(Originally Written Feb. 28, 2008 in the Journal)
Baumgarten (the founder of aesthetics) states the object of logical knowledge is truth and the object of aesthetic or sensual knowledge is beauty.
"Beauty is the perfect recognized through the senses; truth is the perfect perceived through reason; goodness is the perfect reached by moral will" (Maude, 92).
Baumgarten sees beauty as a correspondence of the relations of the parts to the parts and of the parts to the whole.
The aim of beauty he states, is to excite a desire.
Baumgarten's followers did nothing more than separate the pleasant from the beautiful.
Sulzer, Mendelssohn and Moritz claimed that the aim of art is not beauty, but goodness.
Johann Georg Sulzer held that which contains goodness can be called beautiful. He contended that the aim of humanity was welfare in social life. He intended to achieve this through moral education; and art, serves this purpose only.
Moses Mendelssohn held that art is the development of beauty until it becomes true and good. He held that the end of art is therefore, moral perfection.
While Baumgarten was concerned with the Perfect or the Absolute, Mendelssohn and Sulzer divided into three forms: truth, goodness and beauty. Beauty then merges back into both the good and the true.
Johann Winckelmann (a German art historian) said that only external beauty is the aim of art. Winckelmann separated beauty from goodness and divided it into three categories:
1. Beauty of form
2. Beauty of idea
3. Beauty of expression
He claimed that beauty of expression could only happen after both beauty of form and beauty of idea had first been accomplished. Winckelmann held that beauty of expression is the highest aim of art. He claimed that it was attained in antique art and therefore, modern art should be aimed at imitating ancient art.
The German aestheticians like Lessing, Herder, and Goethe understood beauty in the way of Winckelmann until Immanuel Kant changed it all.
Aesthetic theories arose in England, France, Italy and Holland that were also equally cloudy and contradictory The started their theories with a conception of the beautiful as existing absolutely and somehow it intermingled with goodness or at least had the same roots as it.
Shaftsbury held that which is beautiful is harmonious and proportionable, that which is harmonious and proportionable is true, and what is beautiful and true is agreeable and good. Shaftsbury held that beauty is only recognized by the mind. He held that God is the fundamental beauty and that beauty and goodness proceed from the same fount.
Hutchenson held that the aim of art is beauty. Beauty's essence consists in evoking a perception of uniformity and variety in us. Hutchenson held we are guided by an internal sense to what art is. He also held that in this internal sense one could contradict the ethical sense and that beauty does not always correspond with goodness and could actually run contrary to it.
Lord Kanes held that beauty is what is pleasant. Therefore, for him, beauty rests solely in taste.
Burke held that the sublime and the beautiful were the aim of art and have their origin in self-preservation and society. He also claimed that art is a means for the maintenance of the race through the individual. The first self-preservation (and the preservation of the individual) is through 1) nourishment, 2) defense, and 3) war. The second self-preservation (the preservation of the society) is achieved through 1) sex and 2) propagation. Self-defense and war are the source of the sublime. Sociability and the sex instinct are the source of beauty.
Yves Marie André held that there are three types of beauty:
1. Divine
2. Natural
3. Artificial
Charles Batteux held that art consists in imitating the beauty of nature. The end of art is enjoyment.
The French and the English held that taste decides what is beautiful. They also hold that the laws of taste cannot be determined.
Pagano held that art consists of uniting the beauties dispersed in nature. He held that the capacity to perceive these beauties is taste and the capacity to bring them together is artistic genius. He held that beauty is goodness made visible and that goodness is inner beauty.
Muratori stated that art is an egotistical sensation founded on the desire for the preservation of self and society.
Hemsterhuis, the Dutch writer, influenced the Germans, particularly Goethe. He held that beauty is that which gives the most pleasure. He held that enjoyment of the beautiful is the highest form of cognition to which men can attain.
Kant held that:
1. Man has a knowledge of nature outside him and himself in nature.
2. He seeks truth outside himself. He seeks goodness inside himself.
3. Seeking truth is pure reason. Seeking goodness is practical reason.
4. Aesthetic feeling is a judging capacity without reason and produces pleasure without desire.
5. Beauty is in subjective meaning. It is that which without reasoning and without practical advantages, nonetheless pleases.
