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page063from Building IdeasAs part of this rationalizing process, the beautiful was defined in terms of intelligible, with drama dismissed as irrational and even dangerous for “susceptible souls”. The limits of this “traditional” philosophy were Nietzsche’s real and abiding interest, and in this he echoed the Romantics before him, as well as anticipating many more recent debates. He was against the idea that science expressed the truth about an “objective” world and he made a claim for the continued importance of the artist, when he questioned the very limits of logic itself:
Might there be a realm of wisdom from which the logician is excluded? Might art even be a necessary correlative and supplement to science?14 Aesthetics and Deconstruction – From Heidegger to Derrida This notion of the limits of science resurfaces again in the twentieth century, in a debate on the status of art which is still influential in philosophy today. The main protagonists in this debate are, again, two German philosophers, Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer, who represent two distinct traditions. Both philosophers wrote on the subject of art as a form of knowledge, but their conclusions on the relationship between art and philosophy differed widely. Heidegger’s work has proved to be the more influential, due in part to its breadth and scope, as he set out to develop a new grounding for ontology – or philosophy of being – and, like Nietzsche, he tried to deconstruct its long-held traditions. He attempted to see beyond the limitations of language by examining other forms of expression. His writings on poetry, technology and art suggest they all have a significant function: by revealing the presence of truth in the world, they provide an insight into the mystery of “Being”. This Being is the great theme running throughout 14 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, translated by Shaun Whiteside, Penguin Books, London, 1993, p 71
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page062from Building Ideas
2 Andreas Vesalius – Dissected arm, woodcut from DeHumani Corporis Fabrica, 1543.
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page061from Building IdeasThe target of Geothe’s poem is the reductivist tendency of scientific fact, the loss of the qualitative grasp of things that the work of art is able to provide. We “murder to dissect”, as Wordsworth wrote summing up the prevailing outlook, where the process of anatomical dissection had become the paradigm for all forms of knowledge (see Figure 2). By contrast, the nineteenth century saw a series of reactions to this position, where philosophers attempted to support the claims for the contribution of the creative artist. Arthur Schopenhauer, responding to Hegel, proposed that the world was indeed driven by an energizing force – where this differed from Hegel’s “spirit” was in the manner of its highest expression, which according to Schopenhauer was neither philosophy nor science. He in fact saw the work of art as the hightest expression of human consciousness, being more universal, and hence more powerful, than the fragmentary “dissections” of rational concepts. A fellow German, Friedrich Nietzsche, writing in the second half of the nineteenth century, produced a similarly powerful critique of the dominance of logic and rationality. In his later work he was to call for a “revaluation of all values”, as they had been handed down by tradition within the Western intellectual canon. The basis for this call came from his suspicion of the dominance of science, which he regarded as a form of illusion, as he did both philosophy and art.
In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche made a study of Greek theatre and its origins in the “spirit of music”. In the period prior to the systematic philosophy which began with Socrates in the pages of Plato, he detected a high point of cultural expression in the manner that Hegel had done before him. In the best of Greek tragic drama he sensed the resolution of contrary forces – the rational and emotional tendencies symbolized by the deities Apollo and Dionysus. What happens with the rise of philosophy is the separation of these two traditions, as the Apollonian tendency dominates, with its emphasis on intelligibility: Socrates is the archetype of the theoretical optimist who, in his faith in the explicability of the nature of things, attributes the power of a panacea to knowledge and science, and sees error as the embodiment of evil.13 13 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, translated by Shaun Whiteside, Penguin Books, London, 1993, p 74.
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page060from Building Ideasthinking remains most distinct from Hegel, who just a decade or so later developed his alternative views of art. Where Hegel had tried to separate the aesthetic idea from the form of the art-object, as a means of consigning artistic practice to its lowly place in his philosophy, Kant and the Romantics after him had insisted on their inseparable unity and established the alternative view of the continued relevance of “aesthetic knowledge”.
Where Hegel describes the history of philosophy as a continual progress towards “absolute knowing”, he downgrades the role of the artist to that of a redundant supporting actor. Where art once had a useful function in the primitive stages of cultural development, it was then rendered obsolete by the superior precision of philosophical thinking. This “scientific” view of the growth of knowledge, which proposed that all life’s mysteries would eventually be solved, ignores the function of art as a mode of understanding and a necessary vehicle for critical debate. This notion of art as a means of criticism – a way of diverging from the dominant “paradigms” – is a vital legacy of the Romantic revolution in early nineteenth century literature and art. The Romantics attacked the notion of authority and the idea that one could discover the true nature of things. They dismissed the possibility of objective knowledge about the world and instead promoted individual expression. Their frustration grew, to a large extent, from the current dominance of scientific rationality which reduced the richness of experience to the dry descriptions of scientific formulae. Geothe’s meditations on the beauty of a dragonfly in the Leipzig Song Book provide a perfect illustration of the poet’s predicament: … It filts and hovers, resting not – Hush! On a willow bough it lights; I have it in my fingers caught, And now I seek its colours true, And find a melancholy blue – Such is thy lot, dissector of delight! 12 12 Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, from the Leipzig Song Book, quoted in Ernst Cassirer, The philosophy of the Enlightenment, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1951, pp 344-5
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page059from Building Ideas
he called “pure” and “practical” reason dealt in turn with the problem of knowledge and then with the question of morality. The aesthetic function according to Kant was part of the general faculty of judgement, which he then described in his third critique as being the mediator between the other two. This third work was itself divided into two distinct sections, with the second half dealing with judgements based on purpose, or “teleology”. The first half, by contrast, dealt with the opposite situation, where aesthetic judgements are made which are independent of purpose. This was one of Kant’s main principles in his definition of the beautiful which he claims consists of a kind of “purposiveness without purpose”.10 Nature again became the model for the judgement of beauty in art, where the object is seen as having its own inner purpose. This is as distinct from being a means to an end and involves the independence of the artwork from any use by the observer. These are just some of the tests as to the nature of the aesthetic, which Kant attempted to establish as a kind of autonomous realm. Another of his claims which exerted a long-lasting influence was the idea that beautiful art was the product of inspired genius. He described the culmination of ideas already hinted at above, that art was essentially about invention rather than the imitation of models. This suggests the transcendence of traditional Classical principles and prepares the way for the Romantic movement in the decades to follow:
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