This is an essay about language, thought, and culture in general, and about Ancient Greek and Classical Chinese in particular. It is about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which says that language influences the mind, and applies this hypothesis to Greek and Chinese. It is also an essay in comparative philosophy as well as a contribution to the history of ideas. From the language side, I rely on the nineteenth-century German linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, and from the culture side on the contemporary (...) French sinologist François Jullien. Combining their ideas, I give substance to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and explain some of Jullien's claims about the historical and political developments of Chinese culture. The central .. (shrink)
Das Aussprechen eines Wortes ist gleichsam ein Anschlagen einer Taste auf dem Vorstellungsklavier. (Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.) (PU §6)Polonius: What do you read, my lord?Hamlet: Words, words, words!(Hamlet, act 2, scene 2)Wittgenstein in his later years thought about experiences of meaning and aspect change. Do such experiences matter? Or would a meaning- or aspect-blind person not lose much? Moreover, is this a matter of aesthetics or epistemology? To get a better (...) perspective on these matters, I will introduce distinctions between certain subjective and objective aspects, namely feelings of our inner psychological states versus fine-tuned objective experiences of the outer world. It seems to me that in his discussion of meaning-blindness, Wittgenstein unhappily floats between these two extremes, the subjective and the objective. I will also introduce some notions from Kant's aesthetics, to get a better understanding of the interplay between feeling and meaning. This will shed some new light on Wittgenstein's enquiry into meaning- and aspect-blindness. (shrink)
In 1764, Kant published his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime and in 1790 his influential third Critique , the Critique of the Power of Judgment . The latter contains two parts, the 'Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment' and the 'Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment'. They reveal a new principle, namely the a priori principle of purposiveness ( Zweckmäßigkeit ) of our power of judgment, and thereby offer new a priori grounds for (...) beauty and biology within the framework of Kant's transcendental philosophy. They also unite the previous two Critiques , the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason . Besides contributing to general and systematic aspects within his transcendental philosophy, Kant's aesthetics also offers new insights into old problems. It deals with feeling versus experience, subjectivity versus objectivity, disinterested pleasure, aesthetic universality, free and adherent beauty, the sensus communis , genius, aesthetic ideas, beauty as the symbol of morality, beauty of nature versus beauty of art, the sublime, and the supersensible. In this article I will limit myself to this critical aesthetics of Kant. But I will also discuss the ugly and the possibility of beauty in mathematics and see whether Kant's theory can successfully explain or deal with them. I will also compare his theory with philosophical ideas from a very different tradition, namely from Confucius, not only as a challenge to Kant's theory, but also because there is a growing interest from the Chinese side in combining ideas from Confucius and Kant, an interest that might well become influential in both East and West during the 21st century. (shrink)
The main ideas in this paper can be summarized in the following three points. (1) Openness, indeterminacy, and exemplarity are elements of both Kant's aesthetics and Wittgenstein's notion of language games. (2) These elements are essential to what makes a person. They are necessary in processes of decision-making and in the development of a person. (3) Such aspects were in the center of discussion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, especially in the tradition of the so-called Bildungsroman. Unfortunately, (...) they tend to be forgotten nowadays. (shrink)
The notion of the a priori underwent several changes since the time it came into existence in the Middle Ages. Originally it had been used to mark a certain form of argument, an argument that proceeds from what is prior to what is later, from cause to effect: demonstratio procedens ex causis ad effectum = demonstratio a priori. But this changed with Kant, for whom it meant not a form of argument but rather some special kind of knowledge (or elements (...) thereof), namely knowledge that (a) is independent of particular experiences and (b) that makes experience in general (Erfahrung überhaupt) possible. Tied up with consciousness and the transcendental unity of apperception, Kant"s understanding of the a priori was in the spirit of his transcendental philosophy. But this understanding changed again with the rise of analytic philosophy, in which we still find the first characteristic but not the second anymore. The idea of Erfahrung überhaupt was given up, partly because one naturally wondered what exactly this notion of experience in general, or experience universally conceived, should be. Where should we get it from, if not by way of abstraction and generalization from individual cases of experience? And would this not make it an empirical concept, so that the whole project of asking for the conditions of its possibility would not lead us to the kind of certainty, necessity and universality we expect from a priori knowledge? There would be no guarantee that in the future we would not make discoveries that would give us new kinds of experiences or that would show us our experiences in a new light. Thus, we would have to admit that these experiences did not satisfy the conditions of experience we had set up originally. The a priori conditions would have to be revised. (shrink)
