Expression and ends

EparchEparch Registered User new member
edited February 2011 in Debate and/or Discourse
"The other side (that’s me, but not just me) believes that when it comes to expression nothing is off the table."

Doesn't expression have an end? A purpose? Can it not be 'good' or 'bad'? Or have you ingested whole-pig the postmodernist paradigm in which we find ourselves swimming, that rejects any such notions, and in doing so makes all art banal and all communication ultimately meaningless?

The loss of our connection to objective reality - which include objective ends in the Aristotelian sense - is based in a Cartesian sense of everything-starts-in-my-brain (I think, therefore...) hardened into a Kantian view of no objective standards (only practical ones, we come to see in the riffs of Kant, decided by a community). Taking this view, everything is bereft of a 'point', and just becomes a modus of power in a dialectic between the artist (who has power and intends more) and the viewer (who is out of power and desperate to gain it back, which is the controlling desire of the "victims": offended people who will use communication, twitter, forum posts, as a lever to gain their power).

There is no via media between objective and subjectivist standards: one cannot hold that 'nothing is off the table' on one hand, and get too flounced about someone positing the horrific actually being imminantized in a forum post: in the subjectivist sense, the two modes of communication are equally licit. So, that's a non-starter, and the only rational thing you could say in response "I don't like it", as opposed to "it is wrong to threaten people". Obviously, no sane person would merely say the former, it's only the degenerate pseudo-philosophy which takes people down that path, but it's the one that leads to the half-hypocrisy which you've editorially asserted: it's cool to say whatever we want, it's not cool for you, though.

The solution seems to be to step back to the classical narrative, hearkening back to The Philosopher again, that there is a causality outside of ourselves which adjudicates The Good from the non-good. It is this very reason why the Transcendentals (which are commutative with Being) include amongst their number 'goodness' and 'beauty': that beauty is something objective, and is precisely defined as the perfection of a object's being.

So, 'bad art' is that which is somehow stillborn, it does not impart the life of a subject to the object. 'Bad communication' is that which does not give a fair view of truth. Both of these are 'less than good', and in addition to being in-themselves a type of insufficiency, they are a deformation of the being of the creators to have created it, which is the underlying charge made about some of the art here.

Now, as to the cartoon in question, I read it with a chuckle and moved on without deep thought, which I think is a completely rational solution: the ends of creating it were not horrific, they did not imply what has been imputed to them, it was "no big deal". But, it's a far cry from saying in this instance it might have been short-sighted to saying that the ends don't matter at all: the latter is where the dragons lie.

Eparch on

Posts

  • Irond WillIrond Will WARNING: NO HURTFUL COMMENTS, PLEASE!!!!! Cambridge. MAModerator Mod Emeritus
    edited February 2011
    We are done on this forum with discussing the topic of dicks, wolves, rape, consumer boycotts and other issues relating to the dickwolves thing for a while.

    Please respect this.

    Irond Will on
    Wqdwp8l.png
This discussion has been closed.