I appreciate you digging through the text - the quotes you’ve provided illustrate for me the eisegesis that I’m bringing to the discussion.

I guess my interpretation of Kant is geared towards finding the potential in the relational structure he articulates, rather than the conclusions he draws from it based on assumptions that he has regarding human reason. I accept that Kant himself doesn’t recognise (almost to the point of explicitly denying) the possibilities that his theoretical structure of reason allows for beyond this relatively human structuring of its faculties.

FWIW, I don’t see judgement as acting on feelings necessarily - this is a condition of human reason rather than the relational structure between the faculties themselves. The distinction between judgement per se and the faculty of judgement is one of apparent necessity - Kant reaches the fourth moment, that point at which the question of necessity is asked, and makes an anthropocentric assumption that limits this faculty to his understanding of human reason. It is in this fourth moment, in his confusing account of the sublime and in his horizon of artistic ‘genius’, that Kant’s anthropocentric assumption is most apparent.

I find it intriguing that CofJ is often considered separate from the other two critiques, with judgement operating outside of reason as well as firmly within it. The way I see it, only ‘minor’ tweaks to Kant’s overall structure are required (along the lines of Copernicus shifting the centre from the earth to the sun) to position the faculties of imagination, understanding and judgement in a relational trinity that is inclusive of, but not limited to, the human conditions for reason he describes.

Well, Mr. Possible, we might move on from acute angles to discuss something less benign, like family, and more pertinent to our lives as human beings, but if you believe we cannot really agree on things as harmless as mathematical angles, how could we proceed further into more complicated ones like those of “family”? — Todd Martin

Don’t get me wrong - just because we aren’t necessarily thinking about the same angle, doesn’t mean we can’t agree on a relational structure. I’m simply pointing out that it is a relational structure that we’re agreeing on, and aligning our thinking to in potentiality, and NOT the angle itself.

When you say that my “perspective” of the atemporal (as you have avowed it is) acute angle is likely to change, I can only shake my head and laugh. What an acute angle “is” has been agreed upon by every even amateur geometrician since Euclid. It is not a perspective but a definition...except for Lobachevsky and the other non-Euclidians, whose work I am frankly unfamiliar with, other than that they postulated that two parallel lines can actually meet at some point, which has contributed productively to physics and astrophysics and Einstein’s General Theory... — Todd Martin

The definition is a relational structure: not what an acute angle ‘is’, but what we agree on about it. What we don’t agree on is any definition of its temporal aspect. When I talk about ‘perspective’, I’m referring to our four-dimensional structure (in potentiality) with regard to this definition. Our changing perspective doesn’t matter within geometry - until we need to apply it to physics. Then we need to make sure that we’re referring to the same potential angle at the same potential spacetime location. For that we need to acknowledge how observation events change in relation to each other.

This alignment of four-dimensional perspectives in potentiality is essential to quantum physics, where we can’t refine or make adjustments to our predictions based on experience. ‘Near enough’ is not good enough here, and we must acknowledge the fuzziness of our atemporal or potential definitions.

So you can laugh at what I’m saying safe within potentiality, but the process of acting on conception (converting thinking to thought) necessarily involves an alignment of four-dimensional structures in potentiality.

The difference is that the objection comes from those who object to their faith and their belief in the word of god, and perceive their outward show of confidence as a threat.

One informs the intellect, the other insults it? Opinion only, of course.
Philosopher: I can tell you how I think.
Psychologist: I can tell you how you think. — Mww

I can see that, sure - but I would argue that it is this territory that still needs to be mapped if we’re to bridge the gap between philosophy and science. This, I think, is why Kant ventured an exploration of affect.

Kant would never concede a relation between empirical neurological research and pure reason. At the same time, if he had any knowledge of empirical neurological research, it is unlikely he would have spent 12 years developing transcendental philosophy. Still, that particular bell can never be unrung. — Mww

Point taken.

True enough, and starting with the recognition of anthropomorphism. The bane of good philosophy, but conveniently overlooked in the other sciences. What warrant have we to classify the mental capacities of lesser animals, ref. Nagel, 1974. No matter what we think about how lesser animals process information, such thinking is only possible from the way we think about anything at all. It looks to us as if dolphins enjoy surfing, and it looks to us like eagles play catch with their catch. Might be nothing but another kind of observer problem.

You ask what if we let go of the assumption only higher intelligence animals synthesize information a priori; I say the strictly human criteria by which lesser animals synthesize information a priori, can never be met.

Still fun to talk about, though. As long as nobody claims to have all the answers. — Mww

Why must it be strictly human criteria, though? I agree that there may be a kind of observer problem occurring here - this is why I keep going back to Copernicus. No matter what Copernicus could observe in how the planets moved, such observations were only possible from the way he observed anything at all. But he recognised that the variability in the way he observed the motion of the planets was one of many possible perspectives of the same system. So he structured the relativity of conditions under which we made observations of heavenly bodies to inform our prediction of motion. From that relational structure, he was able to imagine similar conditions for alternative perspectives, and develop a broader rational structure that more accurately predicted our observations.

There’s no reason why we can’t do the same thing here. Copernicus enabled us to structure a human perspective of a body’s motion in a consolidation of space, then Newton adjusted for this and restructured it in a broader awareness of time. Darwin enabled us to structure a human perspective of potential in a consolidation of change, then Einstein adjusted for this and restructured time’s relativity in a broader awareness of potential. Kant enabled us to structure a human perspective of knowledge, value and potential in a consolidation of reason. What is required now is to adjust for and restructure the relativity of those conditions for human reasoning in a broader awareness of knowledge, value or potential. Kant’s aesthetics - despite his anthropocentric conclusions - allows us to imagine possible non-human conditions for alternative perspectives of meaning, and develop a broader rational structure that more accurately predicts how we conceptualise reality.

We cannot make claims about what animals ‘know’, how they ‘think’ or what they ‘feel’. But then, we can’t make these claims about each other, either (a la psychology). I cannot even make consistent claims about what I know, think or feel with any certainty. It is the qualitative variability in these claims - how what I ‘feel’ affects what I can ‘think’ and what I can ‘know’ in each moment - which Barrett re-structures into a rational theory that, unlike Kant, plugs back into empirical intuition. She has Kant’s aesthetics to thank for the sense her theory makes at the philosophical/idealism end, and current neuroscience to thank for the sense it makes at the scientific/materialism end.

I’m confident that information and quantum theories - as much as I understand the reluctance to bring these into philosophical discussions - are also important contributors to this endeavour. The reason they’re so troublesome is the same reason we haven’t progressed much from Kant: our structures of language and grammar fail us for certainty at this level. But what these theories do is structure alternative perspectives of knowledge, value and potential that transcend Kant’s consolidation of human reason.

I’ll make a comment on your interesting discussion with @tim wood here, if I may:

Relation is a cognitive term, so relation only means anything when thought is involved. To ask whether things relate when we don’t think abut them doesn’t make any sense. Best we can do is profess ignorance. — Mww

I don’t see relation as an exclusively cognitive term - just because we’re not thinking about a relation, doesn’t mean we don’t feel it, or that it has no effect on our intuition, and therefore our structure of knowledge, value or potential. We may not achieve justifiable certainty, but we can’t afford to plead ignorance here, either. Kant’s aesthetics structures the capacity for what we feel to interact with our faculties of imagination and understanding without interference from judgement. Barrett then re-structures this affect in terms of attention and effort, enabling it to inform both empirical and cognitive intuition from the interoceptive network. Ignorance is not the best we can do - not by a long shot. That’s been my point.

