Dateline: Eagan, Minnesota (about 9 am, Sunday, July 29)
I was reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals before I left Ilsan yesterday: killing some time with one of the great time-killers of all time. In the Third Essay, Section 6, I found the following quote, which I felt compelled to write down immediately in my notebook.
Kant, like all philosophers, instead of envisaging the aesthetic problem from the point of view of the artist (the creator), considered art and the beautiful purely from that of the “spectator,” and unconsciously introduced the “spectator” into the concept “beautiful.” It would not have been so bad if this “spectator” had at least been sufficiently familiar to the philosophers of beauty – namely, as a great personal fact and experience, as an abundance of vivid authentic experiences, desires, surprises, and delights in the realm of the beautiful! But I fear that the reverse has always been the case; and so they have offered us, from the beginning, definitions in which, as in Kant’s famous definition of the beautiful, a lack of any refined first-hand experience reposes in the shape of a fat worm of error. “That is beautiful,” said Kant, “which gives us pleasure without interest.” Without interest! Compare with this definition one framed by a genuine “spectator” and artist – Stendhal, who once called the beautiful une promesse de bonheur. At any rate he rejected and repudiated the one point about the aesthetic condition which Kant had stressed: le désintéressement. Who is right, Kant or Stendhal?
I’ve never been much of a fan of Stendhal – I never have successfully read one of his novels. But I found the above insight very interesting. I have always felt that aesthetics is central to my understanding of the world, and Neitzsche’s point about seeing art and beauty from the point of view of a creator and not just a consumer seems very important. I’ll think about it some more and report back later, maybe.
Meanwhile, it was a drizzly rain at dawn in Dakota County, here.
I took a rather unaesthetic picture of my rental car, a Ford with Missouri plates, in my friend’s driveway, and I thought, why am I always taking pictures of cars in my friend’s driveway? I think it has to do with this view from my friend’s front porch as being a sort of “first real confirmation that, OMG, I’m in suburban North America again” – a snapshot of the culture-shock moment.
