Carrol wrote:
>
> I'm a bit sceptical of using opinions on art as arguing points. I
> wondered about this also with reference to Ted Winslow's
> quoting of Marx's "man also produces in accordance with the
> laws of beauty." By coincidence just before I read Ted's post
> Yeats's lines
>
> Solider Aristotle played the taws,
> Upon the bottom of the king of kings
>
> had popped into my head. They seemed very beautiful to me
> -- but I'll be damned if I could argue that there were any
> "laws of beauty" to produce them or that someone who did
> not think they were beautiful (who preferred a supermarket
> tabloid or a poem by Eddie Guest [Dorothy Parker: "I'd
> rather flunk my Wasserman test / Than read a poem by
> Eddie Guest."]) was ... whatever.
>
> Edgar Snow writes that during the war in Moscow the public
> speakers (previously used for various propaganda purposes)
> played only classical (I presume classical in the narrow sense
> -- Haydn through Beethoven) music 24 hours a day. It made
> wartime a little less grim, a little more endurable.
>
My suggestion is that you read "laws of beauty" as the "mechanical" aspect
of "art" as "production through freedom", the aspect pointed to in the
passage from Kant I quoted.
This is not the essence of art, however. The essence is imaginative
freedom, "the spirit, which must be free in art and which alone inspires the
work".
It's for this reason that the writing of beautiful poetry cannot be "taught"
since "learning is nothing but imitation". p. 151
Kant uses the term "genius" to designate the capacity for producing
beautiful art. It is "a talent for producing that for which no definite
rule can be given; it is not a mere aptitude for what can be learned by a
rule. Hence originality must be its first property." p. 150
Universality enters in a different way. Both the making and the
appreciating of the beautiful involve aesthetic judgment as an expression of
the "sensus communis" - "the faculty of judging of that which makes
universally communicable, without the mediation of a concept, our feeling in
a given representation."
"under the sensus communis we must include the idea of a sense common to
all, i.e. of a faculty of judgment which, in its reflection, takes account
(a priori) of the mode of representation of all other men in thought, in
order, as it were, to compare its judgment with the collective reason of
humanity, and thus to escape the illusion arising from the private
conditions that could be so easily taken for objective, which would
injuriously affect the judgment. This is done by comparing our judgment
with the possible rather than the actual judgments of others, and by putting
ourselves in the place of any other man, by abstracting from the limitations
which contingently attach to our own judgment. This again is brought about
by leaving aside as much as possible the matter of our representatitive
state, i.e. sensation, and simply having respect to the formal peculiarities
of our representation or representative state. Now this operation of
reflection seems perhaps too artificial to be attributed to the faculty
called common sense, but it only appears so when expressed in abstract
formulae. In itself there is nothing more natural than to abstract from
charm or emotion if we are seeking a judgment that is to serve as a
universal rule.
"The following maxims of common human understanding do not properly come
in here, as parts of the Critique of Taste, but yet they may serve to
elucidate its fundamental propositions. They are: (1) to think for oneself;
(2) to put ourselves in thought in the place of everyone else; (3) always to
think consistently. The first is the maxim of unprejudiced thought; the
second of enlarged thought; the third of consecutive thought. ...
"I say that taste can be called sensus communis with more justice than
sound understanding can, and that the aesthetical judgment rather than the
intellectual may bear the name of a sense common to all, if we are willing
to use the word 'sense' of an effect of mere reflection upon the mind, for
then we understand by sense the feeling of pleasure.
"We could even define taste as the faculty of judging of that which
makes universally communicable, without the mediation of a concept, our
feeling in a given representation. ...
"Taste is then the faculty of judging a priori of the communicability of
feelings that are bound up with a given representation (without the
mediation of a concept)." Critique of Judgment pp. 136-8
This idea of "taste" is is , I suggest, another of the ideas of Kant that
have been sublated by Marx. For instance, it's implicit in the account - in
the "Comments on James Mill" - of how we would produce if we "carried out
production as human beings". Another instance is the following passage from
the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.
"Just as only music awakens in man the sense of music, and just as the most
beautiful music has *no* sense for the unmusical ear - is [no] object for
it, because my object can only be the confirmation of one of my essential
powers - it can therefore only exist for me insofar as my essential power
exists for itself as a subjective capacity; because the meaning of an object
for me goes only so far as *my* sense goes (has only a meaning for a sense
corresponding to that object) - for this reason the *senses* of the social
man *differ* from those of the non-social man. Only through the objectively
unfolded richness of man's essential being is the richness of subjective
*human* sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form - in short,
*senses* capable of human gratification, senses affirming themselves as
essential powers of *man*) either cultivated or brought into being. For not
only the five senses but also the so-called mental senses, the practical
senses (will, love, etc.) in a word, *human* sense, the human nature of the
senses, comes to be by virtue of *its* object, by virtue of *humanised*
nature. The *forming* of the five senses is a labour of the entire history
of the world down to the present. The *sense* caught up in crude practical
need has only a *restricted* sense. For the starving man, it is not the
human form of food that exists, but only its abstract existence as food. It
could just as well be there in its crudest form, and it would be impossible
to say wherein this feeding activity differs from that of *animals*. The
care-burdened, poverty-stricken man has no *sense* for the finest play; the
dealer in minerals sees only the commercial value but not the beauty and the
specific character of the mineral: he has no mineralogical sense. Thus, the
objectification of the human essence, both in its theoretical and practical
aspects, is required to make man's *sense human*, as well as to create the
*human sense* corresponding to the entire wealth of human and natural
substance." Collected Works, vol. 3, pp. 301-2
Ted
--
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