Can anything that exists without relation to time, in your opinion, ever change? That is, be altered in any way from what it (already) is? — Todd Martin

Now we’re into a territory where our language and grammar has struggled to keep up with our knowledge. As Rovelli says, “We say that an event ‘is,’ or ‘has been,’ or ‘will be.’ We do not have a grammar adapted to say that an event ‘has been’ in relation to me but ‘is’ in relation to you.”

So, too, we have ‘is’ in a temporal sense and ‘is’ in a timeless sense, and nothing to distinguish them in our discussion, to move between the temporal and atemporal without confusion. What an atemporal thing ‘is’ in my perspective is likely to change, and it’s likely to change in your perspective, too - not because what it ‘is’ in a timeless sense is altered, but because what it is for us alters as we change, our perspective changes. What it ‘is’ in a timeless sense we can only piece together from the relation of our ever-changing perspectives as a probabilistic (fuzzy), inter-subjective conceptual structure. So it’s defined by the accuracy of our predictions.

This all seems rather pointless when we’re discussing a concept as benign as an angle. But what about a concept such as ‘family’?

I understand where you're coming from but to "...challenge us to see the world for what it IS, not just for what we'd prefer it to be" is, to be brutally frank, not an artist's job or if you that doesn't go down well with you, it definitely isn't something unique to art i.e. it fails to define art; plus it amounts trespassing onto territories that rightfully belong to other disciplines/fields. — TheMadFool

Your insistence that we must be restrained by these categories that define our thinking is a fundamental misunderstanding of creativity, and of art. I’m not saying that challenging our perception of reality is an artist’s job - it’s everyone’s job. But to say that artists are ‘trespassing’ by doing so, or that they should have art defined for them by other disciplines, is ridiculous.

That said, I did admit that artists should be given the freedom to pick and choose any topic under the sun as subjects of their artistic urges BUT, and this can't be emphasized enough, they should make it a point to leave a clearly visible sign that the topic/subject, whatever it is, has passed through the mind of an artist. — TheMadFool

You’re talking about creative intentionality. But who decides what a ‘clearly visible sign’ is? This is what I’m talking about - ignorance on the part of the audience does not constitute failure on the part of the artist, anymore than aesthetic awareness on the part of the critic does not constitute creative intentionality on the part of the artist (eg. Roosevelt’s Navajo rug). Not everyone recognises (or is willing to recognise) the creative process at work, especially if it transcends their own capacity to describe it. So much of this creative process is unavailable to the viewer, and even the artist may not be able to describe exactly why their work elicits a certain affect - but it demonstrates awareness, connection and collaboration in achieving an aesthetic experience.

So, how do you gauge creative intentionality? This is part of the question that Duchamp asks in his art. How do you know that an artist made this or that stroke of the brush on purpose? What leads you to assume that Duchamp chose to exhibit the urinal as a joke? Is this something for the critic or culture to determine, or is an artwork inseparable from the artist’s creative process after all? And why do we define art by a judgement of beauty - as if excluding our potential to manifest ugliness and disturbance in the world is more valuable than the truth?

This standpoint is in keeping with how we approach other issues: I remember, quite some time ago, reading a book on critical thinking and there's as discussion in it about how we must get all sides to a story and that, as per the author, involves getting a teacher's perspective, a student's perspective, a parent's perspective, a politician's perspective, so and so forth. The reason why this is done is because each such perspective brings to the table a different take on the issue at hand and, most importantly, each perspective is unique and vital to our understanding. — TheMadFool

It’s the focus on a consolidated uniqueness that I take issue with. Labelling each perspective as such detracts from the importance in the perspective of a teacher who is also a parent, for instance; or an artist who is also a scientist.

Likewise, an artist's perspective must be unique for it to be worthy of our attention and admiration and it, for certain, isn't if the artist's intention is solely to "...challenge us to see the world for what it IS, not just what we'd prefer it to be". Philosopher's do the same thing with words. Comedians do it with jokes. Thus my insistence that beauty be recognized as an essential attribute of art for it's the only quality that art can claim as its very own and thus the only quality that can make the artist's perspective stand out as a one of a kind among the myriad points of view that are available to us. — TheMadFool

Comedians may do it with jokes, but much of a good comedian’s material these days ‘trespasses’ into performance art and philosophy, as well as directly challenging what we think of as ‘funny’. Likewise for philosophers who publish fiction (de Beauvoir, Sartre, Rand, Camus, Nietzsche) or who are also scientists or mathematicians (Aristotle, Descartes, Pierce, Dewey, etc). So, you can insist on everyone ‘staying in their lane’ all you want - but it only limits your perspective of reality if Descartes can be essentially EITHER a mathematician OR a philosopher, but not both.

An artist’s perspective IS unique if it challenges us to SEE the world differently from our current understanding. Whether we take that challenge is not up to the art or the artist, it has to do with our own expectations of what art and artists can achieve. Art cannot claim beauty as its very own, anymore than philosophers can claim wisdom, or comedians humour.

We need to get away from trying to protect institutionalised concepts from change by defining them by some unique ‘essence’ that is nothing more than an illusion of power. Is it so troublesome for your perspective of reality that art aspires to transcend definition and reach beyond our current understanding? Why does that unsettle you so?

You say “When we think of an acute angle...we assume it is eternal, but to be honest, we wouldn’t know.” So are you retracting your previous statement that the acute angle is atemporal? — Todd Martin

No - but I realise that I should have been clearer with that statement. Atemporal does not mean eternally ‘unchanged’ - it means ‘existing or considered without relation to time’. The difference here is subtle but important.

You said that when someone thinks of an acute angle, that the thought is temporal, the angle atemporal. You also said, however, that the acute angle is a fuzzy thing lacking in certainty.

I think of the temporal things as the fuzzy uncertain ones, subject to the ravages of time, coming into being and perishing, like your keyboard. On the other hand, I conceive of the atemporal things as remaining unchanged throughout eternity, not subject to the vicissitudes of time.

Obviously our conceptions of temporality vs. atemporality are dramatically different. Would you please indulge me by explaining your conception of these polar opposites? — Todd Martin

I’ll give it a shot, but it might get complicated.

Essentially, it’s a matter of perspective. When you think of temporal ‘things’ in this way, you’re doing so from your perception or experience of ‘eternity’. From this view, temporal ‘things’ are probably not so much fuzzy or uncertain as fragile and fleeting, wouldn’t you say? And when you describe atemporal ‘things’ as ‘unchanged’, it’s also from a particular perspective of ‘eternity’ - and these ‘things’ seem to be more solid by comparison.

This is a common human perception - the eternity of time viewed as the linear progression of a three-dimensional universe. So when we talk about ‘things’, we assume that we’re referring to the exact same linear progression of time.

But Einstein showed that time is not really a linear progression, but a fourth dimensional aspect. So, if we want a more accurate or inter-subjective structure of ‘eternity’ (especially if we’re going to discuss the properties of what is atemporal in relation to what is temporal), we need to restructure our understanding of time more accurately.

Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time presents a comprehensive process of deconstructing and then reconstructing a more accurate ‘eternal’ perspective of time according to the latest physics. The basic idea is that the world is not made up of objects, but is rather a series of interrelated events, and time is how these events change in relation to each other. And each of our ‘linear’ perspectives can be understood as a fragile and fleeting consciousness or mind-event within this inter-subjective eternity or ‘block universe’.