Schiller held that the aim of art is beauty, which is the source of pleasure without practical advantage.
Fichte held that the perception of the beautiful proceeds from nature. Nature has two sides; 1) the sum of our limitations and 2) the sum of our free idealistic activity. In the sum of our limitations we see deformity. In the sum of our free idealistic activity we see beauty. He held that beauty therefore does not exist in the world, but in the beautiful soul (Schöner Geist). He also held that art is the manifestation of this beautiful soul and that the aim of art is the education of the whole man.
Schlegel held that beauty is understood too incompletely. He held that beauty is in art, nature and love. The truly beautiful is expressed by the union of art, nature and love.
Adam Müller held that there are two types of beauty:
1. General beauty which attracts people as the sun attracts the planets
2. Individual beauty which consists in the observer becoming like the sun and attracting beauty.
Thus, a world which harmonizes all contradictions is the highest beauty. He held that art is a reproduction of this universal harmony and that the highest art is the art of life.
Schelling held "art is the production or result of that conception of things by which the subject becomes its own object, or the object its own subject" (Maude, 99). He held that beauty is the perception of the infinite in the finite. The chief characteristic of works of art is unconscious infinity. Art unites the subjective and the objective, nature with reason and the unconscious with the conscious. He held that because of this, art is the highest means of knowledge. "Beauty is the contemplation of things in themselves as they exist in the prototype" (Maude, 99). The artist does not produce the beautiful by knowledge or skill, but by the beauty inside himself.
Krause held that positive beauty is the manifestation of the idea in an individual form; art is the actualization of the beauty existent in man's free spirit.
Hegel held that God manifests himself in nature and art as beauty. God manifests himself in two ways: on the object in nature and in the subject in spirit. Only the soul and what pertains to it is truly beautiful. The beauty of nature is only the reflection of a spiritual content. The sensuous manifestation of spirit is only appearance and this is the only reality of the beautiful. Art, religion and philosophy are means of being and expressing to the consciousness the deepest problems of humanity and the highest truths of the spirit. Hegel held that truth and beauty are one and the same. The idea as itself is truth. The idea, manifested externally, is beauty.
Weisse held that art is the introduction of the absolute spiritual reality of beauty into the external, dead, indifferent matter. Weisse held that the idea of truth entails a contradiction between the subjective and the objective and then the individual ego discerns the universal. Beauty is a reconciled truth.
In addition to Hegelian aesthetic theories there were contemporary and contradictory German theories like Herbart's and Schopenhauer's.
Hebart denied that there can be such a thing as beauty in itself. He held that there are certain relations we call beautiful and that art consists of finding these relations.
Schopenhauer held that the will objectifies itself in the world on various planes. The highest plane has the highest beauty but, each plane contains its own beauty.
Hartmann held that beauty lies in the seeming or "schien" produced by the artist. "The thing in itself is not beautiful, but it is transformed into beauty by the artist".
Schnaase held that there is no beauty in the world. Art gives what nature cannot. Beauty is disclosed then in art.
Kirchmann held there are six realms of history:
1. Knowledge
2. Wealth
3. Morality
4. Faith
5. Politics
6. Beauty - this is art.
Helmholtz held that beauty is manifested by the artist unconsciously and therefore cannot be analyzed.
Bergmann denied defining beauty objectively is possible. He held that beauty is held subjectively and therefore the job of aesthetics is to define what pleases whom.
Jungmann held that:
1. Beauty is a suprasensible quality of things.
2. Beauty produces pleasure by contemplation
3. Beauty is the foundation of love.
Cousin held beauty always has a moral foundation.
Jouffrey held that the visible world is the clothing by means of which we see beauty.
Lévêque held that beauty was a force behind nature and revealed itself in ordered energy.
Ravaisson held that beauty was the ultimate aim and purpose of the world.
