Philosopher's Forum - Immanuel Kant.

Overview

The year is 1792, we are in Germany, and my name is Immanuel Kant. I am going to explain to you what art is and is not, and what the proper use of art is.

First I would like to mention dress, and to congratulate those of you who have attended this class dressed appropriately. It is not always the most convenient or economical thing to dress well, but I consider this to be my sacrifice to the aesthetic. It is my duty to my visitors and to myself to appear to the best advantage. There is nothing shallow or lacking in virtue about appearance, beauty is in fact an expression of virtue.

What is art?

Art is something necessarily made by human beings. Nature, while beautiful, is distinctly NOT art. Not only that, but art is always a production of the human mind. By right it is only that which is produced through an act of will that places reason at the basis of its action, that should be termed art.

Art, as human skill, is distinguished also from science, and further distinguished from handicraft. We look on the former as something which could only prove successful as play, i.e., an occupation which is agreeable on its own account; but on the second as labor, i.e., a business, which on its own account is disagreeable and is only attractive by means of what it results in.

Fine art, specifically, is a mode of representation which is intrinsically final, and which, although devoid of an end, has the effect of advancing the culture of the mental powers in the interests of social communication. I would term this quality “purposiveness” – that which does not have a purpose, yet gives one to reflect and use one’s reason and judgment in the same way as one would were it to have purpose.

This is why the creation and experience of art is necessary for learning. It is through this reflection that human judgment and reason develops. When enjoying art, one develops one’s mind - The universal communicability of a pleasure involves in its very concept that the pleasure is not one of enjoyment arising out of mere sensation, but must be one of reflection.

The requisites for fine art are, therefore, imagination, understanding, soul, and taste. If we wish children to develop these things, we must allow and encourage them to be involved in the production and appreciation of art.


Art Ranking Game

You each have before you six slips of paper. On these are written the six forms of fine art. Any other forms are simply variations on these – for instance, drama is a form of poetry, and architecture is a form of sculpture.

Given what I have told you, and what you know yourself to be true (use your reason), I would like you to rank these art forms by their aesthetic worth.



1. Poetry

Poetry, which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and is least willing to be led by precepts or example, holds the first rank among all the arts. It expands the mind by giving freedom to the imagination and by offering a wealth of thought to which no verbal expression is completely adequate, and by thus rising aesthetically to ideas. It invigorates the mind by letting it feel its faculty - free, spontaneous, and independent of determination by nature.

2. Rhetoric

Rhetoric, so far as this is taken to mean the art of persuasion, i.e., the art of deluding by means of a fair semblance and not merely excellence of speech is a dialectic which borrows from poetry only so much as is necessary to win over men’s minds to the side of the speaker before they have weighed the matter, and to rob their verdict of its freedom. What it owes to poetry earns it this rank.

3. Painting

Because it is the art of design and, as such, the groundwork of all the other formative arts; partly because it can penetrate much further into the region of ideas, and in conformity with them give a greater extension to the field of intuition than it is open to the others 
to do.

4. Sculpture

The art of sculpture, since in its products art is almost confused with nature. However, it has excluded from its creations the direct representation of ugly objects, and, instead, only sanctions, for example, the representation of death or of the warlike spirit by means of an allegory, or attributes which wear a pleasant guise, and so only indirectly through an interpretation on the part of reason, and not for the pure aesthetic judgment.

5. Architecture

In architecture the chief point is a certain use of the artistic object to which, as the condition, the aesthetic ideas are limited, as opposed to how in sculpture the mere expression of aesthetic ideas is the main intention.

