Monday, November 26, 2018

Week 11

The idea that glass in cathedrals is thicker on the bottom because of the pull of gravity over time is a common misconception. The true reason for this is an effect of the glass manufacturing process. It is true that we can’t really cleanly divide the concepts of solid and liquid, but it is not true because of glass or gravity or anything real at all. In the real world we might be able to have solids in liquids, but we as humans, do not live in the real world; we live in our minds. We can talk about empirical or pragmatic knowledge but ultimately when we say ‘solid’ and ‘liquid’ we are just saying words, muddled and obfuscated attempts to express ideas through the messy development of human language over thousands of years. We can talk about the platonic world of forms, but we can’t live there. The author states that we can acknowledge the work of an actor or the criticism of a critic may be in part of fractionally ‘perfect,’ but fundamentally any notion of ‘perfection’ is essentially and absolutely inaccessible. I agree with the author that ‘all human activity, [is] absurd.’ I don’t think criticism is about trying to judge absolutes or even relativity; I think it is about movement towards an understanding of how we can perceive meaning from what we experience.

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Final Project link

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qg1kHlKq8xfY_AyzC2vd89_G84RQNfwH/view?usp=sharing