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Essay on Aristotle's poetics
Essay on Aristotle's poetics
Essay on kant and beauty
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The Beautiful in Kant's Third Critique and Aristotle's Poetics ABSTRACT: I argue that Kant's analysis of the experience of the beautiful in the third Critique entails an implicit or potential experience of the sublime, that is, the sublime as he himself describes it. Finding the sublime in the beautiful is what I call philosophical beauty. I then consider some aspects of Aristotle's analysis of tragedy in the Poetics, specifically his identification of the key elements of tragedy as those involving the experience of fear and pity, which leads to a catharsis of these emotions. Aristotle is famously unclear about what happens in this process of catharsis. I use the notion of philosophical beauty derived from Kant to suggest a possible explanation. There is beauty and there is beauty. The two are not mutually exclusive, but rather represent two poles on a continuum. At one pole is the beauty that is associated with a sense of lightness and balanced order. It has a faintly decorative quality to it. At the other extreme is the much darker form of beauty that we associate with profundity and truth. This latter form of beauty I will analyze in terms of the containment of the sublime. The distinction between these two extremes of beauty has less to do with the objects under consideration, whether a flower, a sunset, a poem, a painting, or a piece of music, than it does with the attitude of the considerer of the object. That is, anything that possesses beauty of the first kind can also be viewed as possessing beauty of the second kind, if the attention of the viewer is directed appropriately. The differential across the continuum is constituted by the degree of awareness of the element of the sublime in the beautiful. This secon... ... middle of paper ... ... cognitive faculty according to the analogy of purpose. Thus we can regard natural beauty as the presentation of the concept of the formal (merely subjective) purposiveness, and natural purpose as the presentation of the concept of a real (objective) purposiveness." Ibid., pp. 29-30. (15) The whole passage reads, "In this way nature is not judged to be sublime in our aesthetical judgments in so far as it excites fear, but because it calls up that power in us (which is not nature) of regarding as small the things about which we are solicitous (goods, health, and life), and of regarding its might (to which we are no doubt subjected in respect of these things) as nevertheless without any dominion over us and our personality to which we must bow where our highest fundamental propositions, and their assertion or abandonment, are concerned." Kant, p. 101. (16) Ibid.
Nigamananda Das (2007) introduces the concept of ‘positive aesthetics’ which suggests that while ‘[a]rt-work may be good or bad, ugly or repulsive […] nature is all beautiful in its own way’ (p. 18). Positive aesthetics posits that ‘[a]ll [of] the natural world is beautiful’ and that the natural environment ‘so far as it is untouched by man’ (Das, 2007, p. 18). These untouched environments are ‘graceful, delicate, intense, unified, and orderly rather than blase, dull, insipid, incoherent, and chaotic.’ A problem for positive aesthetics is whether all parts of nature should be held as equally beautiful. Holding that all of nature is equally beautiful has a strong motive, since to suggest otherwise may seem to compromise the position of positive
Servomaa, Sonja. “Nature Of Beauty—Beauty Of Nature.” Dialogue & Universalism 15.1/2 (2005): Academic Search Premier. Web.
We have spent a good deal of this semester concentrating on the sublime. We have asked what (in nature) is sublime, how is the sublime described and how do different writers interpret the sublime. A sublime experience is recognizable by key words such as 'awe', 'astonishment' and 'terror', feelings of insignificance, fractured syntax and the general inability to describe what is being experienced. Perception and interpretation of the sublime are directly linked to personal circumstance and suffering, to spiritual beliefs and even expectation (consider Wordsworth's disappointment at Mont Blanc). It has become evident that there is a transition space between what a traveler experiences and what he writes; a place wherein words often fail but the experience is intensified, even understood by the traveler. This space, as I have understood it, is the imagination. In his quest for spiritual identity Thomas Merton offers the above quotation to illustrate what he calls 'interpenetration' between the self and the world. As travel writers engage nature through their imagination, Merton's description of the 'inner ground' is an appropriate one for the Romantic conception of the imagination. ...
Sides, J. (2014, January 8). Most political independents actually aren't. Retrieved from The Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/01/08/most-political-independents-actually-arent/
William Golding’s novel ‘The Lord of The flies’ presents us with a group of English boys who are isolated on a desert island, left to try and retain a civilised society. In this novel Golding manages to display the boys slow descent into savagery as democracy on the island diminishes.