6. Music

Those of you who enjoy music would do well to bear with me on this point. I grant that if we take charm and mental stimulation into account, music would be second only to poetry. However. It is certainly more a matter of enjoyment than of culture, and it possesses 
less worth in the eyes of reason than any other of the fine arts. Music advances from sensations to indefinite ideas: other arts from definite ideas to sensations. Over and above all this, music has a certain lack of urbanity about it. For owing chiefly to the character of its instruments, it scatters its influence abroad to an uncalled-for extent (through the neighborhood), and thus, as it were, becomes obtrusive and deprives others, outside the musical circle, of their freedom. This is a thing that the arts that address themselves to the eye do not do, for if one is not disposed to give admittance to their impressions, one has only to look the other way. The case is almost on a par with
the practice of regaling oneself with a perfume that exhales its odors far and wide. The man who pulls his perfumed handkerchief from his pocket gives a treat to all around whether they like it or not, and compels them, if they want to breathe at all, to be parties to the enjoyment, and so the habit has gone out of fashion.


Resources on Kant’s personality:

From the introduction of Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Immanuel Kant, published by John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1914.
Found at http://www.hschamberlain.net/kant/kant_00_introduction.html.


“If under Chamberlain's guidance you penetrate into the great man's sanctum, you will find a small wizen man, hardly above a dwarf in stature, with sharp inquisitive features, and an eye that penetrates your very soul, and seems to flood the whole room with light. His portrait by Döbler shows him dressed with scrupulous care. Beruffled and be-frilled, his appearance is that of an old French Marquis of the Oeil-de-Boeuf. Fine clothes are his one sacrifice to the Arts; he conceives it to be his duty to his visitors and to himself to appear to the best advantage. One feels inclined to wish that some of the modern men of learning would take a leaf out of his book, slovenliness and economy of soap being in his esteem no emblems of wisdom. He, on the contrary, is as well groomed as any Beau Brummell, and, great philosopher as he is, no petit maître was ever more delicately turned out. Such was the appearance of the man.
And his conversation! He has read every book of travel that he can lay his hand upon. His knowledge of the cities of Europe, especially of Italy, is so accurate that you would imagine that he had spent his life in traveling. An Englishman arrives in Königsberg and the conversation happens to turn upon Westminster Bridge. The Briton is at fault, but Kant sets him right with as great accuracy as if he had been the surveyor who took out the quantities for the builder. His delight is in works on anthropology, architecture, natural science, and history. Don't presume to talk to him of philosophy! he will have none of it — nor does he seem even to have read the works of contemporary thinkers, save in the case of Fichte, where he was eager to show that the man had had the audacity to pretend that he based his philosophy upon him.
Little short of miraculous were Kant's grip and persistence. He was a mere boy when he chose “the lonely furrow“ which he was to plough. During the eighty long years of his life he kept to the course which he had laid for himself. Never for an instant did he swerve to the right or to the left, and it was not until he was sixty years of age that he conceived himself to be sufficiently equipped to face the public with his masterpiece. It must be allowed that this showed phenomenal determination.
As to his moral courage there can be no two opinions. He was the deadly foe of all that is false, of all superstition, of all dogma, — of all slavery. He preached the freedom of man, — the “freedom of freedom.“ Religion he looked upon as the duty which man owes to himself, as “the recognition of all our duties as Divine Commands“; God is a moral necessity, something beyond comprehension: yet “that there is a God in nature“ cannot be disputed. And this is the man whom churchmen have been apt to hold up to execration as irreligious!
His physical courage was no less than his moral courage. Fear was unknown to him. Upon one occasion a burglar broke in upon him. He had mistaken his man. In that puny body there was, to borrow an image from Eöthen, “the pluck of ten battalions.“ Kant rushed upon the thief with the concentrated rage of a wounded tiger: the intruder was so taken aback by the sudden fury of the attack that he decamped, leaving the small philosopher master of the field. What did the burglar expect to find in that simple home? It was bare of all ornament, for art did not appeal to Kant. Save only for the portrait of Rousseau his walls were callow; he looked upon pictures as mere witnesses of the vanity of those who hung them.”


