Of Candy

It couldn't have come at a better time for my project on causality, since I'm going to make a case for regarding the aesthetic dimension as the very fuel of causality, not some nice candy decorating what is essentially a machine.

But this study of classical aesthetics—there's something nice, even refreshing, about the title Greek and Roman Aesthetics, edited by Oleg V. Bychkov and Anne Sheppard (who would have thought that would sound refreshing?)—looks very promising. HT Eric Schliesser over at New APPS.

This publication also appears to be in happy synchrony with a revival of aesthetics in classical studies.

Having taught some of this material (aesthetic theory in Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Horace, Cicero, Quintillian, Plotinus, and others) several times quite recently, I'm struck by its intensity, intelligence and freshness, after two decades (for me) of having not really thought about it. Yes I swallowed the line that nothing before about 1900 was worth it. But I'd trade lots of recent stuff for some Platonic dialogues.

As I hope you'll see in my essay “Sublime Objects” (for Speculations) and in Nathan Gale's work, speculative realism can take this material more than seriously.

And I was just teaching Keats's On a Grecian Urn today. Keats schools Wordsworth in that poem: it's a textbook on how to go past the avant garde by returning paradoxically to classicism, but a weird classicism.

The Grecian Urn in question is the “Portland Vase,” or possibly the Wedgwood knockoff of same: