Any reader of Kafka’s stories realise that in them people do not communicate. In fact, it is the break-down, no, the sheer impossibility of communication that makes for the alienated sphere. But how? Do not the characters talk abundantly to each other? Suddenly the answer to this question dawned on me. The characters talk to…

Three conceptions of culture Culture can be conceived of as1. a set of products (works of art, our cultural heritage)2. a set of processes (sports, art policy), or, lastly, 3. as an activity. The sequence of these three conceptions is conform our common sense views. In reality the activity founds the processes, and these produce…

What Plato is up against in his objection to art, becomes clear in Politiea, Book X, 599a: he objects here to people who take a representation for what it represents. [We can still connect with this objection as a warning at being too naive about news or documentary footage.] – Plato. 1988. Republic 10. Edited…

Kant’s Critique of Judgement can be seen to put aside all sorts of irrelevant, and illegitimate considerations for our judgements of taste, such as our interests, concepts, moral values, sentiments and excitement. Why is there no discussion in Kant of fashionable and trendy following of judgements, in short: of the influence of one’s time, one’s…

Kant, in his so-called Copernican move, filled in the details of this picture in wistful manner. He installed our scientific methods. Hastily. Herder installed our language, instead of the Kantian categories of understanding and the forms of intuition, space and time. And Schopenhauer reduced them to space, time and causality. These were efforts to correct…

We can distinguish between terms which apply only after success and terms which refer to the activity leading to such success. Some terms are ambiguous in this respect, e.g. the Anglosaxon “aesthetic appreciation”: one would think the term denotes a perceptive activity, but in the literature it is used as well to refer to the…

One element in addictions is the farmed out clues, spread in the world the addict tramples in. These clues carry our memories for us, irrespective of the narrative we live through whilst encountering the clues. It is the clues which feed back onto our narratives, instead of the narratives determining how we interpret the clues….

One who speaks in a foreign language will at first look stupid to native speakers–and ‘at first’ may last many years. Apparently, there is nothing either of them can do about it. Yes, they will deny any discrimination, and in theory, that works: people don’t want to look bad. In practice things work out differently….

You know how cats can’t concentrate on a task; how, whenever something moves in their direct vicinity, that something is their project … immediately? We seem to head in that direction. Whenever we sit behind the computer whatever distracts our attention makes us move towards it, inducing us to forget what we were doing in…

The first sentence of the Critique of Judgement contains a puzzling reference to “relating a representation (in your mind) to your feeling”. How does one do that? Can we hold it up in our minds and look at it with our feeling? Part I. Critique of Aesthetic Judgement / Division I. Analytic of Aesthetic Judgement…