Re: Weekend at Buchenwald...

Yep, to be clear:

> OK. But just to be clear, I think there's a lot of difference between how we make important ethical decisions in our daily lives and whether or not we happen to like Weekend at Bernie's or Citizen Kane.

Yeah, I agree with that. I was trying to make a different point
entirely -- that how and why we like either film, and what we like about
either film, has its parallels in how we make those important ethical
decisions, and the decision making process itself is reflected back to
us in our art and literature sometimes.. How we read is an ethical
decision more than what we read, I think.

And no, I don't think art necessarily ennobles us either. It's funny
that you have these highly nationalist Germans reading German literature
and listening to a composer from Salzburg (Austrian) -- not reading
Emerson or collecting American blues albums, which would have been an
implausible example. The point is that the aesthetic of these highly
nationalistic and xenophobic imaginary Germans is still...German.

Here I think we just need to pay closer attention to language:

> And the sharing of "to me"s is certainly not an impossible form of discourse, nothing about subjective opinions makes them incommunicable. They can indeed be expressible without the "worth" in question being either intrinsic or "primary."

I don't think I was talking about "intrinsic" or "primary" but "shared"
-- if it's not at least shared, then communication would indeed be
impossible. We need to start from "shared" before we can even consider
categories like "primary."

Jim
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Received on Sun Dec 21 15:22:55 2003