Gen Eds P11: Philosophy of Art

So we come to the last category in philosophy, the philosophy of art or aesthetics. Last week we looked at the philosophy of history.

This is the tenth and final philosophy post in a series called, "General Education in a Nutshell." Philosophy is the first of ten subjects to overview in this series. These are the subjects a person normally takes in college (or high school) as part of a general education (most of them also make up what is sometimes called the "liberal arts").

The first ten philosophy posts were:

• Philosophy Overview
• Philosophy of Religion
• Epistemology
• Critical Thinking
• Philosophy of Science
• Metaphysics
• Philosophy of the Person
• Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Philosophy of History

1. Art is often thought to be a subjective matter: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." Certainly this is true from one perspective. One person thinks landscapes are beautiful, another likes abstract art. One person likes Mozart, another loves rap music. Someone else denies that techno is really music.

We might therefore say that art is anything that some person considers to be art. Normally, there is an artist involved, someone who believed he or she was creating something that was an expression of something in some sensory medium that can be seen, heard, touched, tasted, or smelled. Sometimes it is the person experiencing that medium who considers something art, an expression or an embodiment of something.

Of course we might ask, what does God consider to be art? Why the whole creation is a work of art by God's hand, a work of beauty! "The heavens are telling the glory of God" (Ps. 19:1).

2. There are those who would say that there are objective criteria for what is beautiful. Symmetry is often considered an objective basis for beauty. What about rounded figures as opposed to jagged or square ones? Some would say there are aspects of the human brain, parts that "light up" with certain visual and auditory stimuli, such that they can actually objectify beauty.

Most of us at this current time would probably say that this approach misses the point of art, which is not scientific but oriented around pleasure. But as we will see, our perspective is only one perspective, one that fits where we are situated in history, and not the only one.

What does God consider beautiful? "God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good" (Gen. 1:31). Everything that God has created, insofar as it is not marred by Sin, is beautiful. Who knows, perhaps even that which is marred by Sin is beautiful to God in a way, for Sin only exists because of the possibility that we might choose the good. Even the unrepentant sinner remains beautiful to him, because he or she is still the image of God. God is able to love the sinner even though he does not love sin.

The laws of physics are beautiful. They are indeed elegant. There is a mathematical beauty to the universe. These are manifestations of God as an artist.

3. The sense of the purpose of art and what therefore constitutes good art has changed from time to time in history. For example, both Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece assumed that the purpose of art was to provide a representation of reality. [1] For Plato, this sense of art implied that it was a bad thing, just as for similar reasons it mean for Aristotle that art was a good thing.

Plato believed that anything we experience with our senses is only a shadow and a copy of reality itself, which is something we access with our minds. The idea of a table is the reality. A physical table is a shadow and a copy of that reality. So for Plato, a piece of art was a copy of a copy of reality. It took one farther from the truth and thus was bad. It also could play on the emotions, which for Plato was bad.

By contrast, Aristotle believed art was good for similar reasons. Unlike Plato, he did not believe that the idea of something--its essence or form--was something that truly existed independently of substance. When I identify something as a table, my mind has abstracted the essence of a table from the table. Art is helpful in this regard, because art focuses on the essential form of something.

And while art often evokes an emotional response, Aristotle believed this experience could be cathartic in a way that actually helps clear our minds. Music might purge us of emotions so that we can think straight.

4. So Plato and Aristotle both judged the value of art on whether it led to greater rationality. Quite the opposite for the Romantics in the late 1700s and early 1800s. For them the emotional irrationality of art was what made it art and what made it good. The artistic ideal was the eccentric artist who seems possessed of something greater than him or herself. The artist is someone swept away by genius, someone with whom the rest of us cannot really relate.

This Romantic paradigm has more or less dominated our sense of art up until the present time. Good art evokes strong feelings which, while irrational, are good.

 Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) had a slightly different perspective on art. He agreed with the Romantics that art was largely about feeling. But he disagreed on what constituted good and bad art. The Romantics viewed art as an individualistic matter. It didn't matter whether you or I recognized the meaning or genius of a work of art. It was a matter of the individual artist and individual taste.

But for Tolstoy, art was only good art if it evoked universal feeling and values. And the values of importance were things like the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. If a work of art made us feel more loving toward each other, then it was good art. If a piece of art helped us feel solidarity with one another as human beings, it was good art.

4. All of the above, in their own way, believe that art is good if it is constructive. If it builds rationality, Plato and Aristotle would have said it was good. If it built individual or corporate feeling, the Romantics and Tolstoy would have said it was good, respectively.

With Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), art becomes good if it has a destructive function. Building on the work of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Marcuse suggested that art serves a psychological function in relation to repression. Repression, for Freud, was the result of human beings not being able to fulfill their deepest drives and desires. This energy gets pent up inside us and can be destructive.

Marcuse saw art as an outlet for these repressive drives. Art allows a person to release these repressed feelings. In that sense, his perspective bears some resemblance to Aristotle's.

5. But we might end with Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), who thought all these perspectives failed because they all evaluate art on the basis of what we might call its "instrumental value." Art is good or bad depending on what it does. For Wilde, art has intrinsic value. Art doesn't have to do anything at all. Art is valuable for its own sake.

Next Week: Summary of Philosophy's Value

Classic Reading

• Plato's Republic
• Aristotle's Poetics
• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment
• Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?
• Oscar Wilde, Intentions
• Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization

[1] I have drawn the general pattern of what follows from Robert Paul Wolff's About Philosophy.

Liberal Arts 4: The Value of Music and Art

Fourth post in my series on the importance of the liberal arts for civilization. Previous posts include:

A Vision for the Liberal Arts
The Value of Philosophy
The Value of History

1. It seems to me that music and art are the most human of the liberal arts, with literature following close on their heals. Obviously some individuals have more capacity in this area than others. In this post, I am not targeting those who recognize the value of art and music but don't have much ability. I am targeting those who would try to remove them from curricula altogether.

A squirrel intrinsically knows the value of a nut, but he can't dance with it or scratch a representation of one in the side of a tree. When I hear of legislatures cutting funding for art or music because they think they are a waste of resources, my initial reaction is to think of them as sub-humans. Mere gorillas, thinks I. How do you make a human being into mere road kill? You take away the part that distinguishes him or her as human.

The ability to appreciate music and art is almost entirely limited to the human species. I'm sure some other species sing to each other, but you don't find hole-drawings in a rabbit hole (unless you're visiting Watership Down).

Even the hyper-utilitarian Soviet Union supported the arts, even if they did so for the wrong reasons--to show their superiority. So the hyper-utilitarian capitalist on this score, who wants to remove "wasteful" expenditures on art and music in the public schools, shows him/herself inferior even to the hyper-utilitarian communist, for whom it was all about the benefit to the State.

2. Of what benefit is art and music? Oscar Wilde would say the question itself is wrong, but let's entertain it for a moment.

Aristotle and Marcuse both recognized the cathartic value of art. Again, many sins are no doubt committed in the public schools when art or music becomes a mere lesson. Some of my children had an art teacher whose main goal seems to have been to teach the children to hate art (the J. Evans Pritchard, PhD type).

But what capacity art and music has to release unhealthy energies! When I was in college, I would sometimes get into a spiraling funk of self-doubt. In such times, there was nothing like a good movie on television to pull me out, to reset my brain, to put me in a different world on a different trajectory.

Aristotle realized this catharsis that art offers. How sad music can vent sadness. How angry music can vent anger. I've often wished I had the talent to paint or play my feelings out. How fantastic it must be to have the talent of a great painter or musician! To be able to express one's feelings in such a channeled way!

Of course art and music can feed unhealthy emotions too. Music can lead us to God, and music can go hand in hand with unbridled sex and drugs. My parents' generation tried to suppress the power of the Beatles, but they lost soundly. Ideas don't hold a candle to the power of music and art, the wimps.

