… en waar bevindt zich de film? Moet men tegenwoordig medelijden hebben met kunststudenten? Adorno begin zijn Aesthetische Theorie veertig jaar geleden al met de opmerking dat niets wat met kunst te maken heeft nog vanzelfsprekend is, behalve die onvanzelfsprekendheid zelf. Sindsdien lijkt de situatie alleen maar erger geworden. En ik heb het nu niet…

What Plato is up against in his objection to art, becomes clear in Politiea, Book X, 599a: he objects here to people who take a representation for what it represents. [We can still connect with this objection as a warning at being too naive about news or documentary footage.] – Plato. 1988. Republic 10. Edited…

The Ideal Aesthetic Experience Certain aesthetic evaluative concepts relate to specific experiences in a non-trivial way. An analysis of our attributions of aesthetic excellence provides us with interesting insights in the idea that our judgements of taste are founded upon an aesthetic experience. Only two rather unfelicitous strategies appear to have been available to analytic…

On Exemplary Art as the Symbol of Morality. According to Kant the experience of knowledge of the world depends on the categories of our understanding and the forms of our intuition. What exceeds this experience, the supersensible, comes in two guises: either as the substrate of appearances, the thing in itself; or as the moral…

To those who know the original performance by Jimi Hendrix of “Little Wing” Stevie Ray Vaughan’s cover may at first sound like a fraud.1 Vaughan is playing a Jimi original in a Jimi-like manner, and this is, simply, ‘not done’. Now why would we want to regard this performance of “Little Wing” inauthentic’? Surely, melodies…

… He Had No Business ‘Ending’ It ‘Hegel’s Dialectics was Geared to Art. He Had No Business ‘Ending’ It.’ Andreas Arndt, Karol Bal, und Henning Ottmann (Hsg.): Hegel-Jahrbuch 2000. Hegels Ästhetik. Die Kunst der Politik–Die Politik der Kunst, 68-74. Akademie Verlag, 2001. »   (134K)

Kant’s Critique of Judgement can be seen to put aside all sorts of irrelevant, and illegitimate considerations for our judgements of taste, such as our interests, concepts, moral values, sentiments and excitement. Why is there no discussion in Kant of fashionable and trendy following of judgements, in short: of the influence of one’s time, one’s…

Kant, in his so-called Copernican move, filled in the details of this picture in wistful manner. He installed our scientific methods. Hastily. Herder installed our language, instead of the Kantian categories of understanding and the forms of intuition, space and time. And Schopenhauer reduced them to space, time and causality. These were efforts to correct…

The first sentence of the Critique of Judgement contains a puzzling reference to “relating a representation (in your mind) to your feeling”. How does one do that? Can we hold it up in our minds and look at it with our feeling? Part I. Critique of Aesthetic Judgement / Division I. Analytic of Aesthetic Judgement…

Afgunstig. Van Schopenhauer is bij SUN een geluksleer verschenen, De kunst om gelukkig te zijn gevuld met citaten van klassieke auteurs en overpeinzingen daarover van Schopenhauer zelf. Ik val maar met de deur in huis, Leefregel 2 zegt: Vermijd afgunst: [..] [‘Je zult nooit gelukkig zijn, als het je kwelt dat een ander gelukkiger is’,…