So now when we think of temporal or atemporal ‘things’ in a block universe, the mind-event is relating to other events, not objects. In this perspective, temporal ‘things’ exist within the mind-event as a complete and definitive event, coming into being, changing and perishing; while atemporal ‘things’ exist beyond the capacity of our particular mind-event, so we have no way of defining them as an event - they’re described in this block universe by their potential relation to temporal events. These are the properties of atemporal ‘things’: they may appear ‘unchanged’ in relation to you as a temporal event, but your perspective and mine of their qualitative relation to temporal events are neither identical nor static, as all temporal events (including us) change in relation to each other.

In mathematics, the properties of atemporal ‘things’ or concepts describe a limiting relational structure between quantitative and qualitative potential. An angle refers to a potential directional relation between the potential convergence of two potential linear relations; in an acute angle, the quantified potential (or value) of that directional relation is anywhere between 0 and 90 degrees. When we think of an acute angle, this potential structure of relations is the extent of its definition. Its temporal and spatial location is indeterminate - we assume it is eternal, but to be honest, we wouldn’t know. It only appears eternally ‘unchanged’ from our limited ‘linear’ perspective of eternity, and by assuming everyone has the same ‘linear’ perspective we simply extrude that information uniformly across the block universe.

It’s like assuming that a circle in 2D is really a cylinder in 3D, when it could very well be a sphere, a cone or an hourglass. It’s only when a different 2D measurement of what we understand to be the same object turns out to be not a circle but an oval, and another measurement is a triangle, that we attempt to position these measurements in relation to each other in a possible 3D space and start to construct a more accurate 3D image. Now consider the block universe as a 5D structure...

I'm somewhat confident that if we make a list of artworks that have been bought/sold for huge sums of money, money here the surrogate marker for real art, you'll [probably] discover that art lovers all over the world choose beauty over anything else that art deals with. — TheMadFool

I would confidently dispute that. If you took a look at the twenty most expensive paintings sold, roughly half of them would not be considered ‘beautiful’ by the general public let alone art lovers, and were certainly not purchased at that price for their beauty. These include de Kooning, Munch, Pollock, Rothko, Lichtenstein and Basquiat - all over $100 million apiece. Many of them, however, are recognised as ‘important’ works in our overall progress of aesthetic awareness. Modigliani, in particular, is indicative of a more ‘respectful’ and ‘sensitive’ treatment of female nudes - although they were considered ‘ugly’ during his lifetime (for showing pubic hair). These artists challenge us to see the world for what it IS, not just for what we’d prefer it to be. Their aesthetic value is realised in the knowledge we gain - not just the pleasure - from thinking about how we feel when we look at it.

Odd that nowhere in your colorful description is beauty even mentioned in passing. — TheMadFool

If you can’t see beauty in those definitions, then I doubt you understand aesthetics at all. It’s only after Kant that the term ‘aesthetics’ was commonly reduced to the nature and appreciation of beauty. It’s such a narrow perspective - Kant uses the example of beauty in aesthetic experience to demonstrate rational structure in our capacity for judgement, not to define aesthetics. The sublime is no less important to an overall understanding of aesthetics.

I too feel that artists should broaden their horizons and expand their interests to be as inclusive of the multi-faceted world that we inhabit. However, they mustn't do this in a way that undermines art itself and they're guilty of doing precisely that when they ignore beauty and get carried away by the novelty of their ideas. For example, Duchamp seems to have been so bowled over by the freshness and originality of his ideas that he completely forgot about beauty. — TheMadFool

I would argue that Duchamp never ‘forgot’ about beauty, but that he deliberately downplayed it in his art to achieve the focus he was aiming for. Artists shouldn’t be expected to encompass an holistic view of this multi-faceted world in every piece, nor to create ‘art itself’ - instead, they embody in their work what they believe the world (of art) can learn from their perspective: ‘Be the change you wish to see in the world’. It is the ‘freshness and originality of his ideas’ that he aims to present in the clearest way that he can, and to attempt anything else is hubris.

What's unique about beauty in art is that the latter makes the former a value in its own right. — TheMadFool

Sorry, I just don’t see this.

But the aesthetic VALUE is completely determined by beauty, the aesthetic quality. To speak of one is to speak of the other. You wrote "...aesthetic qualities..." Pray tell what other qualities other than beauty are there in aesthetics?

Not that I want to get into an argument with you but I quoted YOU so if you're not happy, you have yourself to blame for it. — TheMadFool

Aesthetic qualities are the way in which art elements and principles, materials and techniques work together to influence the mood, feeling or meaning of an artwork. They can be gentle, angry, happy, sad, sharp, bright, harsh, languid, etc.

Aesthetic value is the value that an artwork possesses in virtue of its capacity to elicit pleasure (positive value) or displeasure (negative value) when appreciated or experienced aesthetically.

I understand that Duchamp's works, some of them I presume, elicited a response that was negative in every sense of that word from the art critics. For my money, the reason why critics were, in your words, "...horrified..." was because the work was absent beauty in the form that the world and the critics were familiar with up until that point. For Duchamp to be considered a legit painter, an artist in his own right, we must come to the conclusion that he was offering a different perspective, on, revealing another side to, beauty and not outright rejecting the role and importance of beauty in art. That;s as far as I'm willing to go with what you said. — TheMadFool

Duchamp was offering a broader perspective of art - he was disputing the rejection of negative value in a created aesthetic experience.

A "...new understanding of how to see the world..." as I've been explaining ad nauseum isn't unique to art. The same can be said of philosophical positions, scientific theories, and whathaveyou and that being so, art can't be defined by in those terms. To illustrate analogically, we can't use eyes to define human beings because other animals also have eyes; to define human beings, we need to focus on the essence of what it is to be human. Similarly, to define art, we can't rely on features that are present in other non-art disciplines; what we need is something unique to art and that, for me, is beauty. — TheMadFool

But beauty is not unique to art at all - it is ubiquitous in nature. So, by the same token, art can’t be defined in terms of beauty, anymore than new understanding. In my view, what is unique to art is the self-conscious creation of an aesthetic experience. And no, it doesn’t have to be new in order to be art, but it doesn’t have to be beautiful, either. This is what art ultimately strives for: new and unexpected information, rendered with satisfying aesthetic clarity. It’s more a work-in-process than a product in this respect.

Possibility So, if you and I were discussing the properties of acute angles, you would require that I draw one before you be assured that we were thinking of the same thing? — Todd Martin

Not necessarily. We can and do successfully discuss the ‘properties’ of potential ‘things’ all the time. But they’re still fuzzy things lacking in certainty, if we’re honest. Not that it matters in most instances.

If we were unable to agree on properties, mind you, that may be reason to believe our conception of an ‘acute angle’ differed in its structure. Then we would look to more clearly align our thinking in potentiality by seeking agreement on the concept’s relational structure (ie. its properties or actual instances).

But we shouldn’t assume that we’re talking about an actual angle, or that any thought we may have regarding a concept, its properties or its instances would be identical to another on account of identifying the concept. Of course, we often do assume this, because it’s more efficient. But I think we should also recognise the potential for prediction error in doing so.

The reason why Duchamp was recognized as an artist was because some of his works were beautiful. OK. — TheMadFool

Not the same thing - and I’m getting a little tired of you clipping my statements to suit your own argument. Aesthetic qualities does NOT equal beautiful - you’re equivocating aesthetic qualities with positive aesthetic VALUE. His Nude Descending a Staircase No.2 horrified art critics and patrons alike in the US in 1913:

Julian Street, an art critic for The New York Times wrote that the work resembled "an explosion in a shingle factory," and cartoonists satirized the piece. It spawned dozens of parodies in the years that followed. A work entitled Food Descending a Staircase was exhibited at a show parodying the most outrageous works at the Armory, running concurrently with the show at The Lighthouse School for the Blind. In American Art News, there were prizes offered to anyone who could find the nude.