Showing posts with label Lessing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lessing. Show all posts
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
The Birth of Tragedy Section 13-19
(Originally written July 4, 2007 in Book 15)
The Birth of Tragedy
Friedrich Nietzsche
Section 13
Through Socrates and Euripides the Greek culture placed greater emphasis on enlightenment and knowledge.
Socrates found that the 'wisest' of all Greeks really know nothing and only operated by instinct.
Socrates is the anti-mystic. Rather than relying on instinctive wisdom as the mystic does he uses consciousness to develop a hyper logical system.
The dying Socrates replaced all the old hero of Greece and became the image to which every young Grecian strived for.
Section 14
Socrates and his followers despised tragedy, but found solace and joy in the fables of Aesop.
"Poems are useful: they can tell the truth by means of parable to those who are not very bright" (Nietzsche, 90).
Socrates saw that tragedy did not tell the truth and that it was aimed at those who were not very bright. For these reasons it is doubly contemptible.
Plato also held tragedy in contempt, but his own artistic impulses necessitated him to create an art that was borne of the old ones.
Plato saw art as an imitation of a shadow and thus lower than even the contemptible empirical world.
Plato's dialogues blended narrative, lyric, drama, prose and poetry. He broke the strict law of uniformity of linguistics and created a whole new genre of art.
Plato's dialogues served as the savior of old poetry and the template for the novel.
The Apollonian tendency withdrew to logical schematism and the Dionysian transformed into Naturalism.
The optimistic maxims of
1) Virtue is knowledge
2) Man sins only from ignorance
3) The virtuous man is happy man served to fully kill tragedy.
Optimism destroys the essence of tragedy.
Though harsh against art in life at death Socrates obeyed the divine call to music asking, "Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative of, and supplement for science" (Nietzsche, 93).
Section 15
The Socratic way of life which exists today prompts a constant regeneration of art. The infinite of Socrates guarantees the infinity of art.
Socrates, to be recognized as truthful, must be viewed as the "theoretical man whose significance and aim it is our task to try and understand" (Nietzsche, 94).
The artist clings to the mystery while the theoretical man clings to what was once mystery and is non-known.
Lessing [who is Lessing?] is the most honest theoretical man because he announced that he cared more for the search for truth then for truth itself.
With Socrates, a profound illusion was born. This illusion holds that through unshakeable through using causality one can penetrate the deepest abyss of being and can furthermore correct the errors in being.
This metaphysical illusion accompanies science as an instinct and leads science time and time again to its limits where it must transform into art.
Socrates was the first man to live and die by the instinct of science. The dying Socrates is admired because he has absolved all fear of death through knowledge and reason.
Socrates stands as the turning point of history.
Pessimism in a practical sense will take over wherever art does not appear, especially as religion or science.
Socrates is the anti-pessimist. His optimistic faith that nature is intelligible and that sin is error, which is correctible denies pessimism a foothold.
Science needs art to protect it from its own boundaries. At the boundaries of science man becomes pessimistic if not reminded by art.
Section 16
There is a dichotomy between an insatiable lust for optimistic knowledge and the tragic need for art.
Apollo is the genius of the principium individuationis in which redemption through illusion is truly obtained. Dionysus is the mystical union in which the Apollonian principle is broken. It is from these two sources in which all art is born.
We may regard nature and music as two different expressions of the same thing.
Music is a universal language. It resembles geometrical figures and numbers as a definitive universalism. Music as a universal language is experienced a priori.
Music is not a copy of the physical world, but a copy of the will itself. As such, it stands in relation to the world as the will stands in relation to the world.
The world is embodied music as the world is embodied will.
Music, according to Schopenhauer, is the immediate language of the will.
Image and concept attain a higher significance under the influence of a truly corresponding music.
Music incites to the symbolic intuition of Dionysian Universality and music allows the symbolic image to emerge in its highest significance.
Music gives birth to the myth, most importantly the tragic myth: "the myth which expresses Dionysian knowledge in symbols" (Nietzsche, 103).
It is only through music that individuals can understand the joy of the annihilation of the individual.
