Finishing Up My Chapter on Immanuel Kant, Evolution Through Art
Even the song of birds, which we can bring under no musical rule,
seems to have more freedom, and therefore more for taste,
than a song of a human being. -- Immanuel Kant
A very tough slough of research, over very familiar territory, on Kant's Beauty and the Sublime, and examination of his means of Taste and Aesthetical Judgments. The chapter is important because the Critique of Judgment is, by light years, the most influential and important aesthetic treatise of our life-time world wide -- as it gave the philosophical foundation for our nihilistic postmodern art culture, which everyone and their mother have been exposed to. Can you say "Warhol?"
The chapter is at about 4,000 words, now, and I couldn't be happier -- all the pieces are fitting nicely together. Kant is arch nemesis, very brilliant in a house-of-cards way. I didn't expect it, but I really feel sorry for him, at one point he laments: "I stop my ears, I will listen to no arguments and no reasoning; and I will rather assume that these rules of the critics are false, or at least that they do not apply to the case in question ..."
Wish me luck, hope to have the chapter finished by the weekend.
Michael Newberry, Idyllwild, 9/1/2020