Immanuel Kant
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Immanuel Kant (22 April, 1724 – 12 February, 1804) was a German philosopher from Königsberg in East Prussia). He is regarded as the last major philosopher of the Enlightenment. Today, not everyone is as enthusiastic about his philosophy, especially in the field of aesthetics, Kant has been criticized for reasoning "that aesthetic judgements have universal validity. Kant was wrong. Immanuel Kant searched for the basis of aesthetic motivation. For such a difficult journey, Köningsberg [where he was born and died] was not a good place to start. The age of consumerism has no time for Kant." (Stephen Bayley, 1991)
The philosophical concept of the sublime, as described by philosopher Immanuel Kant in the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, took inspiration in part from attempts to comprehend the enormity of the Lisbon quake and tsunami.
Taste
- At least since Kant's (1790), taste has been considered the ability to appreciate universal beauty. This beauty is a harmony that is detatched from all personal interest. Kant's universal aesthetic seems inconsistent with the vast diversity of different cultures. Inspired by this diversity, Franz Boas put forth his principle of cultural relativism in 1896. Evaluating aesthetics according to cultural relativism, each culture has its own aesthetic, and beauty exists only relative to each culture's aesthetic. --Webb Phillips
Kant and Sade: The Ideal Couple
- Of all the couples in the history of modern thought (Freud and Lacan, Marx and Lenin…), Kant and Sade is perhaps the most problematic: the statement "Kant is Sade" is the "infinite judgement" of modern ethics, positing the sign of equation between the two radical opposites, i.e. asserting that the sublime disinterested ethical attitude is somehow identical to, or overlaps with, the unrestrained indulgence in pleasurable violence. A lot-everything, perhaps-is at stake here: is there a line from Kantian formalist ethics to the cold-blooded Auschwitz killing machine? Are concentration camps and killing as a neutral business the inherent outcome of the enlightened insistence on the autonomy of Reason? Is there at least a legitimate lineage from Sade to Fascist torturing, as is implied by Pasolini's film version of Saló, which transposes it into the dark days of Mussolini's Salo republic? Lacan developed this link first in his Seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1958-59)1, and then in the Écrits "Kant with Sade" of 1963. -- Slavoj Zizek http://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-kant-and-sade-the-ideal-couple.html [Sept 2004]
