Writing and Interpretation

In September, I posted an article by Jean-Paul Sartre titled “What is Writing?” The essay is concerned primarily with differentiating prose writing from other sorts of art—explicitly visual art and poetry. It’s a great article; if you didn’t read it before I’d suggest reading it now if you have the time (which, alas, you probably don’t). Since September, we’ve worked with several writers with close ties to Sartre, so I’d like to look beyond Sartre’s differentiation of prose and poetry to what that means for art. Heidegger and Gadamer seem relevant here.

With Heidegger we learned about the hermeneutic circle, or the idea that all knowledge or understanding is a continuous cycle of interpretation, in which the unfamiliar or concealed becomes disclosed, and the familiar becomes foreign. This conception of knowledge runs counter to modernist iterations (i.e. Locke’s tabula rasa, the idea that we begin life with a sort of blank slate on which the world writes through experience) in that it presupposes some sort of inherent understanding about the world; neither the completely alien nor the completely familiar have any bearing on our experience. This is reflected in Heidegger’s assertion that we must take for granted the “thingness” of an object-to-be-interpreted before we can perform any sort of interpretation. This is what phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty and hermeneutic philosophers like Gadamer are getting at when they use the phrase “always already;” we are always already experiencing the world because we live within it. As such, we cannot hope to view the world objectively or from outside ourselves, something Nagel terms the “view from nowhere.”

For Heidegger, all this means that artwork should disclose something: that truth itself is disclosure. Art makes the unfamiliar familiar and vice versa; this is its sort of first-order function. More than that, though, art shows us that truth is itself an act of disclosure. It seems to me that Gadamer’s view on abstract art falls into this articulation as well; by depicting color and shape rather than things, abstract artists more directly arrive at the Heideggerian goal of disclosure about disclosure. Abstract art takes such recognizable and familiar concepts as color and shape and arranges them in a foreign way; humans tend to experience these concepts as aspects of things rather than things-in-themselves, and so the experience of, say, a Rothko painting (example, "No.3/No.13," to the left), requires a new sort of interpretive engagement with the work, one that leads to a realization of the interpretive act itself.

Here we come to the ultimate difference between prose writing and visual art. Sartre puts it this way: “The writer can guide you and, if he describes a hovel, make it seem the symbol of social injustice and provoke your indignation. The painter is mute. He presents you with a hovel, that’s all. You are free to see in it what you like” (27). With this, Sartre differentiates writing from other artforms, including poetry, by showing that writing utilizes representational language to convey meaning; it is not the images depicted in the writing that have meaning (as in poetry), but the language used to present these images: “The art of prose is employed in discourse; its substance is by nature significative—that is, the words are first of all not objects but designations for objects. It is not first of all a matter of knowing whether they please or displease in themselves; it is a matter of knowing whether they correctly indicate a certain thing or a certain notion. Thus, it often happens that we find ourselves possessing a certain idea that someone has taught us by means of words without being able to recall a single one of the words which have transmitted it to us” (35). Our experience of a novel may be tied to the language used by the author, but the take-away is largely representational; we remember things like plot, character, and narration, but we can remember these things without necessarily remembering the author’s language. To remember an artwork, one must remember the content of the piece rather than its external reference.

To choose to convey an idea through prose, then, is to choose action by disclosure—to act such that “nobody can be ignorant of the world” (38). While a painter may disclose the world by presenting something in the world, thus making it available for interpretation, the writer actively imbues such an image with potential meanings beyond the image itself. This is, to a great extent, a function of language, which Sartre positions as a key factor in perception: “We are within language as within our body. We feel it spontaneously while going beyond it towards other ends, as we feel our hands and our feet; we perceive it when it is someone else who is using it, as we perceive the limbs of others” (35). The function of style is to push the reader through and give value to the content of the prose, but not to be self-evident: content is what matters—language and style change to fit the subject. “In prose the aesthetic pleasure is pure only if it is thrown in into the bargain” (39).

