Previously I had written and posted the following in response to Davidm’s rhetorical question (couldn’t we get along?):

I need to expand why intellectuals are crippled by their own greatest attribute - the powers of abstraction - and why the practical person always has an advantage over the intellectual in social settings, because of their own grasp of the understanding. That requires an exposition of the faculties of the mind, reason and the understanding, how they function in real world scenarios, and particularly how they lead to different personalities.

This is not to say that the Intellectual and the Practical person are persons in themselves, or that a person is entirely either an Intellectual or a Pragmatist, for these idealized portraits of human behavior are merely epistemological outlines of a profile, a persona that we may adopt at one time or another. Indeed, people may be closer to one or the other in their inclinations, habits of thought or action, or etcetera.

The intellectual’s chief attribute - reason - functions by dealing with abstractions in reflection. These abstractions are concepts that have been constituted by (acquiring language) the ability to formulate a generalization of many particular instances, or philosophically speaking, the mental activity of abstracting concepts from the representations of perception. These concepts are objects of reason, conceived and articulated via language. I.e., a car is a general representation devised to stand for many individual objects of perception, say, a Dodge Durango, but the concept of car always leave out many detailed elements of what is perceived or experienced in each particular case.

The practical person’s main attribute - the understanding - functions by dealing with the representations of perception. These representations are objects of perception, which contains and presupposes causality, because they are mediated through our sense organs and intellect. Representations in perception are conditioned by the formal and categorical framework of the mind. All perceived objects already conform to and are conditioned by the human senses and conceptual apparatus. Then all representations necessarily implies an object and subject, for they are always “object-for-a-subject.”

Each and every representation of perception presupposes the law of causality, or cause and effect, which is the sole function of the understanding. On the other hand, the representations of representations are themselves concepts - the “representations of reflection” - which are general concepts we employ when classifying phenomena according to common features.

Therefore, reason utilizes the intelligible perceptions in its application, but since it merely produces concepts from perception and organizes them, it cannot produce anything ex nihilio because it is itself nothing at all. Reason in its abstracting activity is limited to arranging the generalization of perception – representations – because in order to know anything, it must be known by the understanding and be intuitively apprehended before it can be abstracted by the faculty of reason as a concept. Then it follows that bodily activity in all forms is more original than the representations that generate intelligiblity. While it is possible to grasp existence through a more direct means of contemplative awareness, it is likely we cannot think without representations, or specifically, think without using language at all.

Additionally, whereas animals are deficient in conceptual representation, and are incapable of forming judgments, they make up for that in the understanding because they are capable of cognizing causality that is necessary for the cognitive ability of perception. Animals demonstrate amazing ability of coping with their environment (an elephant refusing to cross a bridge, despite having crossed many before, because it does not think the bridge will stand under its weight, a young puppy refusing to jump off a table at a great height, even though it has never fallen before) The behavior of animals indicate their ability to survive and flourish without the aid of reason, which consists of abstract knowledge of concepts. Then this should illustrate the crucial difference between the understanding and reason.

In people, the understanding works best with intuitive knowledge of the particular case where one perceives how to manipulate a certain object(s), such as driving a car. By driving a car one develops an immediate and perceptive knowledge in perception. An experienced driver, say a NASCAR racer, may himself possess brilliant intuitive knowledge of the laws of gravity, of inertia, all coded within the understanding, and for immediate perception. The driver is a pragmatist in practice who employs knowledge via perception in his driving. Incidentally, many inventors of machine or talented craftsmen function without any scientific knowledge whatsoever.

Reason only replaces the intuitions and perceptions with abstract concepts. Yet in the very act of abstraction, the concept loses the particular differences and instances of the perception, then they do not precisely represent experience, and can never come anywhere close to exhaust it.

The greatest value of rational knowledge is, besides its preciseness, communicability. The driver can affix concepts to his experience of representations in perception and communicate those concepts to other people who lack the experience of driving. People working on a collaborative project together require an abstract plan and exchange concepts that are understood by all.

Interestingly, the driver, who is supposed to be alone in his course of action, rational knowledge or reflection can be an obstacle because it is likely to divide his attention, causing him to lose focus and grow confused. There is no need for the driver to think abstractly and deduce the degrees and minutes the angle he needs to turn the steering wheel in order to get ahead and win races.