Apollonian art triumphs the joys of this life by overshadowing suffering with beauty. Dionysian art overcomes the suffering of this life through the belief in the eternal life of the unified will.
Section 17
Dionysian art seeks to convince of us of the eternal joy of existence. But as Apollonian art does this through phenomena, Dionysian art seeks this from behind phenomena.
Myth was annihilated by the faith in science. Music is the way for myth to be reborn.
Aristophanes saw Socrates, Euripides and the music of the New Dithyrambic poets which mirrored phenomena, not the will itself, as enemies and destroyers of art.
By setting music to be descriptive of phenomena, music has been robbed of its power to create myth.
Music which merely represents phenomena is wretchedly poorer than the phenomena itself.
In Euripides, we see the triumph of scientific knowledge and the demise of artistic reflection. The phenomenal particulars win out over the universals.
Tragedy revealed a metaphysical comfort through music. But with music stripped of its myth-bearing power there is no metaphysical comfort and knowledge leaves us rawer than before we knew. There is no solace in science apart from art.
The new spirit of Greek art, deprived of myth, was to seek comfort in an earthly, phenomenal dissolution of tragedy. The hated deus ex machina replaced the metaphysical comfort.
The Dionysian spirit having been banished from the stage fled into the degenerate form of cult.
With the deus ex machina the Dionysian spirit was driven underground and individualism heralded the deus ex machina as the true comfort.
Metaphysical, universal comfort was lost and replaced by momentary particular comforts.
Section 18
There are three cultures:
1. Socratic (Alexandrian)
2. Hellenic (Artistic)
3. Tragic (Buddhistic)
The Alexandrian culture idolizes the theoretical man, reason, knowledge and science above all else.
The Socratic culture is delusional optimistic in believing that it possesses limitless power.
Myth is the necessary prerequisite of religion.
The tragic (Buddhistic) culture replaces science with wisdom at its highest end.
The Socratic culture will tremble with fear once its optimism has been shattered by learning of its power limitations.
Section 19
The Socratic culture is the culture of the opera.
The Socratic culture endures the music of opera to hear the words. All the while he trembles at the thought of giving the music too much appreciation and undoing the base of his culture.
The art of the opera responds to a powerful need, but it is a non-aesthetic need. It responds to the need for faith in the existence of the artistic and good man.
The origin of opera is the fulfillment of a non-aesthetic need: the glorification of man. It stands contra to the dogma of the inherently corrupt and lost man.
Opera is a birthing of the theoretical man, not the artist. The non-musical heroes of Opera demand t hat words are nobler than the tones as the soul is nobler than the body.
The opera is a crude unmusical combination of image, music and words.
"The premise of the opera is a false belief concerning the artistic process: the idyllic belief that every sentient man is an artist" (Nietzsche, 117).
The cultured Renaissance man let himself be led back to the primitive artistic man by imitation of Greek tragedy.
The opera does not touch sorrow as art ought to, but rather emphasizes the cheery optimism of eternal rediscovery.
Those who seek to destroy the unmusical opera would have to destroy the whole of the Socratic culture.
Art in the Socratic culture is empty because it is void of its true purpose: "to save the eye from gazing into the horrors of night and to deliver the subject by the healing balm of illusion from the spasms of the agitation of the will" (Nietzsche, 118).
Music is powerless when it is alienated from its true dignity as the Dionysian mirror of the world and as an expression of the will itself.
Music cannot be a slave to the phenomena or be a mere imitation of the formal characteristics of phenomena.
The Socratic culture cannot explain nor tolerate the reemergence of the Dionysian spirit which has taken place in music from Bach to Beethoven to Wagner.
The Dionysian spirit of this German music is the sole purifying fire in the Alexandrian culture of knowledge lust.
"All that we now call culture, education, civilization must some day appear before the unerring judge, Dionysus" (Nietzsche, 120).
Kant and Schopenhauer made it possible for the spirit of German philosophy to destroy Socratic scientific optimism.
The oneness of German music and philosophy points to the emergence of a Hellenic society. The Alexandrian age seems to be receding backwards to the Dawn of a new tragic age.
