K-On! is the new 120 days of Sodom. Alternately, K-on and snuff films. (Are snuff films high art on this theory?) displaying personality tests on your website is a good test case for this. I say this knowing that Dale Cooper is literally me, (aspirationally)
Should maybe distinguish between slice of life and iyashikei.
Hmm you do need to avoid parasocial liking and relating to characters though. Fictionkin/shipping people maybe have the least aesthetic ways of relating to art, it’s very social, which makes sense of why it’s so often moralistic.
If this escape from striving stuff is a kind of submission, in some sense, then we are overcome by beautiful things. So the beauty sublime distinction is a bit suspect. All beauty really is the beginning of terror (Rilke)
Kant sublime/beautiful relation to his ethics The “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” mentions a number of more specific connections between aesthetics and morality, including the following:
Aesthetic experience serves as a propadeutic for morality, in that “the beautiful prepares us to love something, even nature, without interest; the sublime, to esteem it, even contrary to our (sensible) interest” (General Remark following §29, 267). The demand for universal agreement in judgments of the sublime rests on an appeal to moral feeling (§29, 265–266) Taking a direct interest in the beauty of nature indicates “a good soul” and a “mental attunement favorable to moral feeling” (§42, 298–299). Beauty serves as the “symbol” of morality (§59, passim), in that a judgment of beauty “legislates for itself” rather than being “subjected to a heteronomy of laws of experience” (§59, 353); relatedly, feelings of pleasure in the beautiful are analogous to moral consciousness (§59, 354; see also General Comment following §91, 482n.). Beauty gives sensible form to moral ideas (§60, 356); this is related both to the view that there is an analogy between the experience of beauty and moral feeling (see (ii) above), and to the view that beauty is the expression of aesthetic ideas (see Section 2.6). Because of this, the development of moral ideas is the “true propadeutic” for taste (§60, 356).
George Bataille - Literature and Evil
- seems to emphasise evil as transgression of law, which is just so dull and vile and i hate the french so much. Is transgression relevant to Callard’s sense of it?
Part of the point of winding paths, e.g. in Japanese gardens, is to remind you that you don’t have anywhere better to be, and should give striving a break. Minotaur V2 mazes are not labyrinths, one is for the will, the other for the intellect.
It seems like Heideggers aesthetic naturalism/ugliness of built environments is a natural fit for this view of aesthetics, such that built/functional environments are hard to find beautiful because they’re so full of affordances. But this forgets that our minds/bodies are relentlessly optimised for (most) natural environments. This reverse affordance is interesting, and it suggests that our minds/bodies are actually often less fitted to many built environments than natural ones, since human designers, (let alone systems) are worse optimisers than evolution. These points around seeing things as affording, unaffording, and non-affording, (relating to Heidegger’s ready at hand/to hand), and how they relate to the Kantian views on aesthetics is interesting. Could probably google heidegger-kant-aesthetics for info on this.
The appeal of being a bad person bc. it’s cool is only a way of thinking it’s picturesque, with an imagined audience, it’s not non-picturesquely/directly cool.
- related to the idea of how something feels from the inside cf LW/Yudkowsky
- illustrating the picturesque can be a photo of a framed photo of a qing dynasty circular garden window looking onto a pond. Or just a photo of a photo of that.
How would kants aesthetics re free play of the imagination/aversion/incentive for higher levels to predict or apply categories mesh with PCT/predictive processing layers? Does the neurosciemce of aesthetic experience actually match some weird suspension of predictions travelling down the hierarchy?
Re aesthetics and disinterested liking, you can also put it that aesthetic objects offer no affordances. Affordances are presentations of things in your environment as for some purpose. A pen ordinarily presents itself as for writing, a table as for sitting, a view as for photographing. Social media and the internet are ruthlessly ab tested to provide affordances, to remove the gap between seeing and acting, excising the place for contemplation. In this way it’s very difficult for them to become objects of aesthetic experience. This does have an odd corollary, which is that if a flow state is a constant linear (choiceless) stream of taking up affordances, scrolling through social media is one such and that seems very unaesthetic, but does that means flow states and contenplativ states are opposites, and flow states cant be aesthetic experiences? What might the neuroscience of flow states and aesthetic experiences be, opposites? Similar?
