PHILOSOPHY AND ART (AESTHETICS)
Music is without hate.
I like classical music as well as rock music, especially progressive
rock and jazz rock.
Most of the buildings Richard Buckminster Fuller constructed were
built because of his and other's interests. So the increasing of
the dense of the cities was merely his excuse.
In the third part of Peter Slotredijk's Spheres (especially
in chapter I) Fuller is often mentioned, yes, but his buildings
are primarily representation buildings.
Occidental philosophy compared to - for example - a tree, architectural
art, clothes:
Art is another means to say the truth or the lie. If science fails
(and at last it always fails), then art can be used instead of it
(although it can also fail); if philosophy fails (and at last it
always fails), then art can be used instead of it (although it can
also fail). Art is a mirror of a society and its forms and institutions;
art shows the fitness of a society, how a society is in form; so
art can be used for analogies.
René Magritte, Hegel's Holiday:
Communication (**)
as the answer to the question where art comes from is too
general. All living beings communicate in the way you just
described, most of them by using only chemical signs, some of them
by using also other signs, but only humans by using also language
as a very complex system of linguistic signs. So the fact that only
humans have art and only humans have such a complex system of linguistic
signs could be an indication of a very deep connection between them.
I think that there is a developmental connection between an instinctive
faith or belief on the one hand and art and language on the other
hand, provided that all fundamental requirements are already given
(e.g.: upright gait, relatively free hands, relatively huge and
very complex brain).
Wisdom is great and music the best. Would that be a compromise?
Music makes us feel good. Isnt that a good argument?
Music moves humans of all cultures, in a way that doesnt
seem to happen with e.g. animals. Nobody really understands why
listening to music - which, unlike sex or food, has no intrinsic
value - can trigger such profoundly rewarding experiences.
Music is exquisitely emotionally evocative, which is why a touch
of happy music makes even unrelated pictures seem more pleasant.
In light of the above, then, we are led to the conclusion that the
artifact of music should contain some distinctly human elements.
Just an example:
Is that art?
So this belongs to the era of the bourgeois clothing
too:
By the way: I call this late period, which is also the latest phase
of our whole cultural cycle: Globalism or - with
reference to Spengler - Caesarism.
Now, look at the typical architecture of the current phase:
 
 
Form follows fantasy.
The deconstructivists deduced the slogan form follows
fantasy from Louis Sullivans slogan form
follows function.
A deconstruktivist architect is not somebody who dismantles buildings,
but somebody who localizes inherent problems to the
buildings. The deconstruktivist architect treats the pure forms
of the architectural tradition like a psychiatrist his
patients he ascertains the symptoms
of a suppressed impurity, as Philip Johnson und Mark Wigley
wrote in 1988 (cf. Deconstructivist Architecture,
p. 11). It is just the same old megalomaniac architecture.
The earliest human cave painting is about 40000 years old.
And the human internet picture I posted above is about 4 days
old.
== 40000 years ==>
From Cave Painting to Portable
Network Graphics.
Between that 40000 years, there has been both progress like sunrise
and regress like sunset. But the product after 4000 years
does not much differ from the product before 40000b years.
I am peaking of a cycle.
Artists do not always and/or not entirely show the reality (think
of certain surrealists for exxample), but they actually should.
Philosophers and artists have similarities, but they are not the
same
Salvador Dali himself said once that his art only shows how expensive
it is.
What Salvador Dali also said is this: Surrealim is destructive,
but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our
vision.
But the posterior destructivism destroys more than the previous
surrealism did.
Art belongs to culture.
Culture is based on a soul.
Thus art is also based on a soul.
A soul rises and sets.
Philosophy must be very spiritual, since it has almost only to
do with thinking, which means: logic.
Art is different from that.
So both are not the same, but have similarities..
Soul => Culture => Art and all other cultural forms of
expression.
So:
Art comes from both culture and soul.
Culture and art as well as all other cultural forms of expression
come from a soul.
There are different cultures.
So it is very likely that there are different souls too, or the
soul is basically always the same (though, I don't believe this),
but the way how souls experience their environment is different,
and this different experiences lead to different ways of life, thus
to different cultures and thus to different cultural forms of expression.
One could say that the soul is an unconscious drive. Its
immanent and transcendent.
One could also say that the soul is similar to Kants Ding
an sich (thing at itself / thing as such),
Schopenhauers Wille (will).
Those terms (Ding an sich, Wille) do not
have the function to avoid science, objectivity, knowledge, recognition,
insight ... and so on and so forth. The opposite is true. With those
terms we are more capable of getting more information about the
other things than without those terms. They are and work like scientific
and mathematical constants and variables.
Humans (especially the Faustian humans) want to understand and
to explain everything. And if they did not use such terms, they
would be less able to understand and to explain most things.
These terms do not forbid anything. They are just epistemological
constants and variables. As if they were saying: As long as
you are not able to find a solution use us as constants or variables.
And they are not only epistemologically important. The speed of
light is a natural constant. Who says that the speed of light explains
most things away? - In spite of the fact that natural
constants are not like social or spiritual constants, I would say
that they all work very similarly.