We should be aware of this power. An educated person is, a person who has studied liberal arts. Why have opinions changed so quickly on homosexuality in America? Is it not in large part because of the movies and media of the last twenty years, which have normalized it in our consciousnesses? The influence of movies and television are the power of literature intensely multiplied through art and music.

Art and music amplify the emotions of a society. If you live in a climate where the weather often becomes dangerous, you need to know how to respond in a storm or flood. So art and music can be healthy releases and they can be unhealthy. How shortsighted to think such things are insignificant parts in an education.

3. Of course for those who have a sixth sense, the importance of art and music is obvious. Like someone who has never seen or heard, how difficult it is to describe vision or hearing. Beauty is something God has uniquely given to humanity. Blessed are those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

In that sense, Christians should especially value art and music, as one of God's special gifts for humanity. They are arguably part of the imago Dei, the image of God. They are part of the glory and honor with which God has crowned us in the creation.

Like the emotions they feed and express, art and music are are neither good nor evil in themselves. But they can be expressed in good and bad ways. They can be sanctified. They can be vilified.

Tolstoy recognized the ability of art to point us toward the greater good--the love of God and our fellow human. They hold an immense capacity to bind us together, to help us see others as the same as ourselves. What does it mean to be human? Art and music are doorways to our inner humanity, much as literature, a door through which that Nazi, "Idea," cannot as easily pass.

4. Oscar Wilde of course pushed back against the idea that art must have an instrumental value at all. Art is valid for its own sake, he argued. (Of course the philosopher of art might note that art for him still served pleasure, and pleasure happiness, but we'll forgive this minor philosophical infelicity on his part)

"Life much more imitates art than art imitates life," he said. I don't entirely agree, but poets must be allowed their exaggeration. Certainly life does often imitate art. When cell phones went through the flip-phone stage, it was not lost on me that this form was inspired by Star Trek in the 60s. Indeed, how many careers in science were inspired by the artistry of Star Trek and other movies?

Art and music inspire. The artistry of a good teacher can set a student on a lifelong trajectory. Even sports is a form of art or can be seen to be such.

5. When you think of how much more powerful art and music are than science or courses on countless subjects that focus on ideas, how stupid we must feel to think that they are an unimportant part of an education!

Waiting to Return 7

What is Jesus doing now in heaven as he sits at God's right hand? He is waiting, for one thing, until the time for his enemies finally to be put under his feet (Heb. 10:12-13). Hebrews perhaps thinks of those who will face God in the judgment when it mentions Christ's enemies (Heb. 10:26-31). 1 Corinthians 15 points to the most significant enemy to be vanquished at the end: death (15:26).

The other thing that Christ currently does in heaven is intercede for us (Rom. 8:34).  To intercede is of course to serve as a go-between in a very active way, to advocate for someone.  The Holy Spirit is our go-between when it comes to our everyday needs. "We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans" (Rom. 8:26). So the Spirit pleads for us to God even though we ourselves do not fully know what we need or what is best for us.

The intercession of Christ is arguably a little different from the intercession of the Spirit.  Christ intercedes for us as a lawyer, as our advocate in the divine court.  "Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us" (8:33-34). Jesus is thus the one who intercedes for our acquittal before God on the basis of his blood. Once we have Christ interceding for us in this way, we will be found not-guilty.

John gives yet another function for Jesus "in the meantime."  He has gone to prepare a place for us in heaven (John 14:2-3). Most of the New Testament seems to look for eternity to be on a transformed earth. [1] Paul speaks of how the creation will be redeemed (Rom. 8:22-23). Revelation speaks of a New Jerusalem coming down to earth (Rev. 21:2). Matthew and Luke speak of people coming from all over the earth to eat with Jesus and the patriarchs of Genesis (Matt. 8:11; Luke 13:28-29).