I’ve said my piece on why scholars (as intellectuals) are not genuine philosophers, so this exposition also alludes to that thread as well. However, the dichotomy between the Intellectual and the Pragmatist need not be so cleanly delineated, for there are certain individuals who encompass both personalities at the level of brilliance: they employ an exceedingly original means of intuition in their grasp of the understanding in their insightful discoveries (hooke’s discovery of law of gravity, Lavoisier’s chemistry, Einstein’s relativity, etc). Basically, the great discoveries of knowledge do not consist long chains of abstractions but rather the presentation of the immediate knowledge for the faculty of reason in a way that never happened before. The genius marries his intuitive understanding with the proper concepts of reason for others. The ideal type is not an over-intellectual scholar, nor an inarticulate but experienced loner, but a person who recognizes the limits and the profits of both the understanding and reason and maximizes them in his or her self-odyssey.

Modern art emerged during the end of realism or the crisis of representation (cezanne, cubism, dadaism, surrealism). Realism is defined as the mirror theory of knowledge where the mind is a mirror of reality and objects that exist independently of the mind are represented (reproduced by a concept/work of art) adequately, accurately and true.

The invention of photography canceled/negated the authority of painting to “represent” reality. Technological innovations from the infrastructure of society subverted and radically transformed the superstructural tradition of visual art when mass production replaced hand crafted originality.

Modern art also contains abstract art, where the presentation of the unpresentable is attempted (suprematism, de Stijil, constructivism, abstract expressionism, minimalism). One way to present what is conceivable but not representable is by abstraction: if the concept was inadequate to represent reality, then the solution was privileging it and the elimination of all traces of reality from the (re)presentation of the unpresentable. Then the concept becomes the sublime reality.

De Stijl promoted the machine aesthetic, which was an idealistic belief in abstraction for real life, and championed machinelike undecorated flat surfaces (international style in architecture)

Constructivism was basically the desertion of easel painting for kinetic art and technical design in typography/architecture/industrial production.

In abstract expressionism there is only one name: Jackson Pollock.

Dadaism was taken as a stance against the optimism of modern art. For dada means nothing, a meaningful nothing when nothing has any meaning. Dada emerged in the nihilistic defiance of endless machinery and assembly line of technological warfare in World War I (Hans Arp, Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and Kurt Schwitters’ merz production) even when the artist spits, it is art! Dadaism released automatism, which junks all traditional rules of art for the sake of chance as the direct creative access of the unconscious. Duchamp insisted that “readymade” nonart object by itself can be displayed as art if separated or isolated from its original context/use/meaning (porcelain urinal signed as R. Mutt). The mass (re)produced object discontinued the concept of originality as well as sacred uniqueness of a work of art.

Minimalism: Carl Andre’s 120 fire bricks, where he intended to “unexpress” himself by eliminating all elements of expressiveness that left only the aesthetic process itself at the very borderline of non-art.

Non-presentation signified the very destruction of the aesthetic process. Piero manzoni captured the movement by canning his own shit and sold it as 100% pure artist’s shit. Conceptualism did away with the aesthetic process and refuted art itself since it was contaminated with elitism and crass marketing of the art world.

Phony postmodernism
Lyotard identified one alternative strand of pomo as “antimodernist” that called for the end to experimentation. But since antimodernist conservationism is only one strand of a tangled skien, rational agreement on postmodernism is impossible.

Another strand is “eclectic” or “junk” pomo, a ground zero of contemporary general culture: reggae music, western film, burger king for lunch, local cuisine for dinner, paris perfume in tokyo, retro clothes in Hong Kong…. Kitsch, confusion, anything goes, no aesthetic criteria except for $…

Actual/real pomo
1. Reproductibility in age of mass consumerism: Walter Benjamin thought mass reproduction would lead to the destruction of aura/autonomy of original stuff, but actually, the more a piece of work becomes a cliche, the higher the original costs. Everything is becoming the souvenirs of the ancient manufacture of the past. Where the reproduced is replacing reality as hyperreality is Image consumerism, the life that already has been lived and reproduced w/o reality except the cannibalized image.

Postmodernism is working w/o rules for the purpose of finding out the rules of what you have finished working on. Instead of experimentation, the question of recognizing a work as art depends on whose power it is that legitimizes what was done as the right way of doing it.

Legitimation is the third issue of pomo: a difficult and unpopular avantgarde modern art became accepted as institutional standard of taste through the taste of art galleries, museums, dealers, n the art purchasing public (merchants and collectors of art). As experimentation destroyed the aura and autonomy of art, the aura and autonomy became the sole properties of “exhibitive power” or the crritical establishment (curators, art dealers and clients). Ergo even anti art inevitably becomes reproduced as art by the institutional powers of legitimizaition. Contra the naive utopian beliefs of early avantgarde modernists where they thought history would confirm and legitimate their works as representing modernity through formalism and subversion, postmodernist struggle with this legacy (formalist subversion) and come to grips with the depressing reality that representation, reproduction and legitimation are far more complicated than previously thought.