Philosophers
have sought to defend our investment in art by trying to connect it to
knowledge or to think about art as having some epistemic purpose.
Period
after Kant is very rich in terms of art.
For Greeks,
central question is about epistemic value.
Hume and
Kant are concerned with subjective nature of aesthetic judgments and whether
aesthetic judgments based on subjective experiences can ever constitute a form
of knowing.
For Plato,
no value.
For
Aristotle, catharsis and cultivation of moral disposition.
Hume-
empiricist. He came up with empiricist method, normative approach, true judges,
to establish a standard of taste.
Kant- argue
that it’s not cognitive, but comes from harmonious free-play of cognitive
faculties. He argues that they are universal and necessary, a priori. He argues
that we have a universal psychology. He basically states that aesthetic
judgments demarcates the limits of our cognitive faculties. Imagination is not
a conscious process- it is subconscious. There is an order, but it is not
logical. Imagination cannot be a source of knowledge. It is a stand-in for
reason, shows the limits of rationality as well as rationality’s centrality in
the faculty of understanding.
Romanticism-
Imagination starts to be seen as a source of knowledge.
Emphasis of
the role of the imagination in addition to (or over) reason.
Argument-
We can perceive the truth of the world through subjective feelings as opposed
to enlightenment idea of scientific inquiry and objective evidence.
The
activity of the imagination is eternal. For the romantics, the world of
imagination is also the world of eternity; while natural science describes the
finite dimensions of the physical world, art and literature open up the idea of
imagination, which is infinite and eternal. Imagination- knows no logical nor
categorical limits.
An idea’s
relation to its object is finite but the activity of the imagination is
infinite.
As products
of the imagination, art and literature describe the world in a myriad of ways,
transcending experience of the physical world into the emotional and even the
supernatural. Opens up more truths, before the post-modernists they already
thought of multiple truths.
Although
art doesn’t record truths about the world in the same way science does, it can
give insight into the different ways that we understand the world.
Comparison
between anatomy and poetry.
Romanticism
is a reaction against the enlightenment. The romantics think science didn’t
manage to capture the true world, think of industrial revolution as something
which killed the world.
William
Blake- the enslavement of people by mechanistic industrial view of the world.
Idealism:
shift from objective to subjective.
Philosophically,
romanticism represents a shift from the objective to subjective. Science claims
to describe the objective world, but this is only one viewpoint amongst many.
The move
from the objective to the subjective is a result of Kant’s idea that human
beings do not see the world through our human point of view.
We do not
directly see things-in-themselves. Noumenal vs phenomenal.
Art is
non-representational. For the Romantics artworks are expressive rather than
representational. Music, paintings, poetry do not represent things rather they
express emotions.
Up till era
of romantic art, art is understood as mimesis. We can see this from the
transition from representational realism to expressive romanticism.
FIND
EXAMPLES OF ROMANTICS!
JMW Turner,
Wreckers Coast of Northumberland (1835)
Impressionists-
the play of light and optical effects. Turner- trying to reproduce the
emotional experience.
Romantic
artists were not trying to faithfully represent, but rather visually expressing
to the emotional response of beauty or sublime in nature.
Art is
about expression of artist’s emotion, aesthetic experience become sharing in
experience.
The way
romantics think- expression theory.
“Art is a
human activity.”
Nietzsche.
Romantics
see beauty and sublime as being infinite.
Nietzsche-
trying to determine what truth art affords.
-Nietzsche
reacting against
Schopenhauer-
world is chaotic. Opposite of Plato.
For
Schopenhauer, human desiring, "willing," and craving cause suffering
or pain. A temporary way to escape this pain is through aesthetic contemplation
(a method comparable to Zapffe's "Sublimation"). Aesthetic
contemplation allows one to escape this pain—albeit temporarily—because it
stops one perceiving the world as mere presentation. Instead, one no longer
perceives the world as an object of perception (therefore as subject to the
Principle of Sufficient Grounds; time, space and causality) from which one is
separated; rather one becomes one with that perception: "one can thus no
longer separate the perceiver from the perception"
Romantics-
art communicates truths.
Nietzsche-
what’s the purpose of art? Why do we feel
pleasure when we see beauty? He uses Schopenhauer’s metaphysics. Real
world- maelstrom of chaos and becomings and destruction, has no meaning. Art
used as a protective shield, gives world meaning, but it gives a glimpse into
reality. Narrative structure, gives a form to the world. Art is more coherent
than reality, more organized than life. Art gives form to messy, incoherent
reality. Consolational solace, see it and think of it as being non-chaotic.
Kant- the
fact that our imagination can freely think makes us moral agents.