After attending the Armory Show and seeing Marcel Duchamp's nude, President Theodore Roosevelt wrote: "Take the picture which for some reason is called 'A Naked Man Going Down Stairs'. There is in my bathroom a really good Navajo rug which, on any proper interpretation of the Cubist theory, is a far more satisfactory and decorative picture. Now, if, for some inscrutable reason, it suited somebody to call this rug a picture of, say, 'A Well-Dressed Man Going Up a Ladder', the name would fit the facts just about as well as in the case of the Cubist picture of the 'Naked Man Going Down Stairs'. From the standpoint of terminology each name would have whatever merit inheres in a rather cheap straining after effect; and from the standpoint of decorative value, of sincerity, and of artistic merit, the Navajo rug is infinitely ahead of the picture." — From Wikipedia

The aesthetic qualities he added challenged Cubism’s criteria of form at the time. It clearly lacked those aesthetic qualities by which it could be judged ‘beautiful’ as an art form, and yet it was important for the aesthetic qualities it did have: repetition, indeterminacy of form, and variations of perspective that suggest movement. Today, with photography and cinema, we take these particular qualities in 2D form for granted, but at the time they were conveying a new understanding of how to see the world - one that wasn’t yet understood in art.

In other words, to many, those who share my sentiment that art has to be aesthetically pleasing I presume, Duchamp's work wasn't art.

As far as I can tell, if Duchamp was a pioneer of the point of view on art that you're espousing, then kudos to him. I don't know what kind of artistic environment his take on art take shape in but it must've been marked with deep frustration at the status quo whatever it was. To present a toilet as art comes off as a desperate measure...perhaps because of...desperate times. — TheMadFool

I recognise that many people draw the line of ‘art’ at visually pleasing, which they understand to be the limit of aesthetics. I find it sad that this opinion is still mainstream (even considered intellectual) after more than a century of artistic exploration beyond this horizon. But some people still insist the earth is flat and only 6000 years old, so...

I also recognise that Dadaism emerged from the environment of WWI, a stark reality that made this criteria of ‘retinal art’ seem like escapism, fantasy, a denial of their own experience. But the idea that aesthetics was about more than what is visually pleasing, and included sublime delight in the process (however fearful, difficult or disorienting) of attempting to understand what we’re looking at beyond the limits of our senses - I believe that was Kant.

Which is fine, depending on what you mean by constructionist, given that the concept exemplifies the difference between some speculative epistemology in metaphysics based on reason, and some psychology of learning in the physical world based on experience alone. Although, it might be hard to disseminate how all a priori knowledge is the kind of knowledge susceptible to being learned, as opposed to being merely thought. Might be what Kant had in mind with:

“....For it would be absurd to think of grounding an analytical judgement on experience....”

So does your constructionist perspective deny analytic a priori knowledge?

Yes, we learn from a young age by means of qualitative relation, and I suppose psychology has more to say about it than philosophy. — Mww

While I would agree with Kant’s statement, I think any assumption that analytic a priori knowledge is the essence of language concepts ignores the possibility that significant concepts such as ‘body’ and ‘extension’ may in fact be constructed from qualitative relations of experience into a consolidating capacity for self-consciousness, language and reason. Consider the notion of ‘priori/posteriori’ as a temporal relation to information, and the difference between analytic and synthetic is one of awareness with regards to consolidation. If we let go of an assumption that only humans or other self-conscious organisms can integrate information we consolidate as ‘knowledge’, and recognise the capacity of simpler organisms to synthesise (without necessarily consolidating) information we consider to be ‘a priori knowledge’, then this speculation may not be so much of a stretch. I’m afraid there’s a lot to unpack here, though.

Still, I’m intrigued by this seeming reluctance of philosophers to venture into the domain of psychology. Are they worried about what they might find, or simply resisting based on the historical criticisms that Kant espoused? I think that grounding a psychological theory of conceptual development on empirical neuroscientific research in relation to the possibility of rational structures of affect/introspection may be an approach of which even Kant would approve (which is partly why I find Barrett’s theory so compelling).

Possibility Do you not agree that an acute angle is one of less than 90 degrees? — Todd Martin

One of - yes I do, but it’s like saying ‘I’m thinking of a number between zero and ninety’. An acute angle is a consolidated concept - the potential or conditions for thinking, not an actual thought (or angle).

If you draw two lines converging to a point and say ‘that’s an acute angle’ and I look at it and agree, then I’d be confident that we’re actually thinking of the same angle - even though any measurement is still indeterminate.

But when I think of an acute angle, it is only potentially the same angle you are thinking of whenever you think of an acute angle. Note: this is not the same as possibly - it’s much more precise than that.

I can tell you this, your views depart from the mainstream understanding of art is. — TheMadFool

I’m okay with that - I’m not after the popular vote.

Marcel Duchamp was simply having some fun and unfortunately it was at the expense of those who know that art must be about beauty. I'm sure his reputation from his previous works which were, I suppose, beautiful, helped him slip this monstrosity past the art checkpost. It happens. I remember a long time ago knowing a person who was known for his honesty. At one point he did lie but everyone believed it because of his reputation as an upstanding bloke. — TheMadFool

You might want to do a little research on Duchamp before you leap to this conclusion. Duchamp had already earned a reputation for adding aesthetic qualities to his work that challenged the criteria of form. He added elements of movement (Nude Descending a Staircase No.2) and even elements of mental activity (Portrait of Chess Players) to his Cubist artworks that scandalised critics, and he later rejected what he referred to as ‘retinal art’, which he believed “intended only to please the eye”. Fountain was his most significant Dadaist work, was one of a number of ‘readymade’ objects he used in his art, and was indicative of his desire “to put art back in service of the mind”. It didn’t ‘slip past the art checkpost’, but was originally rejected as ‘not art’ for an exhibition that supposedly had no jury, prompting Duchamp to resign from the Board of its organising society. But it wasn’t the first time his art had been rejected from a non-jury exhibition.

So, do some art "...overstretch our capacity to integrate the new information with how we predict it would (or believe it should) look or move"? After all, if beauty is not all that central to art, some art shouldn't be beautiful. Can you give me some examples of art that have nothing to do with beauty? — TheMadFool

Some art isn’t beautiful, or at least elements of it are disturbing or difficult to face, watch or acknowledge, let alone judge as ‘beautiful’. These pieces are often described as ‘important’. The earlier example I referred to was of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, first exhibited (after initial rejection) in 1917. The 1994 New Zealand film Once Were Warriors is etched in my memory as a disturbingly powerful piece of cinema that I cannot bring myself to watch again, and yet would not hesitate to recommend. Likewise for Khaled Hosseini’s novels.

And Monet’s Impression: Sunrise was among many works rejected by the Salon des Beaux Arts in Paris for years prior to the 1874 Impressionist Exhibition, because they over-stretched critics’ capacity to integrate certain techniques and subject matter with how they believed paintings should look. These artworks were not ‘beautiful’, and did not aim to be: they intended to portray the aesthetic qualities experienced in the fleeting nature of light and the ordinariness of life. That critics couldn’t recognise this aesthetic quality, let alone judge it to be ‘beautiful’, did not mean it wasn’t art, even then.

I do admit that creativity is involved in art for it's necessary for beautification - how might I take something and give it, in your words, "...aesthetic value..." However, creativity per se isn't art. For instance it took a whole lot of creativity to invent the automobile but the earliest automobiles, if you look at old pictures, lacked the "...aesthetic value..." modern automobiles possess. — TheMadFool

I’m not say that creativity per se is art, but that it is a property without which art would not be what it is - ergo, its essence.

