Author: JH

What then about Aristotle’s Camera? Suppose a camera is beautiful if it is ingenious in its design; everything is where it should be; it functions flawlessly; the shape of individual elements fits perfectly with the overall shape; everything superfluous has been gotten rid off. It is admirable how engineers could get to the point to conceive of, and build, such a machine. Now, suppose we apply Kant’s test. Is my judgment that this camera is beautiful “disinterested” in the sense that I do not care whether it exists? That seems crazy. My aesthetic appreciation depends on the idea that someone succeeded in building the camera as they conceived of it.

You won’t be surprised, but this was my contribution in the Aesthetics seminar where I almost got into a fight. I offered a friendly amendment to the Kantians. Perhaps they should rethink what they mean when they say that aesthetic judgments are “disinterested.” Perhaps the point is that, though I care about the existence of the beautiful object, I need not care about owning it. I personally may have no need for this camera and I may not desire to have it. For the work I do, another camera, a much lesser one, may be better suited. It’s just nice to know that someone cared enough to build the masterpiece, and that it is out there.

When I said this, an Aristotelian in the room was looking at me with genuine interest. The next day she approached me to discuss the example further. So, I came to think of it as Aristotle’s Camera. And I needed to find out why Aristotelians would like my example… To be continued.

So, does judging something to be beautiful require that one takes an interest in its existence? Reconsider Kant’s Palace. Palaces are, as Kant nicely mentions, the kind of thing where many of us have (as we today would say) socialist intuitions. Some wonder why “little huts” aren’t better anyway. Others insist that, when visiting a foreign city, their greatest admiration is for “public soup kitchens.” And many are acutely aware of the vanity of the owner of the Palace, and the suffering of the worker that went into it. Kant’s Palace, then, is an example where we have great difficulty isolating the aesthetic experience, separating it from all the mixed feelings we have when, presumably, we find it ‘beautiful.’

My question for the participants was, accordingly: is this perhaps a pretty bad example? And given that Kant says all these polemical things about little huts and soup kitchens, is he maybe joking?

Notwithstanding the shock in the eyes of Kantians when I mentioned this idea, I still think it’s a likely explanation. How else could such a stellar theorizer as Kant use such a messy example when it comes to analyzing aesthetic judgments? To be continued.

In between photography-related trips, I took a couple of days off to audit a summer class on aesthetics. To be sure, this was an event by and for hard-core philosophers. The group was awfully advanced, and I should admit that “audit” isn’t quite the right term. Given that the field of aesthetics is rather close to home, I was drawn into a dispute, and ended up “participating.” I’ve never been well able to deal with high-mindedness, whether it concerns moral or aesthetic value. So perhaps a better word is “disrupting”…

I shall have to write several entries about the contentious issue, and I won’t get to Aristotle’s Camera today. Only to Kant’s Palace. Here’s the example that gave rise to heated discussion. Kant claims that, when you look at a palace and find it beautiful, then this aesthetic judgment is free from interest in the existence of its object, the palace. Now, this seems rather strange to me. Aren’t palaces beautiful as buildings, and as manifestations of architectural ingenuity, and so on? How could all this be independent from the palace’s existence? To be continued.

[While I was there, I made some photos as well, this one from my breakfast table.]