From “Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists"

Immanuel Kant: Evolution from a Personality ‘Disorder’ to a Dementia

Bogousslavsky J, Boller F (eds): Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists. Front Neurol Neurosci. Basel, Karger, 2005, vol 19, pp 76-84

The philosopher Immanuel (or Emmanuel) Kant is felt by many to be one of the most influential thinkers of the modern age. For example, in his monumental work the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason) he showed how one can use the mind’s faculties of knowledge to determine the limits of these very faculties. His life is of interest to neurologists for several reasons. He had a peculiar personality, he suffered from headache and he died with dementia. Kant was a man of legendary calm and regularity. For instance, his morning walks occurred always at the same time and it has been stated that people could set their watch when seeing him go by. He always followed the same itinerary and even walked the same number of minutiously counted steps. It is felt, however, that he did not fit the criteria of an obsessive-compulsive disorder. He suffered from headaches which were probably a true migraine. It has long been thought that a compulsive personality is often found in migraine sufferers. Finally, in his last years, Kant showed clear symptoms of dementia. Various etiologies have been considered such as vascular dementia or a slow growing tumor such as a frontal meningioma. Because he showed marked fluctuation of his cognitive symptoms, reported hallucinations and experienced repeated falls, we propose that Kant was affected by Lewy body dementia.

The CRC - a risk I'll have to run.

I have been mulling over the UN convention on the rights of the child since our first class. In preparation, I had read the child-friendly version available on the UNICEF website. While reading it, I immediately wanted to print a colour version to put on the wall of my daughter’s room.

My next thought was – oh that would be a BAD idea. Do I really want my child coming back at me with legal arguments for why I can’t send her to bed without supper? Or to have her argue that she has the right to practice her own language and culture, even if that language is whining?

The convention is fantastic, of course. According to UNICEF, “The four core principles of the Convention are non-discrimination; devotion to the best interests of the child; the right to life, survival and development; and respect for the views of the child.” Those are beautiful principles!

So why did I recoil at the idea of letting Isadora in on those rights? Is it just that she’s too little to understand them? Or is it, more disturbingly, that I want to reserve the right to dole out those principles at my own whims?

In reality I think it’s neither. I think that she would be quite right to argue that it’s cruel to send her to bed hungry, and I shouldn’t (and don’t plan to) ever do that. I think that I’m quite capable of a solid counter-argument to the whining-as-a-cultural-prerogative idea. It’s just that I think we’re not used to thinking of children in this light, as fully realized, rights-bearing individuals. Shifting our perceptions of children to something other than either property or extensions of ourselves is, frankly, kind of exhausting. And so incredibly important, for parents and teachers and anyone involved in children’s lives. Especially article 31:

“1. States Parties recognize the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts.
2. States Parties shall respect and promote the right of the child to participate fully in cultural and artistic life and shall encourage the provision of appropriate and equal opportunities for cultural, artistic, recreational and leisure activity.”

Or in the child-friendly version: You have the right to play and to rest.

Given all we’ve learned about how imperative play is to a child’s ability to learn, this convention essentially is what will provide the world with the next generation of thoughtful, creative adults.

So I’ve decided that when Isadora can read, I will get a poster of the convention for her room. Her constitutional-law-specialist father will surely approve! And I’ll just have to make sure I memorize and take it to heart as thoroughly as she inevitably will.


Chief Justice Isadora gives her reasons:



Works cited:

United Nations (1989). Convention on the rights of the child. Retrieved on August 5, 2011, available at: http://www.unicef.org/crc/.

United Nations (1989). Convention on the rights of the child in child friendly language. Retrieved on August 5, 2011, available at:
http://www.unicef.org/rightsite/files/uncrcchilldfriendlylanguage.pdf

I read "I’m in a bad mood. Let’s go shopping’: Interactive dolls, consumer culture and a ‘glocalized’ model of literacy" pretty voraciously - I love analyzing toys. And Diva Starz are completely fascinating. I've never heard of them, which is interesting given that the article is from 2003. Was I simply not paying attention to kids' toys, 5 years before I became a parent? Did they really only exist in the United States? Or did their marketing fail utterly, making them a flash in the pan that only those who were actually buying toys at the time would remember?