Food for thought or for illustration.
Do you think that a picture can be thought?
Do you think that a thought can be illustrated?
An example:
What do you, think when you see my avatar?
How would you illustrate this thought?
I, for example, think of my birth place when I see my avatar
and my illustration of this thought would be the birth house,
and that is not illustrated in my avatar.
My avatar shows pretty clearly the church and pretty dimly a few
houses of the village where I was born, but not my birth house.
I think that there are indeed similarities between philosophy and
art in the sense of cultural forms, so that both can be in a good
form and afterwards in a bad form.
Music affects the soul.
Those modern guys who say religion is opium for
the people want to give them their religion, a modern religion
(examples: liberalism, egalitarianism/communism,
fascism, humanitarianism/globalism),
which has always to do with the elimination of the old religion
and with antitheism (with slogans like religion is opium for
the people, God is an impossibility ...). The
main problem ist that the new, the modern religion is
even worse than the old one.
Do not buy the modern opium!
Tiernan Morgan and Lauren Purje wrote:
Hegels ... teleological understanding of history
served as a useful template for Dantos conclusions. Hegel
understood progress as an overarching dialectic a process
of self-realization and understanding that culminates in pure
knowledge. This state is ultimately achieved through philosophy,
though it is initially preceded by an interrogation into the qualities
of religion and art. As Danto summarized in a later essay entitled
»The Disenfranchisement of Art« (1984):
When art internalizes its own history, when it becomes self-conscious
of its history as it has come to be in our time, so that its consciousness
of its history forms part of its nature, it is perhaps unavoidable
that it should turn into philosophy at last. And when it does
so, well, in an important sense, art comes to an end.
Danto is not the only philosopher to have adopted an Hegelian
dialectic. Both Francis Fukuyama and Karl Marx utilized Hegelianism
to reach their own historical conclusions. Fukuyama argued that
liberal democracy and free market capitalism represented the zenith
of Western civilization, whilst Marx argued that communism would
replace capitalism (neither of these developments have quite panned
out). **
Arthur C. Danto wrote:
HEGELS END-OF ART THESIS.
»Art , considered in its highest voc ation, is and remains
for us a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for us genuine
truth and life, and has rather been transferred into our ideas
instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality and
occupying its higher place.« - Hegels
Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts. Translated by T. M.
Knox. Oxford; The Clarendon Press, 1975. 10. Unless otherwise
indicated, all references to Hegels writing are to this
superb translation. This is the most forceful of Hegels
many formulations of what we may designate his End-of-Art Thesis,
and it appears very near the beginning of the published version
of his Lectures on Aesthetics - his Vorlesungen über
die Aesthetic - delivered for the fourth and final time
in the Winter Semester of 1828, at the University of Berlin.
The thesis is so intricately woven into the texture of Hegels
text, however, that it must be regarded as a central and indeed
as tructural feature of his philosophy of art, rather than a critical
obiter dictum regarding the art of his time. And it as much addresses
what other philosophers have said about art, as art itself.
Of course art will go on being made. There w ill be art after
the end of art.
»Art can be used as a fleeting play, affording recreation
and entertainment, decorating our surroundings, giving pleasantness
to the externals of our life, and making other objects stand
out by artistic adornm ent.« - Ibid.,
7.
So understood, art will play any number of roles in what Hegel
terms the objective spirit of a society - the system of
meanings and practices that constitute the form of life its members
live. But Hegel was not speaking of art in terms of objective
spirit when he advanced the End-of-Art Thesis.
»The universal need for art ... is mans rational
need to lift the inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness
as an object in which he recognizes again his own self.«
- Ibid., 31.
That is arts »highest vocation«,to
which alone the End-of-Art Thesis has application. So the truth
of the thesis was consistent with art, and even great art, continuing
to be made. In the Epilogue to his lecture, Origins of the
Work of Art (1935-36), Martin Heidegger wrote:
»The judgment that Hegel passes in these statements cannot
be evaded by pointing out that since Hegels lectures ...
we have seen many new art works and art movements arise. Hegel
did not mean to deny this possibility. The question, however,
remains: is art still an essential and necessary way in which
truth that is decisive for our historical existence happens,
or is art no longer of this character?« -
Martin Heidegger, »The Origin
of the Work of Art«. Translation by Albert Hofstadter,
Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics
from Plato to Heidegger. Edited by Albert Hofstadter and
Richard Kuhns. New York; The Modern Library, 1964. 700.
.... **
The end of art could be a sign, an omen for the end
of history in the relatively soon future.
So, we should not claim that nobody is making art any more, but
that a certain history of western art has come to an end, in about
the way that Hegel suggested it would. The end of art
refers to the beginning of our modern era of art in which art no
longer adheres to the constraints of imitation theory but serves
a new purpose. But what exactly serves this new purpose?
Art has become dependend on money. Almost everything has become
dependent on money.
Beginning again (**)
is possible only then, if something has already ended. So, you have
to wait, if it has not ended yet. If you try to begin again before
it has ended, then you just help deconstruct it and can only achieve
that the end will perhaps come earlier, but this does not mean beginning
but merely deconstructing.
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