On Kant

     There are two places I want to go with Emmanuel Kant. Obviously, I could probably find pages and pages of things to write on Kant, and that’s without really knowing what I’m talking about. I mean, I don’t study Kant. And I don’t know responses to Kant. But I have some pretty strong opinions, and I’m going to share two of them.

     First, we talked in my class about the move from “beauty” to “the sublime,” specifically that beauty is rested in the object itself, but the sublime focuses on our reaction, what’s happening in us. And a lot of this has happened, this shift from outside to inside. Tying into this, I also want to talk about Kant’s view that the sublime stirs us because, mentally, we have “subdued” the infinite, the powerful. That when we see something grand and powerful and massive and nigh incomprehensible, we fear it until we get to a point where we gain dominance, in our minds, over the object – at which point it is no longer fearful.

     But first, this idea that the individual is the most important thing: that what we think and what we do and how we feel is completely up to us, and it relates to no one else but us. Kant speaks about this idea that when we value beauty, we want everyone to agree with us; we know they won’t, but that’s what happens. And this again is where I want to draw a line between aesthetic beauty and, shall we say, inherent beauty.

     Aesthetic beauty is a personal judgment. If something or someone appeals to my eyes, or ears, superficially, that is my judgment of the item. You may agree with me, you may not. Usually I can tell when I appreciate something that no one else is going to appreciate. It has no inherent ugliness that makes it evil or bad; I am not speaking of beauty with a moral component here.

     In my last post, I spoke of Annie Dillard, and her views of beauty. Often I don’t recognize the things she sees. But it is not that I don’t find them beautiful, I just usually don’t find them in the first place. There is an inherent beauty in things, whatever certain philosophers might say. This has annoyed me since I first heard people argued against any sort of ontological Truth. If other human beings exist, beings which think and rationalize apart from ourselves; and those beings encounter the same objects we do whether we are present or not, how can we argue that “things” do not exist? And if the “thing” exists, does it not possess some properties of its own? Forgetting animate objects – plants, other creatures, etc., -- even inanimate objects have substance, and have qualities inherent to them. Like Plato argued, how do we know what a chair is when we have not seen every form of chair there is? True, some people have never seen a chair before in their life; but many people have not heard the word “ontological” either; but once they become acquainted with the chair, there is something about it that signifies any other chair we come across as being a chair. Once we recognize its purpose, we recognize its form; does beauty not have a purpose that, once recognized, we can recognize it in all of its forms?

     That’s why beauty is not merely valuative, and not inherently moral; because beauty has different forms. Though it has a purpose, that purpose can be twisted. A chair can be made to recline against, to give relief to the one it bears; or electricity can be run to it, and it can kill the one it bears. Are both not chairs? Evil can appear very beautiful, aesthetically. It is that deeper beauty, the inner beauty, the beauty of purpose which contains the moral and valuative elements of beauty. Occasionally, yes, that beauty extends to the outer, and there should be no shame in proclaiming outer, superficial beauty, as long as that outer, superficial beauty is not masking and excusing and dismissing and marginalizing ugliness of purpose.

      I’ll leave that alone for now, and talk about this idea of dominating things – about the sublime. After reading this, it is curious to me how legitimate a point feminist philosophers have that rational thought through the ages has been dominated by men. I could feel the testosterone dripping from Kant’s words as he talked about valuing the general over the statesman, and that war, if “properly conducted” is still something that stirs us; that when magnificence and grandeur is “subdued,” that is what stirs us. I wondered if Kant has ever been in a Category 5 hurricane when he thinks about mankind “subduing” nature – that simply because we have fathomed it in our minds, it is somehow dominated by us. Nature just spins these little pinwheels of joy off every year; and the only way to survive some of these is to get out of the way. Countless hundreds have died in rugged terrain, the kind of mountainous regions that look really good on a canvas. I think God likes a good joke, but the idea of man “dominating” this world has to just make his jaw go slack. Well, if the world lives only in our minds, then rule by the mind is rule over reality, right? How can we think to say we have fathomed what God has created, simply because we can talk about it, can sort of kind of grasp it with our imaginations?

     An earthquake on one side of the world causes 90 foot waves on the complete other side of the earth! Stars, those things that are billions of nuclear explosions all at once, are being born. This gigantic earth rotates around one of them! And I think one hurricane on earth is bad? There’s a storm on Jupiter, been there a while, that could swallow the earth three times over!

     These things are staggering, truly.  But did you know a flower can push through a tiny crack of concrete? Did you know an ant can carry the equivalent of a human carrying a dump truck? Did you know there are engines inside your cells, ferrying bits and strings of amino acids from one part of a cell to another? What is sublime? What is awe-inspiring? What is beauty?

     Beauty points back to God. Whether small or large, whether aesthetically pleasing or functionally exquisite; and one thing is not more grand than the other. Can the hand say to the foot, because it is not a hand, the body has no use of it? What if man made the object? I like the story I heard from a pastor once: a man came to God and said “Alright, we know how to make man from dust; we don’t need you.” God said: “Okay, go ahead.” So the man picks up a handful of dirt; and God says: “Hey, start your own dirt.” What does man create that God has not created? Perhaps a ridiculous sense of what beauty is and what its value should be....