Comment by selridge
2 days ago
I think you can lead yourself astray imagining that there’s a big difference between subjectivity and intersubjectivity. One is just a college educated term for the other.
More importantly, I think that enough time has passed that we can critique poor old Kant on this matter. When he says the taste has no interest in something what he is really implicitly describing is that taste is the province of rich people. If one has to strive or worry or self promote or anything like that, with regard to an aesthetic decision, it is easy to mark as tasteless. In most cases, the people with access to the kinds of habits that allow them to act in matters of aesthetic without interest are rich.
The main reason people drive themselves in circles, talking about taste and subjectivity, and college-educated words for subjectivity is because we don’t want to admit that it is bound up in class and upbringing. That and not the passage of time is why it is so hard to understand Kant on this matter. He’s describing a fiction that we agreed upon so that we didn’t have to talk about the influence of money.
> In most cases, the people with access to the kinds of habits that allow them to act in matters of aesthetic without interest are rich.
This isn't true at all. There's a whole world of artisans and fine artists that range from middle class to broke, and they wouldn't be in that financial situation if they felt like compromising their point of view for money.
> I think that enough time has passed that we can critique poor old Kant
No, no, no! Here on Hacker News, it is apparently forbidden to criticize the dead because "they can't defend themselves." It's seen as somewhere between "cowardly" and "uncouth."
This policy seems to mainly apply, for some weird reason I suspect I would prefer not to know about, to the recently-departed Dilbert guy. But I'm sure his fans would stick up for Kant also!
Oh damn. Dilbert dude died. Pour one out for someone other than him who deserves it.
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Whoa, personal attacks are not ok here so please don't post like this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
IDK, I understood them perfectly well.
But what were they actually saying? They just used the phrase "college-educated" and several synonyms as an insult to put themself forward as just some working class Joe who has no time for rich people and their hoity toity high and mighty philosphizing.
If I was to be charitable, I guess maybe their argument was that Kant only believed in subjective universality because he was rich, but that doesn't make any sense. Both Kant and Hume grew up middle class, and ended up in academia, and had very different conclusions about what "taste" is.
It's just a knee jerk reaction to dead white men philosophers and anyone who is interested in them as a bunch of elitists. That's not an argument, that's some kind of misplaced class resentment masquerading as an argument.
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I think your analysis is interesting but I would argue it has more to do with status than money.
They are both intertwined, often strategically. Bourdieu’s book Distinction is all about how (and when in life) status and money can buy taste.
Just skimming the Wikipedia article [1] and it is appears Bourdieu's argument is bit more nuanced than status and money. It is a bit laden with Marxist jargon, but at least the abstract seems to place the heavy burden on "cultural capital" which is a more precise term than what I chose (status) but close enough to my meaning.
Whether or not economic capital is actually transferrable to cultural capital seems to be another debate, but as the old saying goes "money can't buy taste". In fact, a newly rich lower class person marrying a contemporarily poor higher class person seems more likely.
As the abstract states: "Because persons are taught their cultural tastes in childhood, a person's taste in culture is internalized to their personality, and identify his or her origin in a given social class, which might or might not impede upward social mobility." Money can't rebuild the personality that is internalized in youth, but marriage might give your kids a shot.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_(book)
edit: also to add, the relationship between these is the underlying theme of The Great Gatsby.
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