Thursday, February 5, 2009

Dinner with Immanuel Kant

YOU: Do you think I look nice tonight?

KANT: This explanation of the beautiful can be inferred from the preceding explication of it as an object of a liking devoid of all interest. For if someone likes something and is conscious that he himself does so without any interest, then he cannot help judging that it must contain a basis for being liked for everyone.

YOU: Uh, OK. Thanks, I guess. Are you having a good time? How's your schnitzel?

KANT: [A] judgement of taste is not a cognitive judgement and so is not a logical judgement but an aesthetic one, by which we mean a judgement whose determining basis cannot be other than subjective. But any reference of presentations, even of sensations, can be objective (in which case it signifies what is real in an empirical presentation); excepted as a reference to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure--this reference designates nothing whatsoever in the object, but here the subject feels himself, how he is affected by the presentation.

YOU: ...

RATING: I honestly have no fucking clue. 20%, maybe? 80%?

(Image from www.en.wikipedia.org. Quotes from Critique of Judgement via The Norton Anthology of Criticism.)

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I almost peeed :)

Chris said...

I'm coming back to this once I finish metabolizing the whiskey from last night.

Anonymous said...

I hope it was Japanese whiskey. Japanese make the best whiskey.

laurie said...

Hahaha! LOVE IT.

Walter Benjamin and the Mechanical Reproductions (the band) said...

another nice use of italycs

Viking Andrew said...

Gotta love those German philosophers!*




*My way of saying I have never read Kant.


This post brought to you by your favorite area-man paint huffer, Viking Andrew

LipstickMom123 said...

Wow, this really makes me think about a lot of issues! I'm glad you got to have dinner with this gentlmean Jon from Canada. Maybe some day we can all hope to understand his strong words of hope.