Re: Kant
If it seems to you like I’m jumping around the book all willy-nilly, it’s probably because I am. I tend to poke around a bit for anything that looks interesting, and then reading it over and writing up a blog about it. Somehow, this way makes more sense to me than writing about what we’re covering in class.
This week, it’s Imperative you read this blog (not really, but I wanted another Kant pun). Immanuel Kant lived from 1724-1804. He’s best known as a philosopher, which I how I know him, and I was surprised to find him in our textbook for the class. Just a quick excerpt from his biography: “Kant was born in Konigsberg, East Prussia, where he attended the university, became a professor at the same university, and died shortly after his retirement” (499). While the biography actually extends to five pages, that one sentence is hilarious. But that’s a digression; here come the crunchy bits:
Kant argues that judgment of beauty is not cognitive, but aesthetic and imaginative. Judgments can be nothing but subjective. Yet, for the quality of judgment to be good, we cannot be biased, we cannot go by what we find agreeable, we cannot go by what we like “in concept,” nor what we would find “useful.” In short, Kant tells us how not to like something, as well as how not to not like something, or something like that.
The essay goes on. I would go on as well, but Kant writes with a sophisticated tongue (or pen, or whatever), and I find him difficult to read. My most common complaint with most literary criticism is one that I once again put forth for another author: Kant tells us what not to do, but not what to do. He explores beauty, yes, and he speaks of an “ideal of beauty,” but there is nothing too concrete, nothing which I can really grab on to. Academia, in general, is like this, at least in the Humanities (and, most distressingly, in the English departments), where abstraction and “one-off” debates (debates not of the thing, but debates on the debates of the thing) are the most prevalent point of study.
Bitter much? Well, yes, maybe I am. But I’m a practical kind of guy, which is why I’m a Creative Writing emphasis, and not a Literature emphasis.
In any case, I call for a truce. If you’re literature, or just disagree on principle, I apologize. Feel free to dispute with me in the comments.
-AndrewTheory.
