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 ---
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