“Grow up!” is the motto of highbrow scientific enlightenment, not enlightenment in toto.įrom our perspective, Kant’s much-cited definition of Enlightenment is typically highbrow - which is to say, ham-handed. Though Kant is saying: “‘Grow up!’ - that is the motto of enlightenment,” Highbrow is merely one of several important aspects of enlightenment. That’s not maturity, Kant insists - it’s immaturity! It’s cowardly! However, enlightenment is a more complex phenomenon than Kant would have us believe. Kant’s rhetoric of “growing up” is a rebellious challenge to premodern notions of what it meant to be grown-up - i.e., internalizing the authority of church and state. Sapere Aude! “Have courage to use your own understanding!” - that is the motto of enlightenment. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. The rhetoric of “growing up” - which is challenged by the NYT Magazine story, in a highbrow fashion - cannot but make one think of Immanuel Kant’s much-cited 1784 essay, “Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” According to Kant, “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” He continues: The three genres of fiction, as American readers approached them in the 1950s and as obscenity law differentially judged them, are the subject of Ruth Pirsig Wood, Lolita in Peyton Place: Highbrow, Middlebrow, and Lowbrow Novels, 1995.The subtitle of the cover story in the latest New York Times Magazine (“What Is It About 20-Somethings?”) asks: “Why are so many people in their 20s taking so long to grow up?” I’m not going to write about this (not very interesting) example of journalistic generationsploitation instead, I’m going to use it as an excuse to share a few notes I’ve scribbled on the difference between High-and Hibrow. It was popularized by the American writer and poet Margaret Widdemer, whose essay "Message and Middlebrow" appeared in the Review of Literature in 1933. It consists of people who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff that they ought to like". According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word middlebrow first appeared in print in 1925, in Punch: "The BBC claims to have discovered a new type-'the middlebrow'. The opposite of highbrow is lowbrow, and between them is middlebrow, describing culture that is neither high nor low as a usage, middlebrow is derogatory, as in Virginia Woolf's unsent letter to the New Statesman, written in the 1930s and published in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942). The term was popularized in 1902 by Will Irvin, a reporter for The Sun who adhered to the phrenological notion of more intelligent people having high foreheads. The first usage in print of highbrow was recorded in 1884. Levine, "Prologue", Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, 1990: 3 highbrow is currently distanced from the writer by quotation marks: "We thus focus on the consumption of two generally recognised 'highbrow' genres-opera and classical" (Tak Wing Chan, Social Status and Cultural Consumption 2010: 60).
The term highbrow is considered by some (with corresponding labels as 'middlebrow' 'lowbrow') as discriminatory or overly selective (Lawrence W.
"Highbrow" can be applied to music, implying most of the classical music tradition and literature-i.e., literary fiction and poetry to films in the arthouse line and to comedy that requires significant understanding of analogies or references to appreciate. The word draws its metonymy from the pseudoscience of phrenology, and was originally simply a physical descriptor. Used colloquially as a noun or adjective, " highbrow" is synonymous with intellectual as an adjective, it also means elite, and generally carries a connotation of high culture.
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