#j.m. bernstein

[toddjurgess]

aesthetics has been a mode of revealing how the apparently merely subjective aspects of knowing or meaning (say in sensing and feeling) are not merely so (not merely psychological), but somehow ingredients in objective knowings and public meanings that cannot be fully left behind

J.M. Bernstein, writing on the philosophy of Stanley Cavell

[blickinschaos-blog]

There’s been something that has bothered me my entire philosophical life: It is the moment (in the Meditations) when Descartes takes a piece of wax and brings it next to the fireplace; he watches as it changes, and he sees every one of its sensible features—color, taste, sound, feel, smell, size, shape—change. Then he issues a challenge: if every single one of its sensible features changes, then how is it the same piece of wax? And he says, roughly, “Ah well, we have to realize that those sensible features do not truly belong to the wax, and that really the wax is nothing but extension and shape, hence nothing but geometry and number.” It is a shocking moment. The entire sensory, visible world disappears in two pages. I’m always upset when I read this passage, and I’m always amazed when other people aren’t upset too. What Descartes thinks he is doing here is preparing the way for mathematical physics to be the true language for describing the physical world. And indeed, that is, in a way, what has happened. The disappearing piece of wax is an allegory of modernity, of how modern rationality dissolves the world. So, the same way in which Descartes makes the sensible piece of wax disappear into number, exchange value makes everyday objects disappear in their concreteness. Money, exchange value, can become everything while the concrete things in their reality disappear. That’s terrifying. And I think you cannot understand painting or modern art at all unless you take seriously that the modern rationality that creates modern science, that creates the capitalist economy, that creates bureaucratic rationality, needs to get rid of sensuous materiality, concreteness, and the experience of those things.

Jay Bernstein, The Brooklyn Rail interview (with Joan Waltemath)