Romanticism (Art movement)

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.