There are many skills that are considered an ‘art’ in the hands of some, due to their creative approaches to problem-solving that incrementally challenge what can be achieved, but such endeavours are considered ‘beautiful’ only so long as they don’t overstretch our capacity to integrate the new information with how we predict it would (or believe it should) look or move.

The ‘aesthetic value’ of early automobiles is lost on many of us, but at the time they would have been looked upon by engineers (at least) as a masterpiece, a thing of beauty - in looking at this contraption they understood what could be achieved. If you understand the history of the craft, you would appreciate their aesthetic value even now, just as we do with paintings and sculpture.

When I think of an acute angle, assuming I and you both correctly conceive what an acute angle is, is that angle the same one you are thinking of whenever you think of an acute angle? — Todd Martin

Potentially - an actual answer to this question will always be indeterminate, probabilistic or ‘fuzzy’ to some extent.

I know that understanding is important but that goes for everything not just art and so understanding as a notion fails to distinguish art from non-art. — TheMadFool

I’m not trying to distinguish art from non-art; that appears to be your aim, not mine. I’m trying to distinguish between aesthetics and your claim that art should be about beauty.

For my money, if there's an essence to art, it has to be beauty, and while it may or may not be possible to grasp beauty, art is simply experiencing beauty and not studying or analyzing it i.e. art is not about understanding anything but rather the act of beholding that which is aesthetically endowed.

To make my point clearer, there's understanding and then there's understanding beautifully. For instance, some mathematical theorems have more than one proof and some of them may be long-winded, many pages long and fail to capture the core ideas behind the theorems while others, the artistic ones, are succint, and reveals a deep insight of the theorems. Aesthetics and understanding are different things. — TheMadFool

Well, for me, the essence of art is creativity, the experience of art is the possibility of understanding what we see, and the beauty of art is a judgement of success in that endeavour. Aesthetics, however, refers to the relational structure that enables all of this to occur, and is inclusive of both unmanifested creativity and any failure to understand what we see. Aesthetic value is a judgement of beauty with claims to universality, but an aesthetic experience can be so much more than that.

I think that art has always sought to be revolutionary - where it seeks to stabilise or consolidate a prevailing perspective, it quickly loses significance.

Sport (especially football/basketball) is form of entertainment that draws people frustrated by a sense of helplessness, offering an illusion of potential/value in a constructed environment. It’s a form of escapism - for both the viewer and the participant - that has far too many people fooled into believing it’s the only solution to all their problems. The music and reality TV industries seem to be peddling the same distorted perspective in the arts.

BUT they’ve built these industries around a multi-dimensional structure of potential/value that just makes more sense: physical/creative opportunity, popularity, influence and money. Of course, it’s a house of cards, but it appears real enough - more real and more attainable than any value/potential offered by visual arts, anyway.

This comes back to valuing high-quality thinking and its relation to more accurate, comprehensive and original products of thought instead of simply more expensive or more popular ones. In my view this has to start with education reform, particularly promoting creative, critical and constructive thinking across all subjects (not confining it to the arts), and from a much younger age. But it also requires restructuring industry to both value and provide opportunities for creating and utilising more original and accurate products of thought by developing their comprehensibility and popularity, as well as demanding more accuracy from popular products of thought, and more comprehensibility from original products of thought - like we do with products of science and technology.

Unfortunately, the impact these pie-in-the-sky reforms may have on those in the fine arts industry, for instance, should not be the primary concern. Despite my support for Visual Arts and for artists, I think no particular industry format should be protected for its own sake, but for the opportunities it provides for high-quality thinking and its products. Elitism may be its downfall, if it clings to such ideals to remain commercially viable.

I am deeply disturbed by the way people seem to object to having to pay for the arts. When I have conversed with some others who seem to think that I waste my money in this ways, they have gone as far as to suggest that artists should not expect to make their money and do jobs and do art as an extra. So I am left wondering how do we change a culture which expects the arts as a free extra? — Jack Cummins

There is a certain commercial value placed on entertainment in the arts that fails to distinguish between ignorance, escapism or denial of reality, truth, etc and creative challenges to prevailing assumptions about reality, truth, etc. There is no recognised commercial value in high-quality thinking - only in the products of thought and their measurable utility. Because of this, any sub-standard thinking (or thinker) that generates a product people can use is potentially valuable. Enter Trump.

But the value/significance of creativity is in its relational structure of popularity, originality, comprehensibility and relatability - subjective and fluid measures on which we will never entirely agree. Whenever we reduce these relational structures to a single monetary value, we fail to clearly articulate why it matters so much. Everyone then assumes their own reductionist methodology to be in play, and so will argue that the value is ‘wrong’.

Any society that equates meaningfulness with a linear or even two-dimensional structure of monetary value will never fully grasp the utility of the creative process.

Not just ‘attract attention’, but attention and effort towards understanding - this is how we learn about the world. A ‘judgement of beauty’ is part of this
— Possibility

Go on...

What do you mean by "...effort towards understanding..."? This phrase seems more suited for a philosophical article than art. — TheMadFool

When you stop to look at an artwork, it has succeeded in attracting your limited attention and effort. That’s a start. Aesthetic quality is based on feelings not just of pleasure but also of displeasure. Nevertheless, most adults want to simply ‘enjoy’ art, like life - not be influenced by it. Undeniable pleasure in the observation of art is often about its ability to render qualitatively positive aspects of experience in an acceptable form, enabling an incrementally positive overall shift in our perspective, and therefore understanding, of the world. A ‘judgement of beauty’ is an integration of this new understanding. Displeasure draws attention and effort in an initial unwillingness to integrate either certain qualitative aspects of experience or the form in which they are rendered. Sublimity highlights those qualitative aspects of the experience that we struggle to understand: the limitations in our faculty of judgement.

So, when we come across a urinal displayed as ‘art’ in a gallery, aesthetics enables us to come to terms with an interoception of displeasure in a rational understanding of our own limitations, and at least recognise that we’re equivocating a judgement of ‘art’ with a judgement of ‘beauty’ or of ‘form’, to the detriment of our capacity for understanding. The possibility of understanding such an installation as ‘art’ challenges the viewer to correct their conception of either ‘art’, ‘beauty’ or ‘form’ - or to reject the possibility of understanding what they see.

Anything else is illogical. Nothingness cannot have anything in it. Nothingness is not even an 'it'. If there is something happening in nothingness, there is something, not nothingness. Nothingness cannot have potency because potency is something. — EnPassant

How do you know that the potency of nothing is something?

I guess a more interesting question would be what multiple time dimensions would be like if it were possible. We often understand space as being multi-dimensional, but in most theories (even in string theory with it's dozen dimensions), there is only one time dimension. — Mr Bee

I find this to be a common misunderstanding of dimensions that consolidates ‘space’ within an aspect ‘time’. What we commonly refer to as ‘time’ presupposes the existence of what we commonly refer to as ‘space’. This presupposes the existence of direction (shape), which in turn presupposes the existence of (potential) energy.

Now Einstein says time is an illusion but we still assume it has some basis is reality? In the movie, "Doctor Strange" he goes to a universe where time doesn't exist and creates a time loop. Now fiction aside, can we imagine a place without time? Would any events occur? Can memories form? Or do all possible events occur simultaneously? What is the lay of the land? — TiredThinker

I think Einstein was referring to the relativity of time in relation to knowledge. Memories can only form as such in an atemporal structure, where all possible events may be accessible at any time. Such a system would be structured according to a perception of value, significance or potential, rather than an observation of change.