In brief, beauty is something that is aside from you. It is something you do not have to worry about. Nevertheless, we must be afraid of the sublime because we cannot understand it and therefore, is dangerous to us. We must at least decide is it poses as a danger to us. Just as Maureen Rousseau restated from Kant’s “Critique of Judgement” about the notion one can fear God without being afraid of him because we cannot resist God. It makes sense what Maureen Rousseau says when she explains that we can be fearful of the sublime but we can also determine if it something be afraid of. Maybe that is why we have the quest for beauty because we have nothing to fear from beauty. Beauty is ultimately something we admire and want.
It can be understood why the football season of 1988 seems like such a faraway place. 1995, the year I and many of my fellow classmates were born, marked twenty six years since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Though it is not a pleasant thought, it seems that the problems Americans faced in 1969, 1988, and now will be problems we must face for years to come. It is our duty to make Texas a better place to live, encourage younger generations that success and happiness exist after high school, and that one is in charge of his own destiny.
The book Lord of the Flies was William Golding’s first novel he had published, and also his one that is the most well known. It follows the story of a group of British schoolboys whose plane, supposedly carrying them somewhere safe to live during the vaguely mentioned war going on, crashes on the shore of a deserted island. They try to attempt to cope with their situation and govern themselves while they wait to be rescued, but they instead regress to primal instincts and the manner and mentality of humanity’s earliest societies.
O'Connor, J. (2013, February 2). Top 10 winningest d-i men's college basketball coaches. Retrieved from http://msn.foxsports.com/collegebasketball/lists/All-time-top-10-winningest-D-I-college-basketball-coaches-111511
Tiger, Virginia. "Lord of the Flies." Bloom's Literature. Facts On File, Inc. Web. 26 Mar. 2014.
In the Transcendental aesthetics, Kant defines the objective validity of Space and Time as concepts a priori with the help from of Geometry, showing that if we believe in the validity of Geometry, we have to believe that Space and Time are concepts a priori. In the Pure Concepts of Understanding, Kant claims that our intuitions are dependent on sensibility; everything we sense accumulates into our brain and our understanding of the information we sensed relies on organizing that data so that we can recognize the object. Thus, he asserts that understanding is not a faculty of intuition but sensibility. Furthermore, the act of organizing the data into one representation is defined as function and these functions serve as a bridge between the object and its concepts because concepts are not directly related to an object but just some representations of it. This, when function and concepts are put together, Kant concludes is defined as judgment, knowledge of the fact that there is ...
Kuper, Simon, and Stefan Szymanski. "Gentlemen Prefer Blonds." Soccernomics. New York: Nation, 2009. 47-48. Print.
Even twenty years after her death, the world continues to remember the princess who perpetually remembered them. Princess Diana lived as one of the most influential figures of the 20th Century. She devoted her life in the spotlight to bring recognition to causes that she felt others should care about, such as AIDS, homelessness, leprosy, and landmine removal. Diana believed that love and kindness served as the remedy for any sort of suffering. She once stated in an interview with BBC journalist, Martin Bashir, “I think the biggest disease this world suffers from in this day and age is the disease of people feeling unloved. I know that I can give love for a minute, for half an hour, for a day, for a month—I’m very happy to do that and I want to do that” (Roisin Kelly). While the matter remains certain that people were initially starstruck having a princess in their midst, it is undoubtedly Diana’s kindness that attracted and continued to attract beings to her presence. She held the hands of those deemed unsafe to touch and broke down stigmas in the process. Diana became a hero for those who had no one to speak up for them, or the trials they endured, through simple acts of kindness, such as a warm smile or a gentle handshake. While Diana aided those around her, she herself desperately craved love and kindness, as discussed in the following quote from the New York Times’ Article, “Diana in Search of Herself”. “Indeed, Diana's unstable temperament bore all the markings of one of the most elusive psychological disorders: the borderline personality. This condition is characterized by an unstable self-image; sharp mood swings; fear of rejection and abandonment; an inability to sustain relationships; persistent feelings of loneliness, boredom, and emptiness; depression; and impulsive behavior such as binge eating and
Love and beauty is another theme that recurs in Greek discussion, especially in Plato’s dialogues. In the Phaedrus and especially the Symposium, Plato discusses the nature of erotic love and give the argument for the ultimately transcendental object of love: Beauty. In both dialogues, Plato presents Socrates as a quintessential philosopher who is a lover of wisdom, and through his great speeches we are able to grasp Platonism and Plato’s view on the interesting theme.
Nevertheless, the sublime does not lead us to despair, but to a higher pleasure than beauty affords