So it seems that prose writing can have the same effect as visual art insofar as both require the viewer (or reader or audience) to interact with and interpret the work, thus fulfilling Heidegger’s assertion that art discloses the truth of disclosure. However, writing extends past visual art in that it refers to something beyond itself; moreover, the interpretive task the reader faces is more complex. While both a novel and a painting can have a multitude of viable interpretations, the novel has certain “landmarks” set by the author, a sort of roadmap for potential meanings. The reader/viewer, though, bears the responsibility of creating the meaning of the work (this is a fancy way of saying that we get from an interpretive object what we put into it; a work is only meaningful when its audience interprets it). While it seems unlikely that there could be a “bad” or “wrong” interpretation of a visual artwork (this is arguable, but I’m working here with abstract art in mind, which would seem to place few restrictions—if any—on interpretation), the written work has a certain limit to interpretation. This comes less from the author than the interpretive community in which the work takes hold, which is to say that certain interpretations of a work come to be considered “correct”—or at least compelling—as a result of the metaphorical “vocabulary” of the community critically examining the work. The task of the reader, then, is to interpret individual or personal meaning from a work without losing sight of the actual content of the work itself.

Works Cited
Sartre, Jean-Paul. “What is Writing?” What is Literature? Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988. pp. 25-47.

Photography and Misinformation

On the recent 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, French President Nicolas Sarkozy posted a picture on his facebook page which he claimed showed himself helping to take down the wall the night the authorities declared the East-West border open. A couple of days later, French papers published evidence that the picture was actually taken a week after the wall fell, rather than the night of. Even after a complete refutation of Sarkozy's claim, though, the President refused to admit that he had lied. Reading Morris' piece on the Iranian missile launch reminded me of this article (linked here) because both highlight the ease and the dangers of simply trusting, or expecting, photos to show the truth.

I think the fake is also an example of how photography has undermined what Benjamin called the aura resulting from a thing's unique existence. It seems like in lying about the real context of his photo, Sarkozy was trying to add to an normal picture an aura of uniqueness that would in turn reflect well upon him. As a result, while the age of reproduction may have resulted in the destruction of aura with things whose unique existence suddenly become a mass existence, perhaps another danger is that the ease of reproduction has allowed people to fake an aura of uniqueness, or add on a seemingly more impressive aura of uniqueness, to a merely commonplace reproduction. This second damage to the authenticity of aura is highlighted in the photos at the bottom of the article (linked again here) sent to two French newpapers in which Sarkozy appears in famous historical events, from the Yalta Conference to the JFK assassination.

Longinus, Burke, and Kant: Origins of the Sublime

While our discussion of the sublime in class was centered on Kant’s philosophy, the concept of the sublime has been continuously developed throughout the history of aesthetics. This paper will focus on three influential figures with regards to the defining of the sublime: the Greek philosophy and writer Dionysius Longinus, the 18^th Century Irish philosopher Edmund Burke, and Kant. Through examining each of their takes on what the sublime is, and where it springs from, the goal is to lay out a broader appreciation on what the sublime has been interpreted to be.

The concept of the sublime is first attributed to the Greek critic Dionysius Longinus. In his work Peri Hupsos or On Sublimity, written in the first century A.D., Longinus writes that “the sublime is a certain eminence or perfection of language, and that the greatest writers, both in verse and prose, have by this alone obtained their prize of glory, and filled all time with their renown” (23). Addressing the question of where the sublime exists that it can be brought out by language, Longinus gives five sources: 1) through boldness and grandeur of thoughts; 2) through the raising of passions to their highest degree; 3) through the skillful application of both feeling and language in writing; 4) through the use of graceful expression; and 5) through a dignified and grand composition of sentences (23). The common theme in each case is stretching and surpassing rationality through thoughts made grand in writing, thoughts that pull the audience out of their common ideas and into a larger arena, forcing the audience to think and perceive in a mode beyond normality.