The Birth of Tragedy
Friedrich Nietzsche
Section 13
Through Socrates and Euripides the Greek culture placed greater emphasis on enlightenment and knowledge.
Socrates found that the 'wisest' of all Greeks really know nothing and only operated by instinct.
Socrates is the anti-mystic. Rather than relying on instinctive wisdom as the mystic does he uses consciousness to develop a hyper logical system.
The dying Socrates replaced all the old hero of Greece and became the image to which every young Grecian strived for.
Section 14
Socrates and his followers despised tragedy, but found solace and joy in the fables of Aesop.
"Poems are useful: they can tell the truth by means of parable to those who are not very bright" (Nietzsche, 90).
Socrates saw that tragedy did not tell the truth and that it was aimed at those who were not very bright. For these reasons it is doubly contemptible.
Plato also held tragedy in contempt, but his own artistic impulses necessitated him to create an art that was borne of the old ones.
Plato saw art as an imitation of a shadow and thus lower than even the contemptible empirical world.
Plato's dialogues blended narrative, lyric, drama, prose and poetry. He broke the strict law of uniformity of linguistics and created a whole new genre of art.
Plato's dialogues served as the savior of old poetry and the template for the novel.
The Apollonian tendency withdrew to logical schematism and the Dionysian transformed into Naturalism.
The optimistic maxims of
1) Virtue is knowledge
2) Man sins only from ignorance
3) The virtuous man is happy man served to fully kill tragedy.
Optimism destroys the essence of tragedy.
Though harsh against art in life at death Socrates obeyed the divine call to music asking, "Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative of, and supplement for science" (Nietzsche, 93).
Section 15
The Socratic way of life which exists today prompts a constant regeneration of art. The infinite of Socrates guarantees the infinity of art.
Socrates, to be recognized as truthful, must be viewed as the "theoretical man whose significance and aim it is our task to try and understand" (Nietzsche, 94).
The artist clings to the mystery while the theoretical man clings to what was once mystery and is non-known.
Lessing [who is Lessing?] is the most honest theoretical man because he announced that he cared more for the search for truth then for truth itself.
With Socrates, a profound illusion was born. This illusion holds that through unshakeable through using causality one can penetrate the deepest abyss of being and can furthermore correct the errors in being.
This metaphysical illusion accompanies science as an instinct and leads science time and time again to its limits where it must transform into art.
Socrates was the first man to live and die by the instinct of science. The dying Socrates is admired because he has absolved all fear of death through knowledge and reason.
Socrates stands as the turning point of history.
Pessimism in a practical sense will take over wherever art does not appear, especially as religion or science.
Socrates is the anti-pessimist. His optimistic faith that nature is intelligible and that sin is error, which is correctible denies pessimism a foothold.
Science needs art to protect it from its own boundaries. At the boundaries of science man becomes pessimistic if not reminded by art.
Section 16
There is a dichotomy between an insatiable lust for optimistic knowledge and the tragic need for art.
Apollo is the genius of the principium individuationis in which redemption through illusion is truly obtained. Dionysus is the mystical union in which the Apollonian principle is broken. It is from these two sources in which all art is born.
We may regard nature and music as two different expressions of the same thing.
Music is a universal language. It resembles geometrical figures and numbers as a definitive universalism. Music as a universal language is experienced a priori.
Music is not a copy of the physical world, but a copy of the will itself. As such, it stands in relation to the world as the will stands in relation to the world.
The world is embodied music as the world is embodied will.
Music, according to Schopenhauer, is the immediate language of the will.
Image and concept attain a higher significance under the influence of a truly corresponding music.
Music incites to the symbolic intuition of Dionysian Universality and music allows the symbolic image to emerge in its highest significance.
Music gives birth to the myth, most importantly the tragic myth: "the myth which expresses Dionysian knowledge in symbols" (Nietzsche, 103).
It is only through music that individuals can understand the joy of the annihilation of the individual.
