Kant - the second coming and The cave by an artist

We've had our second week on Kant and gone a bit deeper into his views on beauty. Which I will get into in a moment, but first I wanted to quickly showcase a music video I'd discovered recently which seemed to represent Plato's 'The Cave Allegory' however, it was in fact music and art that allowed the person to escape rather than keep them trapped.

Now looking back at Kant, this one quote summarizes a lot about his views of beauty.

'We call agreeable what GRATIFIES us, beautiful what we just LIKE, good what we ESTEEM or ENDORSE'

Kant's view is that good, beauty and agreeable are different because beauty is the only one that does not survive a purpose outside of being beautiful. Good, serves a function that benefits society. The agreeable, serves a function that only benefits the individual.

Beauty is not possible if it invokes personal interests. If it is beautiful is it universally beautiful and universally liked. This becomes more difficult, as under Kant's definition only things that have pure structures and pure colors. Meaning only primary colors as they are agreed to be at a base level beautiful universally. If the colors are mixed than it becomes an 'opinion' rather than a fact of beauty.

Real beauty equals the pure abstract simple forms, no distraction from colors or tone. I would have to disagree with Mr Kant as I believe when something is considered universally beautiful it should be classified as good. To me, beauty is a purely subjective pursuit, granted that this no doubt comes from a society where there is an increased emphasis on the individual, their wants/needs/desires and a seeming idea that no opinion is without worth observing. Good however, is something that is without subjectivity. When something is good; removing the moral or ethical views of goodness for the time being, than it is structurally sound as it were. It is not so much the look but filling in a set of unknown, yet agreed upon criteria. The great works of art from the renascence are not good because they are beautiful; I certainly find the Mona Lisa to be incredibly overrated in terms of beauty, but I understand and respect the skill behind it. It is a good painting.

This then brings me into a quick look at modern, that is my contemporary, art, is the art of now good? For the most part I certainly wouldn't classify it as beautiful.

Currently on exhibition at the Sydney museum of Contemporary art this work by Stephen Birch is not, to me, beautiful. I have difficulty calling it good as well, as while previously art strove to be as realistic as possible in the renaissance, than to break the boundaries of form in Modern art and finally to question and insert personal meanings and questions of society in Post Modern. Art is now no longer considered good unless it has a message to it; unless the author has a purpose beyond showcasing beauty. And for this work, I simply have no idea exactly what is trying to be said... and I studied art for years in school! 

It is no secret I am not a fan of a large proportion of contemporary art, I do believe however that messages do have a place in art but that if art strives for the simple complexity of beauty it should not be discounted and in fact still aimed for. This can include personal opinions, they can be earth shattering revelations of the injustice in our society or simple judgements around individual endeavors; such as entertaining your time by painting, in your own opinion, the most beautiful man alive.

Immanuel Kant - a hearty meal and a real pissant.

We'll be spending the next three weeks on Kant so there should be a number of posts about him, particularly the sublime moment which interests me greatly but we'll return to that in a couple of weeks. For now we'll be looking at just the start of his work on Aesthetics, and to help us understand him a look at how his views differ from Plato the week before.

Kant makes a number of key distinction's from Plato when it comes to the topic of beauty; firstly that it is not directly linked to good as Plato often claimed. This is not to say that beauty cannot be good but it is no longer a direct correlation.

The large difference to note is in the way they approach knowledge. Plato had the view that pure knowledge was granted from the moment of birth and that we were just remembering it as we grew older. Kant however believes our knowledge to be based on experience. We cannot know that which we haven't experienced or tested. Our knowledge comes not from the idea of pure forms inbuilt into out ideas but from our interaction with the physical world. There is one exception to this and that is the notion of beauty, this is the only concept that is based not on cognitive reasoning but on senses and in our own mind. There are a few other aspects of knowledge that can be drawn through reasoning and not from experience; such as mathematical forms that can't be experienced or tested, such as the theory of relativity, that however still comes from a rationality, a cognitive understanding.

We need to look now at the idea of beauty as being inbuilt, or is it a construction or society. The argument of whether our construction of the idea of beauty is created by our society is an oft debated view and I do believe that there is some weight to it. We are told to associate certain qualities as beautiful, but how much of beauty to we have built into us.

I'll have more to say on beauty in art, as it is an issue I have been dwelling on for some years after studying Modernism and Post Modernism in high school. But quickly I shall have a word or two on the notion of beauty as a predetermined notion. I don't think it is the concept of beauty we are born with, I think that, the idea of it is something that is created by society to help explain the emotive response we receive from something 'beautiful'. I personally find the term of beautiful, as used to describe something that draws a wonder or affection from us, very limiting. As a child, we have a moment were we experience an emotive response to things we can't explain and when it is a visual stimuli that has triggered that we are told that we have seen something beautiful. Then as we get older we associate the idea of beauty less with the emotion that is brought out but with a few concepts that are meant to represent beauty.

And now a quick video, showing a young one's first view of 'beauty' and a sublime moment.