A Week in Review (2/15)

This week marked the movement from Classical Theory into the the period of Enlightenment. The class time was spent more on summarizing the later Classical Theorists, and we spent time talking finishing up with Longinus before the first group presentation. To quickly overview Longinus's idea of the sublime, he noted five sources of sublimity. These sources dealt with two distinct types of sublime. The ability to conceive great though (1), and strong and inspired emotion (2) dealt more with an innate sublime while containing certain types of figures (3), having noble diction (4), and dignified and elevated word arrangement (5) dealt more with the sublime as a product of art. The presentation was on Longinus's idea of the sublime. I was one of the members in the first discussion group, but will cover that within the words of a following blog.

To begin the Enlightenment age of theory and criticism, we briefly discussed Rene Descartes's “Cogito ergo sum,” or in English, “I think therefore I am.” This ability to suggest that there is a self that thinks was the rise of rationalism, which lead to empericism which lead to skepticism. Before the 18^th century most ideas were based out of romance and idealism which was correlated with the Aristocracy. With the shift in social structures, an idea of knowing through sensual experience that was grounded in detail and fact arose with a more progressive society. This eventually gave rise to skepticism that was a slight throwback to both aristocratic and progressive social structures.

In class time, we were only able to cover two of the philosopher's readings. One of them was Alexander Pope who had an essay (poem) on criticism. His ideas about criticism were harsh towards those who did not know how to criticize works properly all within the delicious shell of a criticism. The main points Pope made was that a critic should focus on the entirety of a piece and not it's segments, that he must try to view the piece in the same way a writer wrote it, and other seemingly contradictory and situational views.

Then we discussed Immanuel Kant, who covered the ideas of a priori and a posteori knowledge coupled with analytic and synthetic. He was also noted for saying that beauty was disinterested and only appreciated while desire was the big thing. He also noted uses of reason and aligned them with maturity by saying there were private and public uses of reason. Of these two, public reason showed the more maturity since it required socialization with others.

My impression on the subject is still a little lost, since the readings can be dense and slightly pretentious, but since we didn't get to fully discuss all the readings, I'm hoping for some clarification in later discussions.