(Originally written February 8, 2007 in Book 16)
Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts 2nd Ed.
David Goldblatt & Lee B. Brown
Against Imitation - Plato
The painter is a creator of appearances just as a mirror is a creator of appearances.
Art creates merely some semblance of existence because it cannot create the essence of what it represents.
Three types of creators:
1) God - creates the eternal idea
2) Maker - creates the physical object
3) Artist - paints/sculpts the artistic representation of God's creation and the maker's creation
Art is merely imitation of physical appearances, not an imitation of truth.
An artist that is capable of maker level creation would not choose to create at the level of the artist.
Ion - Plato
Poetry, and all all art is created in divine possession. During this possession one loses one's mind and becomes free of knowledge to create art. Art does not require knowledge. In fact knowledge must be excluded from the creation of art.
Poets do not create poetry. They interpret what the divinity that possesses them states. Poets are interpreters.
Those who memorize and recite poets are merely interpreters of interpreters. They have no art, but are divinely inspired by their chosen poet.
On Tragedy - Aristotle
Tragedy is imitation with embellished language.
Embellished language is language where rhythm, harmony and song are mixed.
Tragedy is the imitation of an action.
Tragedy has six parts:
1. Plot - imitation of action
2. Characters - virtue ascribed to agents
3. Diction
4. Thought - needed when a truth is revealed
5. Spectacle
6. Melody
The plot is the soul of the tragedy and the most important part.
The Character is the second most important part.
Thought is the third most important and is the faculty of saying what is possible and pertinent to the circumstances.
Character reveals moral purpose.
Thought enunciates a general maxim.
Diction is the expression of the meaning in words.
The Birth of Tragedy
Friedrich Nietzsche
A critical backward glance:
The period of Greek life that was full of dissolution and weakness turned them from their true pessimistic outlook to an optimism, and a more scientific outlook.
"What kind of figure does ethics cut once we decide to view it in the biological perspective?" (329).
Linehan - How can one perceive ethics biologically?
Art, not ethics constitute the essential metaphysical activity of man.
Morality is a mere fabrication for purpose of gulling.
Christianity, a purely moral system sets itself to abominate art.
Christianity is the "most dangerous, most sinister form the will to destruction can take" (330).
In Christianity, life (moral existence) will always be wrong.
Morality is merely a will to deny life and the "Supreme Danger".
Apollo & Dionysus
Art owes it continuous evolution to the Apollonian-Dionysian duality as the propagation of the species owes its continuance on the duality of the sexes.
Dreams (the birthplace of art) are a sense of delight and a necessity of being.
In Dionysian intoxication the artist ceases to be the artist and becomes himself the work of art.
Tragedy is the child of the Apollonian dream interpreters and the Dionysian ecstasy.
Dionysian ecstasy was the unleashing of the mind and liberation to pursue a complete sexual promiscuity and cruelty.
Eternal contradiction is the begetter of all things. (Linehan - eternal flux?)
Apollo demands self-control which implies a knowledge of self-temperance was virtue to Apollo and hubris and excess were the principal vices.
On Oedipus Rex and Hamlet
Sigmund Freud
The fact that Oedipus Rex is as powerful to men now as it was to the ancient Greeks shows that the tragedy does not depend on the conflicting between fate and human will, but upon the nature in which the material is revealed.
We may be moved by the story because we are all destined to make our first sexual impulses to our mother and our first hate impulses to our fathers.
The story of Oedipus is merely "a wish-fulfillment - the fulfillment of the wish of our childhood" (340).
Hamlet is rooted in the same soil as Oedipus Rex.
Every character of the poet stems from more than one interior motive and is thusly open to more than one exterior interpretation.
Of the Standard of Taste
David Hume
It is natural for man to seek a standard of taste.
There is a species of philosophy in which no standard of taste can be ascertained.
Beauty is a product of the mind and has no external existence.
However, there must be some objective beauty for us to judge beauty at all.
When works are art, they are are not guided by presciences, but by the rules of art.
Sometimes pieces can be beautiful when they break the rules of that art, but they are beautiful despite those breeches, not because of them.
Bad artists can be praised for a while, but time will prove them flawed.
There is room for a degree of taste or preferences within a standard of task where only general principles are enunciated. This allows us to judge what is beautiful and what is not in a fairly universal sense.
The more one is experienced in a specific art the more one is capable of judging it as a whole and its individual parts.
The principles of taste are universal and nearly the same in all men, but few are qualified to give judgment on any work of art or establish their own sentiment as the standard of beauty.
Judgments about the Beautiful
Immanuel Kant
Taste - the faculty of estimating an object mode of representation by means of delight or a version apart from any interest.
Beautiful - The means of delight of taste
"The beautiful is that which apart from a concept, pleases universally" (454).
What is agreeable is subjectively, (agreeable-to-me) is not universally agreeable.
Everyone has their own sense of taste.
If something is merely pleasing to one's self it is not beautiful.
"Beauty is the form of finality in an art object, as far as perceived in it apart from the representation of an end" (455).
There are two types of Beauty:
1) Free Beauty (pulchritudo vaga)
2) Dependent beauty (pulchritudo adhaeren)
Estimating free beauty involves pure judgment of taste.
"The beautiful is that which, apart from a concept is cognized as object of a necessary delight" (456).
Fine art is the art of Genius.
Genius - natural talent which gives the rule of art, the innate mental aptitude through which nature gives the rule to art.
A product cannot be called art if it does not proceed from a rule.
Genius:
1) A talent for producing that for which no definite rule can be green
2) Produce products that must be models, exemplary and serve as a standard
3) Not scientifically expressible, must give its rules as the nature of the art
4) Nature prescribes the rule through genius to art
Art cannot be explained how it was conceived and created as a whole.
To estimate beautiful objects one needs only taste. To produce such objects, one needs genius,
"A beauty of nature is a beautiful thing; beauty of art is a beautiful representation of a thing" (458).
The Philosophy of Fine Art
G.W.F. Hegel
Art:
1. Not a product of nature, it is brought into being by man
2) created essentially for man, and more or less addressed to the sense of man.
3) It contains an end bound up with it.
Since it is brought into existence by man it is knowable, divulgable and learnable by others.
A work of art originates in the human spirit.
The function of fine art is to arouse feeling.
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