File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1998/bhaskar.9804, message 31


From: MSPRINKER-AT-ccmail.sunysb.edu
Date: Thu, 09 Apr 1998 08:24:05 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: FWD: Re: BHA: Reply to Michael



               State University of New York at Stony Brook
                       Stony Brook, NY 11794-3355

                                            Michael Sprinker
                                            Professor of English & Comp Lit
                                            Comparative Studies
                                            516 632-9634
                                            09-Apr-1998 08:19am EDT
FROM:  MSPRINKER
TO:    Remote Addressee                     ( _bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu )
 
Subject: FWD: Re: BHA: Reply to Michael

Apologies.  The attached went to the wrong address.

One more point, Colin:  Baumgarten and Kant are not saying the same
thing, I think.  For the former, the aesthetic is much closer
to what I've been claiming it is, an objective property of
artifacts.  For Kant, as you well know, it's a mode of
cognitive apprehension, different from theoretical or practical
reason.  There is, if memory serves (it's been a decade
since I even thought about Baumgarten), nothing subjective
about the aesthetic in Baumgarten's view.

Michael


                                          Michael Sprinker
                                          Comparative Studies
                                          516 632-9634
                                          09-Apr-1998 08:09am EDT

TO:  Colin.Wight-AT-aber.ac.uk               ( _owner-bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU )

Subject: Re: BHA: Reply to Michael

Colin,

We'll just have to agree to disagree.  If you hold that the
aesthetic cannot be detached from judgment, or better (since
judgment implies a Kantian position), evaluation, then we
can't really go any further.  That puts the matter in the
realm of the subjective--or at least of subjects, who are
socio-historically determined--and, as Johnson would say,
"there's an end on it."

But I wonder how you would account for two curious phenomena
that are quite familiar:  1)the fact that large numbers of
differently constituted subjects, from different epochs and
social formations, have been able to comprehend (I suppose
you'd say appreciate), say, Greek drama of the classical
period; and 2)the capacity to learn how to view or apprehend
works of art among those whose initial experience of an
artifact is sheer comprehension (e.g., my own experience
with Jackson Pollack, whose paintings made no sense whatsoever
to me for a very long time, but now, I'd like to think,
I can, as it were, "read" with some degree of comprehension).

That not all people in all times and places fall into either
of these categories, I well admit (I also read the article
about Hamlet being incomprehensible to an African tribe;
actually, they just thought the story improbable, Hamlet's
famous failure to act simply dumb, or so I remember it).
But that a group does not comprehend a thing does not preclude
the possibility that they can be taught to do so--surely
you would not wish to carry cultural relativism so far.

Michael


     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005