When you conceive of an acute geometrical angle in your mind, is that angle temporal or atemporal? — Todd Martin

The angle is atemporal, the thought is temporal.

Just tried to post something on “Bannings”, and was told no more posts allowed on that thread...what’s up with that? — Todd Martin

The ‘Bannings’ thread is opened by mods to discuss particular banning events, and is usually closed again when the discussion goes off topic, which it invariably does.

The value is not in the actuality of the experience, but in its qualitative potential. — Possibility

↪Possibility While true, that is also true of almost every experience. — LuckyR

Agreed. The value of altruism is NOT in how much we give or how much we do, but in how much anything we give or do increases the perceived potential of others. When we, as observers, refer to an act or person as ‘altruistic’, though, we attribute that perceived value/potential back to the giver/doer, or to the gift/act itself. So ‘true’ altruism goes unrecognised.

Understanding itself is not constrained with respect to noumena; it is allowed that understanding thinks objects belonging to the categories, and those objects would be called noumena. On the other hand, if the categories can only apply to phenomena, and phenomena are the only possible objects of experience, and objects of understanding called noumena are themselves not phenomena, then it follows noumena cannot be cognized as objects of experience.

“....But, in this case, a noumenon is not a particular intelligible object for our understanding; on the contrary, the kind of understanding to which it could belong is itself a problem, for we cannot form the most distant conception of the possibility of an understanding which should cognize an object, not discursively by means of categories, but intuitively in a non-sensuous intuition....”

So we are constrained by discursive understanding with respect to cognitions, but understanding itself is not constrained with respect to noumena as general conceptions. — Mww

By the same token, we are constrained by determining judgement with respect to objects of sense, but judgement itself (on reflection) is not constrained with respect to noumena as aesthetics.

But at the same time, he had little precious respect for the burgeoning science of psychology, which makes me wonder why he felt the need to examine purely subjective conditions with which this aspect of human perception concerns itself, albeit outside moral considerations. Transcendental moral philosophy is necessarily predicated on subjective conditions, sure, but knowledge of calculus and dump trucks? Or, our feeling of the beautiful/sublime inspired by them?Ehhh.....not so sure about that. Seems all he did was take the transcendental doctrine of a faculty of judgement with respect to empirical cognitions, and transplanted it into an a priori ground for something beyond itself. — Mww

I think psychology in Kant’s time was based on introspection and the equivocation of rational and empirical information, so it isn’t surprising that he saw little there in the way of science. And I don’t think Kant saw his approach to feeling as examining ‘purely subjective’ conditions, but instead he perceived in their variability (when isolated/abstracted from noumenal reality and attributed to our knowledge of objects/concepts) the possibility of building on our rational structures of knowledge, just as Copernicus did.

I would argue that human knowledge of calculus and dump trucks were both originally predicated on ‘subjective’ conditions - those conditions built on rational structure when we attributed their variability (differentiation) to previously consolidated knowledge. This is the point that CofJ approaches but doesn’t follow through on: for Kant, all human knowledge is a rational structure abstracted from noumenal reality through a process that is most accurately predicated on the qualitative variability of conditions for integrating information being attributed to previously consolidated knowledge - variation in our perspective of knowledge, rather than as external ‘forces’. Kant argues that a priori knowledge (what we appear to ‘just know’) can be synthetic, and demonstrates this synthesis by converting qualitative variability in phenomenal experience into a rational structure. In my own constructionist view this allows for all a priori knowledge to be understood as synthetic - but there is no allowance for this in Kant’s anthropocentric perspective of knowledge.

We are so accustomed to learning via the rational structure of knowledge that we sometimes forget how much we learned to identify initially by qualitative relation: including early language and objects, shapes, colours, faces, sounds, etc. A look at Lisa Feldman Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion might shed some neuroscientific light on this argument, but I digress...

Still, in the preface to the A critique, he made it a point to have “.....the intention of erecting a complete and solid edifice of metaphysical science...”, elaborated in the B preface, “.....attempt to introduce a complete revolution in the procedure of metaphysics, after the example of the geometricians and natural philosophers....”.

So I suppose all that in the CofJ is how such completion is attained. — Mww

I think the change in his use of terms here is interesting. In the A preface, his intention was to complete the structure itself; in the B preface, his intention was to complete a revolution of the procedure - suggesting a recognition that his intended structure may not be as ‘solid’ or ‘complete’ as he had presumed - or perhaps that it was more of a scientific process rather than a fixed body of knowledge.

CofJ journeys through the four moments of aesthetics to a state of ‘free play’ between the faculties of imagination and understanding in relation to the faculty of judgement - suggesting that what in CPR he had described as the capacity to distinguish whether something falls under a given rule is in fact part of the process by which those rules are given.

If art isn't about beauty what is it about then? "Attract attention" is vague enough to include almost anything. — TheMadFool

Not just ‘attract attention’, but attention and effort towards understanding - this is how we learn about the world. A ‘judgement of beauty’ is part of this.

Not necessarily altruistic, but giving or thoughtful, yes. You bring up a good point that it is very possible that helping someone to experience something you found great, may be a mediocre or worse experience for another. And where's the value in that? — LuckyR

The value is not in the actuality of the experience, but in its qualitative potential.

I'm reluctant to accept works that don't have an aesthetic quality to them as art. All said and done, there's got to be something different, something unique, about art and that which makes art stand out as an independent category of human activity is its focus on the beautiful. Now it isn't absolutely necessary for an artist to depict the beauty of nature to the exclusion of other dimensions that reality has to offer. An artist could choose anything under the sun and turn it into a work of art but only if fae manages to make beauty an integral part of it. This is what I meant by beautification.

As for the sacred, it's beautiful and all that the artist needs to do is reproduce a faithful copy - I suppose this is what you mean by realistic art. The profane, however, is going to need more work from the artist for the immediate gut reaction to it is going to be that of disgust and revulsion. Given such circumstances, the artist has a mountain to climb in turning the sacrilegious into art for it involves turning what is, any way you cut it, hideously ugly into something that's a sight for sore eyes. — TheMadFool

I think ‘aesthetic quality’ is arguably not about what is judged ‘beautiful’, but about what attracts our attention and effort towards understanding what we see. The installation of a urinal in an art gallery aims to achieve that - to challenge the art critic to look for the rationality in such an incongruous display. If they don’t find any - is it a lack of potential in the artwork, or in the viewer/critic?

Art that simply reassures the viewer of their own static position in the world offers no aesthetic experience.

Money of course depends on a pre established living system; us. But it is not separate from us either, as we all hold the belief that money exists and can be used. So it could be viewed as an extension of our own living systems that has its own body and its own purpose and agenda. Consider that we are born into a world where money dominates and none of us can do much to convince each other otherwise. We can simply agree to use it or well... starve or live in poverty or “off the grid”.