In Phillip Shaw’s book The Sublime, he describes Longinus’ depiction of the sublime as ravishing, or even raping the audience. In Longinus’ words, the successful incorporation of the sublime in language, thought, and literature endues works “with a strength irresistible” that “strikes home, and triumphs over every hearer,” (23) transporting the audience members from their individual feelings into collective awe of the literary work. The sublime, then, is the masterfully crafted force of language so powerful that it overcomes rationality, causing the audience to submit to incomprehensible feelings, and leaving them overwhelmed and in awe of the experience that transported them into a realm of sentiment beyond description. It does not lay waiting in an object ready to leap out at those who happen upon it, or is feeling that can be recognized in nature at all, but rather is an overcoming of conventional thought that is created and brought out through powerful language.

Another important aspect of Longinus’ depiction of the sublime is its apparent compatibility with the concept of beauty. As only the greatest, most talented, and ingenious writers and thinkers could produce the sublime, these works were at the same time beautiful and well loved. The sublime and the beautiful, then, work hand in hand, with the sublime experience being at the same time an experience of beauty that surpasses normal limitations of thought and sentiment.

Although Longinus’ On the Sublime was written in the first century A.D., it was largely absent in aesthetic debate until the 17^th Century, and only gained real prominence after its translation into French in 1674. Most 17^th and 18^th philosophers agreed with and developed upon Longinus’ account of the sublime as primarily drawn out of thought and language, and particularly in literature and poetry. The sublime remained attached to concepts of beauty as well, as neither were thought to be completely exclusive of the other in their traits and in their portrayal. However, in 1759 Irish philosopher Edmund Burke challenged these notions with his treatise “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.” While Longinus argued that the sources of the sublime ultimately lay in the power of thought and literature, Burke refuted this account of the sublime’s origin when he wrote “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say whatever is conversant about terrible objects or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime” (131).

Consequently, instead of citing language and thought as the sublime’s origin, Burke’s argument is that the sublime is essentially a reaction to an object of terror, a thing that produces a horror which is “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (131). As a result, although Longinus and Burke still agree that the sublime in effect wrenches the individual away from normality by an incomprehensible feeling, their ascription of the origin of the sublime is drastically different. According Longinus, the sublime is created by humans through an elevation of language and thought to their highest, most overpowering levels, pulling individuals out of their comfort zones into a feeling of incomprehension. Burke’s account, though, is that the sublime exists within objects that produce a feeling of potential pain. Although the sublime can never be pain itself, since “when danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible,” (131) it exists in the feeling of delight that occurs when recognizing the potential for pain without actually feeling it. Consequently, Burke argues that the sublime is not dependent on language for its evocation, but perhaps is best felt when encountering natural objects that produce a delightful fear.

Burke goes even further in accounting for the sublime’s origin with his descriptions of terror and power as the two primary sources. Describing fear as the mere thought of the actual pain, Burke argues that “whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too, whether this cause of terror be endued with greatness of dimensions or not” (133). In other words, the sublime is not a reaction to the grand scope of a thought, as it is described by Longinus, but rather by the terror evoked by an object of thought, whether that object is big or small. Similarly, the sublime can be elicited both from objects of sight or of thought, as both have the power to invoke terror without actually causing pain, and as such are both potential sources for the sublime.

With regards to thoughts or objects that do not immediately inspire fear or terror, Burke says that there is “nothing sublime which is not some modification of power” (137). Again, this fear of power can come from a big or small object, as well as simply from a thought. Burke connected power to a fear of pain when he wrote that “pain is always inflicted by a power in some way superior, because we never submit to pain willingly…strength, violence, pain and terror, are ideas that rush in upon the mind together” (137). Witnessing an animal or an object with immense power creates the sublime by recognition of the potential pain that could be caused by such force, even if the threat never materializes. An example of this fear of power may be witnessing an avalanche, as the sheer, destructive force of the landslide creates in the observer a feeling of the sublime due to recognizing the potential for pain even when fear itself is not present.