Does the fact that you like your car less when a faster one comes out mean you never really had an aesthetic liking of it in the first place? Probably. What about your liking for a piece of music after you listen to more music? Probably not. Why is that?
- If the aesthetic, signalling, and practical functions of objects are orthogonal, we should expect an optimum of aesthetics when they’re relatively unlimited by the other two factors. When would this be with cars? Mid period.
- Whats wrong with seeing replicas of the sistine chapel?
- Why might intellectual specialisation seem fine but aesthetic specialisation (in terms of your aesthetic competences, not just time spent) seems impoverished? There might actually be a very general point here about responding to reasons in a balanced way - think of fitting responses in the domain of one virtue vs all virtues. Do virtues have to be low in oppourtunity cost or something?
- Confucius holds the same position re a gentleman is not a tool/pot
Does Callard’s art is for seeing evil also count against politicised art and especially against politicised art criticism?
- You could say those who think academic criticism can effect social change think there’s still an emperor who will listen to them, though I don’t really believe this analysis.
- Also the question of art and morals is framed here, i.e. the morals of the author, and of representation. Would Shylock/merchant of venice be a good test?
See https://twitter.com/nabeelqu/status/1742893701201011126 for a nice paradox that Callard claims her piece answers.
The Elephant in the Brain on art
Could connect that essay referenced in the selected essays podcast on Nagel that claims the point of art is to estranged or defamiliarise with disinterested liking by claiming our typical understanding of things is couched in accordance-concepts. “Milk” is the stuff you can have with cookies. Drinking milk when expecting Coca cola is a great example from that podcast. Victor shklovsky is the theorist, art as technique is the essay. This also explains Cliché This is connected to Weil’s idea of attention, they aim at the same thing, this unifies the ethical and aesthetic.
This connects to other escapes from striving, which aesthetes have always loved, from the Wei period poets to Wilde’s decadents. See Daoism Oh duh this is also a defense of getting stoned and alcohol and stuff. Why is art better than being a stoner then?
It took european poets some time until they could write of australia, Harpur was the first and for a long time the only that managed it, and even he faltered badly. We cannot see a new land because we have old eyes. Even if the world transforms utterly it will be difficult. This is somehow the same thing as watching modern re-tellings of shakespeare just being distracting in their normalcy. The strangeness of the past is easier to understand, in art and in life. Why else would we historicise?
Kant: Disinterested liking neither depends on nor generates desire for the object. (though we somehow get desires to preserve beautiful objects) We don’t predicate beautiful things under concepts, and hence cannot like them qua their usefulness for X end. Judgments of beauty do involve the representation of purposiveness (without a purpose). Pleasure in the beautiful depends on the harmonic free play between the imagination and understanding, the rules of the understanding do not govern how the imagination synthesises sense data. This free play is the precondition of all judgments, including those governed by understanding. Since we can demand assent to those, we can also demand assent for the mere non-contradiction of understanding and imagination that is expressed in a judgment of beauty.
The problem of how kantian judgments of beauty can be embedded is like frege geach for expressivist accounts of normative discourse. Are judgments that something is ugly disinterested or do they involve an aversion? Is there such a thing as disinterested disliking? Liking and enjoying come apart, do disliking and dis-enjoying? (not merely not-enjoying)?
Free play stuff seems formalist; aesthetic ideas are more expressivist.
Because there are no rules for what is beautiful, the artist cannot learn rules then deploy them. But art must still be rule governed. So genius is the faculty by which nature lets artists express aesthetic ideas, without themselves being aware of how they came by them. This answers the puzzle of how certain artists can reliably produce beautiful art.