4/5) Growth/ development/ Regulation or homestasis - think society - central banks, the fiscal legal system, public demand, commodities, design features ( anti-fraud measures and security) - all in place to ensure money stays in a relatively functional state of having a certain value. Mechanisms are there to counter inflation and other economic phenomenon that could render money untrustworthy/ valueless.
6). Nutrition: metals (coins), paper (notes/cheques) plastic (cards), etc. Metabolism: exchange of money between people In order to carry out a diverse range of processes; construction, renewal, development, innovation, destruction, maintenance all of which can produce money, help to exchange thus propagating its value.
7). Excretion (old bank notes and outdated coins etc are disposed of and replaced)
2). Order and self organisation; money comes in may forms and structures and orders of magnitude. It is self organised in that money has a tendency to congregate: to go away from areas of low wealth and towards areas of greater wealth. Once in areas of wealth (power and influence) it can put in place more avenues/ means by which it can continue to accumulate there.
3). Reproduction: Money drives the work done to produce itself. If you didn’t hand the staff at the mint a paycheck they wouldn’t make the money used to pay them. Ironic.
4). Sensitivity and resonance to the environment. Money is highly sensitive to conditions of the human environment; war, unrest and uncertain times tend to dirige inflation of (a reduction in the belief that money has value) to a society whilst times of prosperity strengthen a currency. Consider the last person alive in a catastrophe... this is value zero for money (ie. the point at which money has lost all value as it can’t be used to do anything for one person... what are they going to do... pay themselves?)

Here we see that in certain ways the monetary system possesses (as an extension of us) all the features of a living system. Can it be said then that we birthed an organism that is more powerful and more self perpetuating than the individual human? Or perhaps a virus of kinds that feeds off of us (a host) to survive and do it’s bidding? — Benj96

I think how we perceive the monetary system may be a reflection of how we relate our own perceived potentiality to the value structures of our socio-cultural environment. To see it as a living system may be a credible start, but a more powerful and self-sustaining virus? I don’t know.

I don’t see the overall monetary system as ‘living’, mainly because its temporal aspect is indeterminate, but I can see how spatially located economic structures within it can be perceived as ‘living’ - they are each integrated systems of exchange events. I see the overall monetary system as structured according to the relative value or potential of these exchange events.

As for its own purpose or agenda, I think that the monetary system is to some extent dictated to by the spatio-temporal limits of its various exchange events, but that the relative value or potential attributed to each exchange event is negotiated from a very human perspective of meaning. So each economic structure tends to ‘fear’ its limitations and direct limited resources of attention and effort towards homeostasis, only occasionally and partially collaborating during times of mutual prosperity to develop limited self-awareness of a potential system capable of incrementally variable progress towards an overall purpose or agenda.

Given that you think wisdom is simultaneously both possible and impossible, are there other things about which you hold the same opinion? Are there other things that are both possible and impossible? Are there any things that you think are only one or the other, but not both at the same time? — Todd Martin

I don’t think ‘simultaneously’ quite fits what I’m describing here - it seems like you’re trying to constrain this notion of ‘possibility/impossibility’ to a relative temporal position. Wisdom is not temporally located in my perspective - not like the keyboard I’m typing on, for instance.

Truth is both possible and impossible, as is reality, ‘God’, etc. These are atemporal notions of infinite potentiality (despite attempts to define them within certain value systems). How the binary is tipped one way or the other structures the relational limits of existence for the experiencing subject, as well as what lies either side of those limits.

Even so, with that moveability, which I understand, I am left with this seemingly unrelated moveability, which I do not......

So Kant synthesised human knowledge (...) and even rendered it moveable (by phenomena) in relation to possible knowledge of reality (noumena)
— Possibility

......insofar as, according to Kant, there is no knowledge of noumenal reality possible for intelligences imbued with merely discursive understanding, such as is claimed for humans. Would I be correct in supposing you mean, that because of the speculative predication of phenomena, human knowledge is restricted to a sensory-determinant empirical domain, in effect removing it from any noumenal reality? That actually does make sense to me, in spite of the inconsistency explicit in the concept of “moveability”. — Mww

I may be reading more into Kant than is warranted, but I don’t think he believed humans were as constrained by discursive understanding as CPR suggested with regard to noumena. Nevertheless, by isolating human perspective as a rational structure from noumenal reality - in the same way that Copernicus used mathematics - the qualitative aspects of phenomenal experience are rendered as an unstructured variability or indeterminacy in our knowledge of the nature of objects. Where Copernicus structured this variability in the temporal dimension (as motion), Kant structured this aspect of human perception in an additional dimension of affect or feeling.

Would I be correct in assuming that you are a realist( I understand there are many varieties of it)? In other words, that you believe with Kant that, while we can never attain the thing in itself, progress in human knowledge possible as an asymptotic goal via successive approximations? More specifically, do you believe that our models attempt to mirror or correspond to an independently existing reality? — Joshs

A structural realist - I believe that the ‘independently existing reality’ we attempt to render is ontologically a relational structure, and nothing more. Successive approximations of knowledge can be viewed as heuristic devices in navigating this structure of relations.

If so, then I assume you reject various relativisms( postmodernism, etc) that argue reason and logic rest on arbitrary, ungroundable assumptions, and that you prefer Popper’s Kantian notion of scientific process through falsification over Kuhn and Feyerabend’s post-Hegelian claims that science does not ‘progress’ but changes in arbitrary ways through paradigm shifts? — Joshs

Not reject, no. I think that relativistic thought is as important to progress in human knowledge as approximations of that knowledge, and that the constraints of reason and logic constitute a limited view of potentiality that amounts to quanta-like ‘paradigm shifts’ in the observation of scientific change.

I think perhaps a form of Creole or Pidgin would develop from goal-based concepts and the dynamics of relationships.

If a woman in the group knows where to find fresh water, for instance, the rest of the group will quickly learn how to say ‘water’ in her native language, and that will soon become the dominant word used to communicate ‘water’. Another member might be medically trained, and would probably find sign language, body language and hand gestures easiest to understand, but the group will soon pick up this person’s language in reference to body parts, medicine, etc.

There may also be someone who has the patience, listening skills and affinity for patterns to quickly piece together vocabulary in several of the languages. This type of person could be in demand as a go-between in disputes, etc.

Those who attempt to communicate and connect more will find their language repeated back to them more by those around them. And the more we care about those around us, the more effort and attention we’ll put into understanding them and being understood by them. This is how children pick up languages so easily - they’re desperate to be understood.

Would you agree that wisdom is either possible or impossible, but that it cannot be both? — Todd Martin

Nope. Wisdom is, in an objective, ontological sense, both possible and impossible. But I can’t relate to wisdom as both in any logical or practical sense. That is, I always feel, think, believe, state or enact an answer to the question one way or the other.

But I also don’t think the question needs to always be framed by the term ‘wisdom’. In my view, asking whether objective truth, a Higher Power or understanding is possible/impossible are all just different ways to frame this same fundamental question, the answer to which determines existence.

Perhaps the essence of what we’re questioning is an indeterminate sense of more - calling for attention and effort beyond that of our current conceptual structures.

Basically, I think maybe the disagreement comes down to a confusion in terms. I suggest that "human reason itself" is different altogether (and is also confused itself) than the rationality inherent in the forms of art--their rationality is not "arbitrarily isolate[d]" by us; they are categorically independent from us, wrapped up in the means of art; free, if not from our opinion, from our control (our "meaning"), from our arbitrariness, and our falling into taste or mere experience. Whatever the reason you want/need to maintain a "subjective relation" (not capturedelieve in the Pleasant and the Sublime) we do not have a "variable" "relation" to knowledge of the forms of art (other than to know and use them). When I speak of possibilities of the forms, it is not a possibility to be rational, it is the open-ended possibilities of their rationality. And, again, this is not an "ontological" structure; there is no "object" in relation to the Beautiful (Witt's analogous "concepts" are not of a metaphysical or "objective" world). We do not make claims to "objectivity", we can make claims about art because of the rationality in their forms. A main point of mine is that there is rationality without the idea of "objectivity". In concert, our epistemology does not have to be more "accurate" so much as realize that knowledge in aesthetics does not ensure agreement, certainty, universality, etc. (what we philosophically have wanted from knowledge). This does not eat away at its sense of rationality as much as leave those things in our hands, up to our ability to evoke that rationality for others to see. Again, maybe this comes down to a misunderstanding that the rationality of the forms of art should not be confused with the critic giving us "reasons"--evidence, perspective, connections, etc.--to see the rationality inherent in the forms of art in the example of a work. We do not vary the structure, we vary in our capability or desire to discuss art in relation to its rational, formal structure. — Antony Nickles

I think perhaps most of this disagreement comes from my perspective as an artist, mainly because you (and, it appears, also Kant) talk about art as if the artist’s relation to the work is excluded, which I find difficult to reconcile to my own understanding of art. When I interpret Kant’s aesthetics, I tend to read that relation back into it. Needless to say, that’s my issue, not yours.