But perhaps the popular sense that we spend eternity in heaven comes most from John and John 14 in particular. Jesus prepares a place in heaven for his followers. And certainly this location fits with what other parts of the New Testament have to say about the time between Jesus' resurrection and second coming. The Parable of the Rich Man in Luke speaks of a beggar going to Abraham's side after his death (16:22). Paul speaks of how being absent from the body is to be present with the Lord (2 Cor. 5:7; cf. Phil. 1:23).

Again, much of what we are saying about Christ's current activities do not come so much from the gospels as from the rest of the New Testament. What we do find a good deal about in the Synoptic Gospels, and in the rest of the New Testament, is Christ's impending return in judgment, as we discussed in chapter 8. "You will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven," Jesus tells the high priest (Mark 14:62). Acts 1:11 puts it this way: "This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven."

[1] See especially N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church ***.

What is Art?

... As we attempt to synthesize the various perspectives on art in this chapter, we might start by addressing art in form and art in function.  In form, art is a matter of the human senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell.  So when we think of art, we think of things like paintings, sculptures, architecture, drama, novels, music, and good cooking. These all involve our senses--often combinations of senses.

However, for such things to be art in function, someone must perceive them to be art.  In that sense, something can be art to me that is not art to you.  Something can be art to its creator and not art to anyone else.  The key is that someone finds in something created by someone an embodiment of meaning or skill that is not literal or mechanical. [1]

Art is often a function of human emotion or pleasure.  The artist may express feelings about something.  An audience may have emotions as they experience a piece of art.  Art can of course also communicate rational truth, but it does so in a non-literal or symbolic way.  The painting represents a truth rather than simply telling it.  A novel creates a world that embodies truths or feelings without presenting the literal world.

Someone may consider something a work of art because it embodies skills that not everyone has.  Something evokes pleasure in the perception of the skill it embodies.  There can be an art to writing even when a person is writing about math or science.  The idea of a skill was in fact the original meaning of the word "art."  We might thus define art as the expression of something meaningful to someone in a skillful or non-literal way in the form of something perceived by the senses.

[textbox: Art]

Beyond this definition, are there criteria by which we might evaluate the value of art, especially as Christians?  Is beauty only in the eye of the beholder?  Certainly by our definition we cannot deny any individual the right to define something as art that only they find to be art.

Yet there is also something to be said for art that, as Tolstoy said, has an infectious quality.  We can suspect that the kind of art that is infectious in one time and place may not be infectious in another.  What one generation or culture finds appealing and desirable, another may not.  Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, admired today for its brevity and clarity, was not as admired in a day when more embellishment was the norm.  William Shakespeare's plays were considered unsophisticated to the elite of his day.  And Paul in the New Testament reveals that according to the style of his time, "his speech [is] contemptible" (2 Corinthians 10:10, NRSV).

But it is surely also by no coincidence that centuries of individuals have found the works of artists like Michelangelo (1475-1564) and Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) to be art at its best.  Is it because they have captured something about the order God placed into the world?  Is it because they have expressed some common dimension of the human psyche?  Is it because they were able to do things none of us could imagine doing?  Perhaps it is all these things.

Most Christians believe in beauty and (appropriate) pleasure for their own sake.  While many Christians throughout the ages felt the need to make Song of Solomon into a metaphor for Christ and the church, it was originally poetry about sex and love, plain and simple.  We find acrostic poetry in Lamentations and Psalm 119, where the first word of each verse intentionally begins with a different letter of the alphabet.  Lamentations 1, 2, 4, and 5 have 22 verses, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet.  Lamentations 3 goes through the alphabet three times.

These and other artistic expressions in the Bible serve no rational purpose.  They are purely a function of beauty and artistry.  Many of the psalms are expressions of sadness or thanksgiving or anger.  The purpose of such psalms was not to communicate truth--they do not give a proposition to evaluate. [2] They are expressions of God's people with which we can identify.  We can thus agree with Oscar Wilde that art does not always have to have a purpose other than enjoyment or an expression of meaning.  Art most often falls in the category of adiaphora--things that are morally neutral.  