To the internet! I said. Turns out, Diva Starz came on the market in 2000, so the fact that the author saw them on shelves in 2003 means they had at least some staying power. However, according to Wikipedia (I make it a practice never to cite Wikipedia in a paper, obviously, but you'll forgive me for citing it on a blog!)

"After the success of the debut model, Mattel released the Diva Starz Fashion Dolls. While generally identical to the original line, these dolls have clothing made of fabric, and were thinner and had more accurate proportions. Also, the dolls will speak recorded phrases when a button on their backs is pushed. This collection of dolls did not include the Summer doll, but instead introduced the Miranda doll. With the introduction of the fashion doll, the robot dolls fell drastically in popularity, and Mattel discontinued them. After a few successful seasons with the fashion dolls, they to began to drop in popularity. In the end, Diva Starz soon became discontinued altogether, and Mattel went on to improving Barbie dolls and creating MyScene dolls."

So it looks like what sold better than dolls that were interactive about fashion were dolls that were passive about fashion, kind of. I mean, it's not like you don't get to dress Barbie. I made tons of tiny clothes for my Barbies, and they had exciting adventures. My Barbie play was more interactive, really, than whatever constitutes play in talking to one of the Diva Starz.

To address Carrington's central theme of literacy, I think there is some value for sure in toys as texts which teach children about what exists in the world. And certainly, gender stereotypes of the sort that Diva Starz portray absolutely exist and will absolutely be a large part of any girl and eventually woman's life. But as Carrington says, these toys are not descriptive, they are normative. They don't say "You could act like this." They say "You SHOULD act like this." By making their speech come from the dolls themselves instead of from the imaginations of little girls, they are leaving no room for subversion. Everyone I know who had Barbies at some point had them say something aggressive, competitive, combative. A Diva Star can't say "I will defeat you, evil vacuum cleaner!" because she is already saying "I just know we’ll be the best of friends! "

I'm not sure how this turned into a defense of Barbie! I'm certainly no fan. Barbie teaches one kind of appearance and one kind only, and as a parallel, Diva Starz teach one kind of speech and one kind only. I'm not anti-Barbie because I think there's anything wrong about having large breasts and a small waist, and Diva Starz don't seem distasteful to me because I think there's anything wrong with shopping. I love shopping, and heck, I have large breasts and a small waist. But there are so very many ways to talk and ways to look, and little girls are just shown the same ones over and over again, so that they assume those must be the only acceptable ways to talk/look. It's the homogeneousness that makes these toys boring and dangerous.

And they don't really look that different, either:



Works Cited:

Victoria Carrington (2003). I’m in a bad mood. Let’s go shopping’: Interactive dolls, consumer culture and a ‘glocalized’ model of literacy. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy. University of Queensland, Australia.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diva_Starz

Mickey Mouse Monopoly and the sinister effect of cross-marketing on spontaneous play

This week I watched "Mickey Mouse Monopoly,"a video by Chyng Sun and Miguel Picker about Disney, childhood, and corporate power. I highly recommend it!



The reason I wanted to blog about it is that I was struck in particular by the discussion in the video of how marketing towards children affects their play, particularly their storytelling. The stories Disney tells in its movies are in many way secondary to the merchandising of products related to the movies, and as such those products become embedded with the particular narratives Disney has attached to them.

In essence, when a child is given a toy for which she already knows the story, her spontaneous creative abilities become displaced. She uses her Cinderella doll to tell the (Disneyfied) version of Cinderella, she plays out the (Disneyfied) story of the Little Mermaid in her Ariel swimsuit. She already knows what happens in the story, so she does not create her own. I remember experiencing this myself as a child - my friends and I would decide to play, for instance, Sleeping Beauty. If there were the right number of friends, it all worked out: we could have one princess, three fairies, a wicked queen, and a prince. But if more than three friends wanted to be fairies, or worse if more than one of us wanted to be the princess, a wall was hit. That's NOT HOW IT GOES, someone would protest. After all, we'd seen the movie a dozen times. We remembered.

