, are notions > I have long rejected, both as an artist and as a struggling thinker. My > essential slogan is that "anything can be perceived as something else" > > That means that all formal abstract shapes, designs, etc., do evoke some > associative, continuous metaphorical "naming". Thus an artificial > distinction between adherent and free beauties strikes me as irrelevant. > > I believe we are forced by nature to identify everything as if everything > had a name, a representation. Conversely, everything has a formal construct > (which we invent). If we see something that seems only formal, we > immediately want to say "it looks like...." Or if we see a human figure, we > qualify it formally. > > Free beauty is the same as adherent beauty; one instantly evokes or > serves and becomes indistinguishable from the other. > > I'm sure it's not as simple in Kant as it is to me. I will appreciate > your explanation.