To be sure, from a Christian perspective, art can also have both positive and negative moral dimensions.  We can say with Tolstoy that art that tends to promote virtue in its audience has a positive moral dimension.  We can say with Aristotle and even Marcuse that art can be cathartic in a way that purges us of unhealthy emotions so that we can think or act with greater clarity or virtue.  For this reason, art that embodies sadness or anger is not clearly negative in effect.

But we can also say with Plato that art can be used to manipulate in a negative direction.  And we can find Marcuse's sense of art dangerous when it is the expression of an evil heart.  Art is an embodiment of evil when it is an expression of an evil heart, and art is negative when it embodies or promotes vice and evil in those who perceive it.

Most of us live in a culture where freedom of expression is a primary value, but freedom is never absolute.  In secular American culture, I am free to express myself in speech or religion if such things do not lead to violence or a violation of the rights of others.  Even from a secular perspective, there are limits to freedom of expression.

The limitations you want to put on others from a Christian perspective will differ in keeping with the view you have of how Christians should relate to the society around them, as we saw in the previous chapter.  Christians who see the world through a deterministic lens may want to force the rest of society to conform to their Christian values.  Christians who believe God has given us free will by contrast will lean toward allowing others to express themselves in negative ways, as long as it does not harm the innocent.

[1] We can of course by extension speak of God as the consummate artist in his creation of the world.  And we can always make metaphors of such things--our dog is an artist in the way she arranges her food around the kitchen floor.

[2] In such cases, words like "inerrant" or "infallible" do not really relate to the genre in question.

Romanticism

Romanticism was a movement in art and culture in the late 1700s and 1800s that emphasized feeling, intuition, and imagination.  It was a reaction to the Enlightenment emphasis on reason (the "Age of Reason"), as well as the cold, impersonal direction of the Industrial Revolution.

If the Scientific Revolution of the 1600's had made the world seem to be a mechanical, unfeeling place, the Romantics felt their way to something deeper and more mysterious about human life.  If God had seemed more distant and less certain by reason, they recognized the possession of the artist by a higher power.  If Kant had suggested we cannot know the world as it actually is, they responded that they could access the world as it really is through intuition.  If the Renaissance and Enlightenment had reached back to the classical world of the Greeks and Romans for examples, the Romantics reached back into the Middle Ages for shadowy tales of Arthur, Robin Hood, and the stories of the Brothers Grimm.

No doubt the popularity and influence of Romanticism derived from the fact that the common person could identify with it.  It certainly had its elite leadership, individuals like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) in Germany and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) in England (although Goethe denied that he was a Romantic).  But the staying power came from the fact that anyone could identify with its values and themes.  Paintings were less and less about representing truths--less about Jesus, Mary, biblical scenes.  Now they were expressions of feeling and imagination, ranging from scenes of everyday life to less than reverential treatments of religious themes.

Romanticism was thus an expression of cultural insecurity, a kind of escape from the "real world" to some other supposedly more real world.  It is no surprise that fear was one of the primary emotions expressed, and the modern horror film finds its origins in the Romantic Age.  This is the age that gave birth to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818).  The movement that birthed it in Germany was called Sturm und Drang ("storm and stress").  In Goethe's Faust, a genius has studied everything imaginable ("unfortunately theology as well") and at the end of reason sells his soul to Satan.

Individualism in its modern form owes much to the Romantic Age.  It is true that Descartes turned the lens of philosophy toward me as an individual thinker, but Romanticism glorified individual feeling.  It was the age of the French and American Revolutions, where any individual could disregard the time honored roles and rules of society (this is part of the reason Shakespeare emerged as a hero).  "Who am I and what do I feel about who I am?" became a question the elite now asked, while common people now felt empowered and embraced a common identity as a people (nationalism). These developments would set the stage for Freudian introspection at the end of the 1800’s.