Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Communicability, Vocabulary, Beauty

Communicability entails commonality of content, i. e. of vocabulary, which, once manifold, requires structural, i. e. grammatical, commonality, as well.  Now, in Kant's system, the a priori status of cognitive faculties guarantees the universal commonality of grammatical structures, as Chomsky, notably, appreciates.  In contrast, the universal commonality of vocabulary, remains lacking, despite the availability of Esperanto, and the ongoing efforts to establish a universal algebra.  Thus, Poetry, in whatever language, lacks universal communicability, and, hence, lacks the capacity to universally communicate Pleasure.  Likewise, the vocabularies of Music and Painting, even where once assumed to be universal, have been proven to be culturally and/or historically relative, in which case they, too, lack the capacity to universally communicate pleasure.  But, Kant's definition of Beauty is in terms of the universal communicability of Pleasure.  Hence, in his system, Beauty is a perhaps unrealizable ideal.

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