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Beauty and Art. Aesthetic Imagination and Artistic Fulfillment . Review. Friedrich Nietzsche
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Beauty and Art Aesthetic Imagination and Artistic Fulfillment
Review • Friedrich Nietzsche • Surveying the history of Western culture since the time of the Greeks, Nietzsche laments over how this Dionysian, creative energy had been submerged and weakened as it became overshadowed by the “Apollonian” forces of logical order and stiff sobriety.
Jean-Paul Sartre (21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980)
Imagination and Art: Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination • Existentialism is a twentieth-century philosophical movement that has had a great interest in art. • The term “existentialism” was coined by Jean-Paul Sartre, but the philosophy itself derives from certain currents in the nineteenth century, especially from the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard.
The Psychology of Imagination • The task of defining existentialism is complicated by the great variety of philosophers called existentialists and by the many discrepancies among their views. • One can sympathize with those who finally abandon in exasperation the task of defining existentialism as a philosophy, settling for calling it “a shared mood” or “an attitude,” but I think the task is really not that hopeless.
The Psychology of Imagination • Sartre says that an existentialist is any philosopher who has as a guiding idea the view that, in the case of human beings at least, “existence precedes essence.” • Now traditionally in philosophy, it has been held that the opposite is so, that “essence precedes existence.”
The Psychology of Imagination “What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterwards will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be. This there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it.” –Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), p. 15.
The Psychology of Imagination “We must try to see what we can learn about the condition of man from the art phenomenon, and about the art phenomenon from the existential condition of man.” Arturo B. Fallico, Art and Existentialism (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 52.
The Psychology of Imagination • One main theme that Sartre points out is that in some sense the world confronts us like a work of art, but there is also a sense in which the world confronts us quite differently from a work of art, and there is something about art and human existence that we can learn from each of these phenomena.
The Psychology of Imagination • The sense in which the world confronts us like a work of art is that our lived-in world is fundamentally aesthetic rather than scientific. • The hegemony of science over the modern mind may make us forget this fact, but actually the world presents itself in terms of experienced qualities of the type better described in the language of the art critic than the language of the physicist.
The Psychology of Imagination “The aesthetic transformation” … “To the extent that man is artist, he is already delivered from his ego and has become a medium through which the true subject celebrates his redemption in illusion.” – Birth of Tragedy • Unless one creates something – and, for Nietzsche, creation itself is artistic – then it would be better that one had never been born.
The Psychology of Imagination • Sartre is more interested in the relationship of the experience subject to the work of art itself. • Sartre means to draw the distinction between the material object and the ‘intentional act that apprehends it’. • Sartre suggests that our experience of a work of art involves an imaginative act which brings into being the aesthetic object – something essentially unreal, or purely within the domain of the mind, distinct from the actual physical canvas that is in front of us.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951)
What is Aesthetics? Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures on Aesthetics • In our quest for the definition of art, we now turn to a discussion very different from those we’ve seen so far. • We will examine two areas of Wittgenstein’s thought on art that have proved especially instructive. • One has to do with Wittgenstein’s discussion of the “open-endedness” of certain concepts; the other concerns his notion of language as a “form of life.”
Lectures on Aesthetics • Open Concepts: he does not ask us to philosophize about the concept; rather, he asks us to look at all the activities we call “games” in order to see whether we discover anything they all have in common.
Lectures on Aesthetics “Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games.” I mean board-games, card-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? – Don’t say: “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’” – but look and see whether there is anything common to all. – For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look! – Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and other appear.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillian, 1964), pp. 31-32.
Lectures on Aesthetics “I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, color of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way. –And I shall say “games” form a family.” (p.32).
Lectures on Aesthetics • “Game,” then, is an “open concept.” • We cannot state the necessary and sufficient conditions for something’s being a game. • That is we could never close the concept with a specific definition in the way that we can do with “triangle” because it is always possible, and even likely, that at a later date we will want to include a new activity under the concept of “game.”
Lectures on Aesthetics • Those who seek and exhaustive definition of the word “art” may be I the same bind as those who seek to define the word “game.” • Conceptual art: A development in art during the last forty years of the twentieth century in which it is claimed that the technique, methods, and materials of production rather than the final artistic product are themselves the real work of art. Also, in some cases, the designation of concepts themselves rather than objects as works of art.
