Posts Tagged aesthetics
Lila Notes, Pt. 2: Dynamic vs. Static Quality
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on February 5, 2012
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The big distinction made in Lila is between dynamic quality and static quality. Dynamic quality is Quality in ZAMM, i.e. the immediate, moment-to-moment recognition of something’s awesomeness level, but also in ZAMM, he wants us to recognize quality in classical (as opposed to romantic) forms, for example, the quality of the structure of a motorcycle. Since dynamic quality is instantaneous, and we can only have (roughly) one thing in mind at a time, it would seem to rule out any kind of body of quality knowledge, but that’s clearly not the way judgments work.
Pirsig stresses that we make Quality judgments first, and then figure out later how to characterize them. But certainly this doesn’t have to the be case: often we have a standard already in mind, and we explicitly apply that standard to something and judge it positively or negatively. Judges are supposed to do this, for example. Now, you could say that what judges do (looking at legal precedent and seeing how a new case stacks up) is cold and impersonal: they don’t necessarily feel the verdicts they issue, and in fact might have feelings contrary to what they judge, but still, that doesn’t mean they should overturn all legal precedent on a whim.
Episode 50: Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on February 3, 2012
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:26:18 — 79.1MB)
On Robert M. Pirsig’s philosophical, autobiographical novel from 1974.
What’s the relationship between science and values? Pirsig thinks that modern rationality, by insisting on the fundamental distinction between objects (matter) and subjects (people), labels value judgments as irrational. Society therefore largely ignores aesthetic considerations in the buildings and machines that litter our landscape.
People rebel against this ugly commercialism by rejecting technology altogether, and Pirsig thinks this is a mistake. If we realize that value judgments (where we sense “Quality”) are fundamentally a part of experience, that they drive what what we consider “rational” (e.g. a “good” scientific explanation) in the first place, then we can stop with the hippie rebellion and more sensibly and peacefully co-exist with technology. Though the book is not about historical Zen, it is about keeping centered, connected, and in the moment.
Featuring guest participant David Buchanan. Read more about the topic and get the book.
End song: “Freeway” by Mark Lint and Stevie P. Read about it.
If you enjoy the episode, please donate at least $1:
Topic for #50: Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on January 6, 2012
[Note: This article has been updated post-discussion; I didn't want to create a new post when we've had all this great discussion on this one that I want people to continue. The episode itself should be up w/in the next day or two.]
Mark, Seth, Dylan, and guest David Buchanan have recorded a conversation on Robert M. Pirsig’sZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,
It’s an autobiographical novel describing (in part) Pirsig’s encounters with the idea of “Quality.” In trying to teach this to freshman composition students, he decided that it’s a fundamental, immediate, and undefinable part of our experience. We don’t, on his account, first consciously analyze things, and then decide based on that analysis what’s better than what. Quality (or more precisely, “dynamic quality,” a term he comes up with in his 1991 book Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals)
Daniel Coffeen on Bergson’s Matter and Memory
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts, Web Detritus on December 6, 2011
One of the name-drops on the Sartre episode is Henri Bergson, a philosopher who was in vogue in France at the time Sartre wrote, famous among other things for promoting and anti-atomic epistemology. Kant, for instance, thought that we get our idea of number out of time, meaning that time is essentially something we can count. For Bergson, time is a flow: if we break it up for analysis, that’s an abstraction; it’s epistemically subsequent to the primal flow. This goes well with Sartre’s (and moreso Mereleau-Ponty’s) excitement about gestalt psychology as part of the phenomenologist’s project of taking experience as it comes without falsifying it with some theory, like Hume’s empiricism, imposed upon the data.
With a little research I found this podcast/lecture on Bergson by Daniel Coffeen, focusing on Bergson’s book Matter and Memory.
Capturing Schleiermacher’s Romantic Mood
Posted by Daniel Horne in Things to Watch on June 14, 2011
Can modern film depict Schleiermacher’s nature-obsessed 18th century Romantic mood? Probably not, but let’s go.
I thought I better understood Husserlian phenomenology after reading Sartre’s Nausea, which even in translation has some gripping prose. The clip above, from Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu (1979) exudes both the German Romantic aesthetic, and a phenomenological approach of sorts. Bonus points if you catch the moment where subject separates from object. Plus, it stars the totally insane Klaus Kinski as Dracula. Not to be missed.
Malcom Gladwell on Plurality in Taste
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Things to Watch on February 14, 2011
Thanks to listener David Emerson for suggesting this video on plurality of tastes (in response to some of the things we said back on our Danto episode, but equally applicable to our other aesthetics one on Goodman):
The point is not that people’s tastes differ, that everyone has different favorites (i.e. that taste is subjective) but that there are different ideals, and once an ideal is selected, then you can talk about how best to meet that ideal. Gladwell, though, doesn’t seem to distinguish between plurality and subjectivity here. His hair is f’ing crazy looking qua hair but pretty damn cool qua ‘fro. The fact that I have to consider it aesthetically according to its category doesn’t mean that we get rid of standards altogether, though of course I may not be immersed enough in the world of that breed of hair to adequately assess his ‘fro within that category.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Philosophy of Art and Stephen King’s “Duma Key”
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Reviewage on November 10, 2010
Somewhere in between and overlapping with Nelson Goodman and Kierkegaard, I subjected myself to one of Stephen King’s recent books, Duma Key.
When the artist main character is doing something really great, he goes into some sort of a trance. He doesn’t understand his work, doesn’t know where it comes from, doesn’t really know much about art history. He does recognize as he’s doing it and when it’s done when a work seems really great to him are viewed by others, amateur and professional alike are entranced, such that stylistic comparisons become irrelevant. (It’s of course great for an author that he doesn’t have to actually produce the works; descriptions are inevitably vague enough that they could fit either a masterwork or a piece of amateur crap, so King is able to sell their quality via character reactions and mood elements. This will be more difficult when it inevitably becomes a movie or mini-series.)
Read the rest of this entry »
Episode 16: Danto on Art
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on March 4, 2010
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:13:28 — 122.3MB)
What effect should the avant garde have on our understanding of what art is? We read three essays by modern, first-rate American philosopher Arthur Danto, all published in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (1986): the title essay, “The Appreciation and Interpretation of Works of Art,” and “The End of Art.”
I understand you may not have heard of Danto, and you may think modern art is goofy, but you’ll definitely enjoy this discussion and the reading anyway. Danto gives a picture of philosophy and art at war throughout history: philosophy says that art can’t get at truth and is otherwise useless, yet philosophers like Plato seem afraid of the power of art to corrupt. What’s the deal?
Also, Danto claims that art is over; the end of art has happened. So suck it, artists. (Actually, artists can keep on doing what they’re doing; they’re fine, yet art is still over.) Plus, can you stare at a urinal and thereby make it art? What if it’s in a museum? Danto loves them crazy ass post-modern artists, and thinks that their work shows that art was not what we thought it was.
Plus, Seth talks about the plane crashing into the IRS building near his house, and we respond some listener postings.
This work is unfortunately not available free on the Internet, but is worth purchasing.
End song: “This Night Before the End,” by Mark Lint and the Simulacra, recorded mostly in 2000 but finished just now. Here’s more info about the song.
"I’ve never before heard my work discussed like that, and rarely as intelligently ... I listened to the whole podcast, and felt exalted afterward." -- Arthur Danto
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