One of the things I got out of Fragile Moments was that play is how children learn, and how large a part reiteration plays in that learning process. So in repeating the stories we'd been told by Disney films, my friends and I were not only not learning anything new ourselves, but reinforcing the messages in those films. Some of those messages are innocent or even lovely, but many of them are not. I have distinct memories of being a little girl and thinking about how when I grew up and was beautiful, I would look a particular way, and that way was directly modeled on the consistently wasp-waisted and willowy Disney heroine. I was told by Disney that that was what a pretty lady looked like, and moreover that pretty women were always the good ones who lived happily ever after, so of course I wanted and intended to look that way (despite some nagging suspicions that with my big nose and puffy hair, flat chest and long face, I bore a closer resemblance to an Ugly Stepsister.)

Through marketing, Disney has the power to approve certain narratives and not others, and this is particularly sinister when one considers Disney CEO Michael Eisner's 2005 pronouncement: "To make money is our only objective." This is an above-board admission that disrupting children's play is an effective way to be profitable. It really made me reflect on Fragile Moments, and how much learning hinges on the spontaneity of play. Upsetting, to say the least!

Works cited:

Mickey Mouse Monopoly : Disney, Childhood & Corporate Power. (2001) Producer, Writer: Chyng Feng Sun . Director, Co-Producer: Miguel Picker. An ArtMedia Production. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byaMd_PNyIY

Wien, C. A. & Callaghan, K. (2007). Fragile moments: Artists co-constructing creative experience with children, parents and early childhood educators. Innovations in Early Education: The International Reggio Exchange.

Eisner - Yes!

I really enjoyed The Arts and Creation of Mind. Eisner’s theory of arts education meshes well with my study of philosophy of art – both hold that “art” is not the painting in a gallery or book on a shelf, but the whole realm of artistic thought and production – perceptual exploration. Closer to greenish than green, as Eisner put it.

I chose Eisner for this entry because I agreed with him so much, and I’ve actually found it hard to write, because just want to pull quotes and say “what he said!”

I was particularly taken with the section where he discusses the arts as language, in the sense of being a lens though which we experience everything else. They “make possible a certain quality of experience we call aesthetic.” He poses the question of how we could teach other subjects as “a process in which artistry is at work.” I think that’s a simply beautiful idea! In my experience, there absolutely is art in mathematics, science, history, athletics – in everything, really. Because I view art in the Kantian definition, being that which is purposive without being purposeful, it allows us to enjoy the parts of other disciplines whose usefulness is not readily apparent. We can enjoy the beauty of a balanced equation without knowing how it applies, we can enjoy the depth and complexity of cellular structure without knowing how it helps us cure a disease or develop a new crop. We can enjoy history as literature, instead of dismissing it as just some stuff that happened to people who aren’t alive anymore. None of this is a cheapening of other subjects, but a strengthening, I think.

In an ideal world, I think the practice of dividing school into subjects, core and otherwise, would be phased out. Perhaps this is partly a function of coming from a philosophy background – I have often joked that one can be a philosophy scholar simply by studying whatever one is passionate about, and calling it Philosophy of that.

References:

The arts and the creation of mind. Elliot W Eisner. Language Arts. Urbana: May 2003. Vol. 80, Iss. 5; pg. 340

The Critique of Judgement [1892]. Immanuel Kant. Translated with Introduction and Notes by J.H. Bernard (2nd ed. revised). London: Macmillan, 1914.

Arts Autobiography

I began dance classes at the age of nine. I wanted piano or voice lessons, but those were expensive, and ballet was subsidized by the city, and I also think my parents had the idea that dance would help their supremely bookish and unathletic daughter to get out of her head a little.

