May 22, 2016 07:02 PM
https://aeon.co/essays/why-does-philosop...low-regard
EXCERPT: [...] Søren Kierkegaard notes that ‘in order to swim one takes off all one’s clothes – in order to aspire to the truth one must undress in a far more inward sense’. Even for modern philosophy, then, the truth of self-knowledge seems to require renunciation, the stripping of metaphorical clothes, but also all material preoccupations and vanities. And there is an implicit elision here too: material preoccupations are a vanity. Those garish outward garments keep us from our naked inward truth.
Before Kierkegaard, Immanuel Kant dispensed with fashion, declaring it ‘foolish’. [...] Although ‘appearance’ remains a resolutely perceptual and epistemological issue in philosophy, this concern is entirely disconnected from questions of physical appearance or dress. And yet to ignore the material reality of the clothed body is to deny something crucial to the ways human beings see and are in the world.
[...] What if clothes were not simply reflective of personality, indicative of our banal preferences for grey over green, but more deeply imprinted with the ways that human beings have lived: a material record of our experiences and an expression of our ambition? What if we could understand the world in the perfect geometry of a notched lapel, the orderly measures of a pleated skirt, the stilled, skin-warmed perfection of a circlet of pearls?...
EXCERPT: [...] Søren Kierkegaard notes that ‘in order to swim one takes off all one’s clothes – in order to aspire to the truth one must undress in a far more inward sense’. Even for modern philosophy, then, the truth of self-knowledge seems to require renunciation, the stripping of metaphorical clothes, but also all material preoccupations and vanities. And there is an implicit elision here too: material preoccupations are a vanity. Those garish outward garments keep us from our naked inward truth.
Before Kierkegaard, Immanuel Kant dispensed with fashion, declaring it ‘foolish’. [...] Although ‘appearance’ remains a resolutely perceptual and epistemological issue in philosophy, this concern is entirely disconnected from questions of physical appearance or dress. And yet to ignore the material reality of the clothed body is to deny something crucial to the ways human beings see and are in the world.
[...] What if clothes were not simply reflective of personality, indicative of our banal preferences for grey over green, but more deeply imprinted with the ways that human beings have lived: a material record of our experiences and an expression of our ambition? What if we could understand the world in the perfect geometry of a notched lapel, the orderly measures of a pleated skirt, the stilled, skin-warmed perfection of a circlet of pearls?...