I agree with your point that “there is rationality without the idea of ‘objectivity’”, and I think I have acknowledged this, while also pointing out that the OP question is regarding objectivity, not rationality. None of what I’m referring to is necessary for a rational discussion of art, but I think it’s relevant to a discussion of whether aesthetics can be objective. It seems, however, that this aspect does not concern you. From a critic’s view, the rationality of art is equal to its forms. From an artist’s view, the possibilities of aesthetic rationality may be constrained by the formal structures of art and aesthetic judgement.

First, if it is we seeking an investigative domain, I don’t see how it could be otherwise than it is we who are central to it. De-centralizing our perspective, whether of temporal reality or anything else, would seem to immediately negate the validity of our investigations, the correctness of them being as it may. — Mww

I don’t think it negates the validity of our investigations, it only renders those investigations a distortion of reality. They’re still valid, but we have to account for the distortion in order to integrate them into a rational structure of reality.

Second, is “Kant’s shift” the same as your so-called “Copernican turn” of a day or so ago, and if so, wherein, as laid out in CPR Bxvii, and from subsequent speculative justifications in relation to it, is the implication that the “plan or purpose of eternity” is precisely that humans should exist because of it? I submit there is no such implication, which then suggests “Kant’s shift”, the one that hasn’t taken effect, lays in some other conceptual scheme, in which may be found the assumption “the existence of humans was the purpose of eternity”, that should have been rejected, such that that shift would take effect. So...if that was Darwin’s position, how could it have been used by Kant? What Kantian “shift” possibly would have occurred had Kant only theorized as Darwin did? — Mww

I haven’t explained myself very well here, sorry. Let me try to clarify. Kant’s perspective on knowledge is decidedly anthropocentric, which is where much of the confusion regarding his reference to Copernicus comes from. Copernicus’ revolution, for Kant, was more about the moveability of the spectator than its de-centralisation - even though arguably the most significant effect of that revolution was to de-centralise the limited human perception (empiricism) in relation to knowledge of reality. So when Kant proposes “to do just what Copernicus did”, I’m not sure that he recognised the full effect of the paradigm shift that initially occurred because, by that time, the human perspective all but assumed some kind of relation between sense and reason, although its structure was still contested, and ‘human knowledge’ was being perceived as a rationalisation of the senses. So Kant synthesised human knowledge from empiricism and rationalism, defined its limitations (of sense and reason) and even rendered it moveable (by phenomena) in relation to possible knowledge of reality (noumena) - but had no means to de-centralise this perspective. His transcendental or synthetic a priori knowledge (imagination in relation to understanding and judgement) was an anthropocentric perspective of the conditions for knowledge of reality. In my view, his revolution was not quite complete, and my interpretations of CofJ above are an attempt to highlight this.

Darwin’s Evolution of the Species provided the ‘stationary stars’ to de-centralise the limitations of human experience in relation to possible knowledge of reality: nature’s experience of evolutionary process. But essentialism assumes that the conditions for knowledge of reality are exclusive to human experience, and relativism assumes that no objective knowledge of reality could be achieved. Both of these assumptions hark back to interpretations of Kant’s metaphysics, and yet I would argue that there is enough room, in light of Darwin, to dispute them both and begin to reconcile his conditions for knowledge with the scientific method. But I’m obviously an amateur, forming speculative ideas. The discussion is helping, and your questions in particular have challenged the way I previously understood Kant’s relation to Copernicus.

I’m following the ongoing dialectic with respect to the Critique of Judgement, which I appreciate, insofar as hardly anyone does that. Guess I got confused as to how the CPR, having to do with the possibility of a priori knowledge, could have any relation to the CJ, which has to do merely with “feeling” in a certain sense only, and from which no knowledge is at all possible. — Mww

I find that’s a common perception of CofJ, and does much to explain the lack of dialectic. My main interest is in the relational structure of Kant’s metaphysics, so I find that CofJ sheds more light on the conditions for synthesising a priori knowledge than CPR. It might be just my perspective, having explored CofJ before looking into the two previous Critiques, but I get the sense that by the third he’d realised that the structure of metaphysics was more dependent upon ‘feeling’ than he had anticipated. It’s more that no knowledge is at all possible without ‘feeling’.

Possibility are you saying that wisdom is both possible and impossible? — Todd Martin

Yes - I wouldn’t argue against either claim.

BUT if you choose to live by the truth that perfect wisdom is impossible, then I would argue that you limit your potential.

I also believe that we cannot know for certain what lies within the meanings we see within the works of the arts, whether it is really there or in our own imagination. That is the problem with aesthetic judgments and when people make claims that certain works being superior.

I can remember once getting into an almost argument with someone who was trying to say that the music of Hawkwind was more advanced than almost any other band. My friend was saying that the music led people into certain dimensions which were real, and I was trying to query whether everyone who listened to the music would have the same experience. I know personally that my own experience of listening to a piece of music or viewing a piece of art varies according to the emotional mindset at that time.

I think that the emotional state of the person partaking in perceiving any form of art is critical and makes it difficult to come to a position of objective aesthetics. This is because aesthetics, more than knowledge by reason, is dependent on emotions, which involve sensory experiences and life experiences. — Jack Cummins

Most judgements of art are not pure aesthetic judgements, but judgements of the agreeable or the good. That’s not to say the meaningfulness your friend is referring to is only in his imagination. He’s just hasn’t distinguished a disinterested character of feeling from what he likes or finds pleasing - he’s subsuming the work under a subjective account of experience, instead of describing any universal quality in the music.

Claims regarding the superiority of certain works can only be evaluated in relation to a particular quality. Saying that the music inspired a particular dimensional awareness in ‘people’ is not to claim that other music is inferior because it doesn’t inspire the same awareness in the same ‘people’. There’s a lot of subjectivity in that claim, which I think he’d need to acknowledge as a personal or collective position in order to distinguish any universal validity (an aesthetic judgement) from what anyone likes or finds pleasing about their personal experience of the music.

I would argue that aesthetics by reason (which Kant demonstrates is achievable to an extent) is neither more nor less dependent on the ‘emotion’ or affect of sensory and life experiences than knowledge by reason. It is (human) reason itself that serves as the limitation. And it is our capacity to recognise and own this subjectivity that enables us to develop and refine rational structures of relation to more closely approximate reality.

This is not, as I think @Antony Nickles suggests, wanting to keep one’s own opinion (a passionate plea for individuality), but rather recognising that we only arbitrarily isolate both the artwork and aesthetic judgement from our subjective relation to it. In my view, it is awareness of the variability in our qualitative relation to knowledge such as criteria of the Form that orients it in the possibility of a rational ontological structure which could make claims to objectivity, and from which we can restructure and refine a more accurate epistemology.