Hello again! I have now done a bit more online research. Roger Scruton has written a book about '
Beauty', Gerard, which I should perhaps confess that I have never read. Roger explores this timeless concept, asking what makes an object--either in art, in nature, or the human form--beautiful. This compact volume is filled with insight, Neil McGowan, at least according to Roger himself. Can there be dangerous beauties, corrupting beauties, and immoral beauties? Roger insists that beauty is a real and universal value, one anchored in our rational nature, and that the sense of beauty has an indispensable part to play in shaping the human world.
Roger Scruton - BeautyThe greatest philosopher of all time, in the opinion of kleines c, is not Roger Scruton, but Immanuel Kant. Kant was born in Königsberg in Prussia and never left the town during his life. He became Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at its university and one pupil commented that "nothing worth knowing was indifferent to him". Kant started a revolution in philosophy by examining how the mind constructed our knowledge of the objective world and the limits thereof. He set out his thinking in three critiques - '
The Critique of Pure Reason' (1781), '
The Critique of Practical Reason' (1788) and '
The Critique of Judgment' (1790).
In the '
Critique of Pure Reason', Immanuel Kant argued that objects in the world must conform to our innate understanding of them. Reason makes experience possible by imposing upon raw sense data certain categories of understanding. Kant identified twelve basic categories. These categories were innate, independent of experience and they allowed us to give order and reason to the universe. In the second critique Kant argued for the existence of absolute moral law, placing moral duty above the pursuit of happiness. Moral law could not be affected by expediency, for example Kant reasoned that it could never be right to tell a lie. He called our obligation to obey this moral law the "categorical imperative".
In his third critique, Immanuel Kant turned his attention to aesthetics, arguing that there was an objective basis for aesthetic judgments. Aesthetic judgment was not the same as taste, it was not contingent. The truly beautiful was beautiful in an objective sense and this could be recognised by everyone. Kant, in 1764, made an attempt to record his thoughts on the observing subject's mental state in '
Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime'. He held that the sublime was of three kinds: the noble, the splendid, and the terrifying.
In his '
Critique of Judgment' (1790), Kant officially says that there are two forms of the sublime, the mathematical and the dynamical, although some commentators hold that there is a third form, the moral sublime, a layover from the earlier "noble" sublime. Kant claims, "We call that sublime which is absolutely great". He distinguishes between the "remarkable differences" of the Beautiful and the Sublime, noting that beauty "is connected with the form of the object", having "boundaries", while the sublime "is to be found in a formless object", represented by a "boundlessness".
Kant evidently divides the sublime into the mathematical and the dynamical, where in the mathematical "aesthetical comprehension" is not a consciousness of a mere greater unit, but the notion of absolute greatness not inhibited with ideas of limitations. The dynamically sublime is "nature considered in an aesthetic judgment as might that has no dominion over us", and an object can create a fearfulness "without being afraid of it". He considers both the beautiful and the sublime as "indefinite" concepts, but where beauty relates to the "Understanding", sublime is a concept belonging to "Reason", and "shows a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of Sense".
For Kant, one's inability to grasp the enormity of a sublime event such as an earthquake demonstrates inadequacy of one's sensibility and imagination. Simultaneously, one's ability to subsequently identify such an event as singular and whole indicates the superiority of one's cognitive, supersensible powers. Ultimately, it is this "supersensible substrate," underlying both nature and thought, on which true sublimity is located.
Wikipedia - Sublime (philosophy) - Immanuel KantAs something of a scientist, I would only add that there is evidence that perceptions of beauty are evolutionarily determined, that things, aspects of people and landscapes considered beautiful are typically found in situations likely to give enhanced survival of the perceiving human's genes. As for the meaning of life, it is your genes, as much as your jeans, that ultimately count. Writing in the FT, Jules Evans argues that
we think, therefore we are. Public forums for the discussion of ideas are flourishing everywhere, from festivals and pubs to social media and online discussion forums, pre-eminently, of course, The Third. But will the popularity of philosophy groups have any lasting impact? Jules concludes thus:
I should add that Cambridge philosophers, in particular, remain pugnacious. Roger Scruton, a former fellow of Peterhouse, is an expert on Immanuel Kant and scourge of animal-rights activists. He also has his own farm. Roger Scruton’s signal opponent is Peter Singer, the Princeton professor of bioethics and defender of animal rights. As Singer’s book '
Eating' records, Scruton recently reared and butchered an animal named after his nemesis – Singer the pig – and can thus claim to have slaughtered Singer.
As kleines c generally prefers to wear cords rather than jeans, at least casually, it could also be argued that the meaning of life has less to do with the genes I rip, and more to do with the chords I play. The nineteenth century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, famously concluded that '
Gott ist tot'. What did he mean? God is dead, although he added that there may still be caves in which his shadow will still be shown. God's death was supposed to be a liberating event, just as Christians have always argued that Christ's resurrection on Easter Sunday is a liberating event. In the very first of his books, '
The Birth of Tragedy', Friedrich Nietzsche uses this phrase three times:
What he is saying, I think, is that the greatness of the early Greeks, before Socrates, lay in their tragedy. He never really forgave the trivialising practice of rationalising everything with Socratic argie-bargie, or indeed, Plato for setting up a hero whose main qualities are those of talking everybody else into the ground, as has occasionally been attempted here in The Third! Nietzsche may be asking, as indeed Shakespeare and Goethe occasionally ask, is the whole world really to be taken seriously, or is it not a great game, a great play like '
Hamlet' or '
Faust', some kind of drama played out by we know not whom, as a spectacle for we do not know whom? Can we make sense of such an aesthetic justification for mankind? I suspect so, Gerard! You, too?