Apollonian art triumphs the joys of this life by overshadowing suffering with beauty. Dionysian art overcomes the suffering of this life through the belief in the eternal life of the unified will.
Section 17
Dionysian art seeks to convince of us of the eternal joy of existence. But as Apollonian art does this through phenomena, Dionysian art seeks this from behind phenomena.
Myth was annihilated by the faith in science. Music is the way for myth to be reborn.
Aristophanes saw Socrates, Euripides and the music of the New Dithyrambic poets which mirrored phenomena, not the will itself, as enemies and destroyers of art.
By setting music to be descriptive of phenomena, music has been robbed of its power to create myth.
Music which merely represents phenomena is wretchedly poorer than the phenomena itself.
In Euripides, we see the triumph of scientific knowledge and the demise of artistic reflection. The phenomenal particulars win out over the universals.
Tragedy revealed a metaphysical comfort through music. But with music stripped of its myth-bearing power there is no metaphysical comfort and knowledge leaves us rawer than before we knew. There is no solace in science apart from art.
The new spirit of Greek art, deprived of myth, was to seek comfort in an earthly, phenomenal dissolution of tragedy. The hated deus ex machina replaced the metaphysical comfort.
The Dionysian spirit having been banished from the stage fled into the degenerate form of cult.
With the deus ex machina the Dionysian spirit was driven underground and individualism heralded the deus ex machina as the true comfort.
Metaphysical, universal comfort was lost and replaced by momentary particular comforts.
Section 18
There are three cultures:
1. Socratic (Alexandrian)
2. Hellenic (Artistic)
3. Tragic (Buddhistic)
The Alexandrian culture idolizes the theoretical man, reason, knowledge and science above all else.
The Socratic culture is delusional optimistic in believing that it possesses limitless power.
Myth is the necessary prerequisite of religion.
The tragic (Buddhistic) culture replaces science with wisdom at its highest end.
The Socratic culture will tremble with fear once its optimism has been shattered by learning of its power limitations.
Section 19
The Socratic culture is the culture of the opera.
The Socratic culture endures the music of opera to hear the words. All the while he trembles at the thought of giving the music too much appreciation and undoing the base of his culture.
The art of the opera responds to a powerful need, but it is a non-aesthetic need. It responds to the need for faith in the existence of the artistic and good man.
The origin of opera is the fulfillment of a non-aesthetic need: the glorification of man. It stands contra to the dogma of the inherently corrupt and lost man.
Opera is a birthing of the theoretical man, not the artist. The non-musical heroes of Opera demand t hat words are nobler than the tones as the soul is nobler than the body.
The opera is a crude unmusical combination of image, music and words.
"The premise of the opera is a false belief concerning the artistic process: the idyllic belief that every sentient man is an artist" (Nietzsche, 117).
The cultured Renaissance man let himself be led back to the primitive artistic man by imitation of Greek tragedy.
The opera does not touch sorrow as art ought to, but rather emphasizes the cheery optimism of eternal rediscovery.
Those who seek to destroy the unmusical opera would have to destroy the whole of the Socratic culture.
Art in the Socratic culture is empty because it is void of its true purpose: "to save the eye from gazing into the horrors of night and to deliver the subject by the healing balm of illusion from the spasms of the agitation of the will" (Nietzsche, 118).
Music is powerless when it is alienated from its true dignity as the Dionysian mirror of the world and as an expression of the will itself.
Music cannot be a slave to the phenomena or be a mere imitation of the formal characteristics of phenomena.
The Socratic culture cannot explain nor tolerate the reemergence of the Dionysian spirit which has taken place in music from Bach to Beethoven to Wagner.
The Dionysian spirit of this German music is the sole purifying fire in the Alexandrian culture of knowledge lust.
"All that we now call culture, education, civilization must some day appear before the unerring judge, Dionysus" (Nietzsche, 120).
Kant and Schopenhauer made it possible for the spirit of German philosophy to destroy Socratic scientific optimism.
The oneness of German music and philosophy points to the emergence of a Hellenic society. The Alexandrian age seems to be receding backwards to the Dawn of a new tragic age.
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