Anonymous asked: “Hypothetically, for whom would you rather design a modern day business card: Nietzsche or Kant?”

I think Kant would have been a great client - Kant was a tinkerer and designer himself (he created a system of strings and pulleys inside of his trousers that held his socks up) but the problem is Kant would have hated the idea of designing a business card.

Prior to the eighteenth century, art was all over the place conceptually. Music was linked to mathematics, painting and sculpture to engineering, and so on. Then in the 1740’s, this bro Charles Batteux gave us our modern idea of art by grouping together the ways that humans can imitate nature. Ultimately this category failed because Batteux wanted to include things as art that didn’t imitate nature, so finally he decided that “art” were things that caused pleasure in the audience.

Then Kant comes along fifty years later with the Critique of Judgement. For Kant, the problem with Batteux’s ”art = pleasure” category is that we’re the only ones who know what gives us pleasure. Kant didn’t want us to just say that art is beautiful “for me” - he wanted to make claims about the beautiful and the sublime as it is experienced universally.

Kant wrote that the way to really appreciate the beautiful or sublime is to remove anything that might be an individual experience from the judgement. Taking our “interest” out of art lets the beauty hit us right in the beauty holes - bam! - and then we can all agree on what is beautiful and sublime and good.

Since a business card is pretty much an object of pure interest, I’m not sure Kant would ever agree that it could be good or beautiful, or count as art. In fact the very idea of a business card as a design or art object would have been upsetting to Kant, because there’s no way to conceptualize it without interest. The entire aesthetic is based on using design to provoke an interest.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, would have made a terrible client (he probably suffered from either a brain tumor or syphilis, plus I bet he would have changed the colors on everything) but he would have appreciated the strategy that goes into making a business card, for pretty much exactly same reason that Kant would have resented it.

Nietzsche said that the problem with Kant’s standard of “disinterestedness” is that there IS no such thing as art without interest - we are nothing but interest. In the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche said:

“If our aestheticians never weary of asserting in Kant’s favor that, under the spell of beauty, one can even view undraped female statues ‘without interest,’ one may laugh a little at their expense: the experiences of artists on this ticklish point are more ‘interesting’ and Pygmalion was in any event not necessarily an ‘unaesthetic man.’”