Boy, did that backfire. Ballet put me further into the darkest parts of my mind, fuelled by hours in front of a long mirror in a skin-tight leotard, watching my peers develop waists and breasts while I maintained my little girl swayback, round belly, and flat chest. My turnout was horrible, and my memory for sequences worse. It didn’t matter that I actually loved moving to music – that wasn’t ballet.

I quit ballet when I was 16, unable to deal with the constant reminder of not being good enough, but the monster had already been born, and by the end of high school I had a full-blown case of anorexia. In the last few months of high school I began my recovery, and vowed to never dance again. My relationship with the arts was at that point, to put it mildly, strained.

Then, in university, I met a man who talked about dance in a way I’d never heard before. He made it sound so free, and easy, and joyful, and I remembered those few moments when in a jump or a turn I had let go of my self-loathing and enjoyed feeling my body move through space. I joined his dance company, and have been doing modern dance ever since, both as a dancer and a choreographer.

I wrote my MA thesis on philosophy of dance, and I would love to see joyful and unrestricted dance as part of the public school curriculum. It breaks my heart that dance, especially ballet, hurts so many young people, when it has the potential to give them a beautiful perspective on the wonderful things their bodies can do.

I am especially excited by the idea that dance and other arts curricula can be a part of cultivating healthy body image in young people – and even that there can be a logical intersection between arts education and physical education. Making art with one’s own body as the medium can be so empowering, and powerful, and such a good antidote to the idea that only one particular shape and size of body is aesthetically acceptable.

This is a dance piece I choreographed for the Only Human Dance Collective show this year. It is about the dual pressures of the internal drive towards perfection, and the external stresses of teachers (dance and otherwise), media, and impending adulthood.



And for extra bonus dance goodness, this is a 30-second solo of mine from that same show. It is, loosely, about giving birth.

Mixed reactions to "Play Held Hostage"

Reading "Play Held Hostage" was kind of a rollercoaster for me! I went into it expecting to do a lot of head-nodding - I'm no fan of the idea of "excellence" as it's often practiced, and I certainly value play. But while doing the reading, I found myself not so much nodding vigorously as tilting my head, and occasionally rolling my eyes.

It seemed over-the-top to me, almost shrill in tone. Linda Cameron does offer the caveat that she might sound more passionate than rational, and I agree with her on that. Is play really in such jeopardy that it warrants such phrases as "Teachers and students are to be mere puppets, to comply, conform, and to serve..."? In my (limited) experience, children DO play, and teachers and parents care about much more than grades. I've never met one of these parents who pushes their child to get high grades at the expense of happiness, or kids who didn't have time in their day to experiment and create.

On the other hand, I agree very strongly with Cameron's indictment of toystores. I took these picture in Chapters once because I was so appalled by the gendered costumes available there.

And after our class discussion on Thursday, especially following the video we watched, I see her point more and more. Those parents who prioritize structured activities, and the children deprived of play, DO exist, and I need to be careful not to take my own experience as anything more than one anecdote in a sea of data.

My other reaction when reading the paper was that Cameron had a very strong sense of nostalgia for the type of play she did as a child, the "out until the streetlights came on" model (so many of these theorists have a particular attachment to the streetlights rule!) I'm wary of nostalgia, as we tend to have pretty inaccurate recollections of how good things used to be. I was a kid who was largely left to her own devices, and honestly, I would have loved to have piano lessons or even a little more pressure to perform well in school. Again, though, there is always a balance to be struck. I also needed to remind myself that Cameron's speech is just that, a speech, and not a formal paper, and as such, the passion is well-placed.

The main thing I came away with after this paper and Thursday's class is that I need to know more, read more, understand more about play. Exciting!

Sources:

Cameron. L (2006.) Play held hostage by the 'bully' excellence. Touchstone 36th Annual Conference Proceedings: Council of Drama and Dance in Education, 6-10

Harper, S. [Producer-Director]. (2009). Lost Adventures of Childhood [Motion picture]. Canada: CTV.