“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, August 13, 2017

Here's a Tiny Bit of My Penguin Book to Give You the Level

“Kant described beauty as a feeling of ungraspability: this is why the beauty experience is beyond concept. You don’t eat a painting of an apple; you don’t find it morally good; instead, it tells you something strange about apples in them- selves. Beauty doesn’t have to be in accord with prefabricated concepts of ‘pretty’. It’s strange, this feeling. It’s like the feel- ing of having a thought, without actually having one. In food marketing there is a category that developed in the last two decades or so called mouthfeel. It’s a rather disgusting term for the texture of food, how it interacts with your teeth and your palate and your tongue. In a way, Kantian beauty is thinkfeel. It’s the sensation of having an idea…”

1 comment:

Igor da Silva Livramento said...

I wanna read that, dude! It provides me some insight.
As I've commented on another post, I will open up a bit.
I am currently working on Theses on the Ugly , a series of fragments (not aphorisms, not paragraphs, no nothing – fragments, floating pieces of languageland).
There I insist on how Beauty has overriden the other two aspects of the medieval truth: "quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum seu perfectum", that is, to be "good" and "truthful" have been forgotten for the sake of "beauty".
I know this borders on french-influenced "sociological philosophy", but it matters quite a lot to grasp such conception.
Hence the question: what are the uses of beauty today?
I claim they are aligned with global capitalism and moral depravity, owing much to my marxist roots.
And as an exit, I propose the ugly .
But how does one define it?
Contact me privately (igor__sl@hotmail.com or via my Facebook account) and we can dive deep into more details!

As usual, awesome entry. Keep up the great work!
Cheers from Brasil.