With his assertion that the origin of the sublime lies in objects of pain instead of in the grand working of thought, language, and literature, Burke provides a new perspective against Longinus that he further drives home with his portrayal of the sublime and the beautiful as antithetical forces. Longinus maintains that beauty and the sublime coincide, a claim supported by works of great literature in which the genius writer is able to lift the audience with the grand language of the sublime, which is also regarded as a beautiful writing. Burke argues, though, that beauty and the sublime are as opposed as night and day and can never coincide. This is because for Burke, unlike Longinus, one can never find the sublime beautiful, as the sublime is ultimately founded on an object that causes fear, while a beautiful object can never be sublime since the origin of beauty is in perceiving a pleasurable object (140).

Burke’s appreciation of the origin of the sublime sets the stage for Kant’s ideas that we discussed in class. Similar to Burke, Kant argues that sublime exists only in separation from the object being perceived; there is no sublimity in directly fearing for one’s life, but there is a sense of the sublime in recognizing that one’s life could be in danger. For example, Kant would agree that the avalanche elicits a feeling of the sublime to the extent the observer is removed from the actual path of destruction, and is therefore able to reflect upon the power of the landslide.

This reflection though, points to a likely split between Longinus, Burke, and Kant. Unlike the others, Kant posits that the origin of the sublime is in instances where the imagination, the sentiments, of the mind cannot grasp an object’s might, resulting in the transcendence of reason. An example of this is reflecting upon the infinite. Kant argues that when the mind tries to imagine such scope it ultimately fails due to imagination’s inability to picture what it has as its aim. Reason, on the other hand, tells the person that the infinite makes sense even though it is incomprehensible, and so triumphs over the failure of the imagination. The resulting sensation, of sentimental incomprehension that still makes rational sense, is the sublime.

As a result, Kant would reject Burke’s claim that the origin of the sublime is terror or the potential for pain. Instead, he would argue that the sublime comes from the failure of imagination to fully comprehend an object of immense terror or pain, which results in a feeling of delight brought on by the transcendence of reason. While both assert that this delight is a characteristic of the sublime then, each have different conclusions. Burke wants to stop at the sensation, saying that the sublime is simply the detachment from the potentially pain inducing object of perceived terror. Kant agrees that the sublime could not exist without the detachment, but argues that the delight of the sublime arises due to the superiority of reason over the failure of imagination to sensibly comprehend an object.

Consequently, as Burke went in a different direction than Longinus in searching for the sources of the sublime beyond the feelings elicited in language, thought, and writing, Kant went away Burke in looking beyond sentiments and feelings to the relation of these feelings to reason and to their inability to comprehend the objects they address. Kant’s conception has since drawn considerable debate, though, as separating the sublime and the beautiful too much from the actual objects that are directed towards. As a result, the divergent interpretations that Longinus, Burke, and Kant have of the sublime show that as a concept it is has undergone continuous changes and is still not well agreed upon. Noting these different opinions and theories, though, prompts questions such as whose understanding is actually right, whether the three philosophers discussed are each talking about different types of the sublime (or whether they are talking about the same thing at all), and what the underlying characteristics of the sublime actually are.

Works Cited

Shaw, Philip. The Sublime. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print.

Gadamer and Liturgy

In one of H.G. Gadamer's seminal pieces, The Relevance of the Beautiful, he posits the ideas of play, symbol and festival as meaningful tools for the ways in which one can more practically and interactively engage a piece. His purpose in the essay is to explore whether or not modern art such as Duchamp's "readymade" conceptions can be evaluated under the same framework as Monet's "Lily Pond" or Chagall's "The Praying Jew". Gadamer claims that while our perception of art is historically contingent, the common feature of art, we find in the Ancient Greek conception of poietike episteme, or the knowledge and faculty appropriate to production. He says it nicely comparing Plato's craftsman in the Timeaus to the artist that persists through history:

What is common to the craftsman's producing and the artist's creating, and what distinguishes such from knowing from theory or from practical knowing and deciding, is that a work becomes separated from the activity…the common feature here is clearly the emergence of the work as the intended goal of regulated effort.[1]

Thus, just as a craftsman designs and produces a table or a watch, so to, the artist looks at a canvas and purposively projects a design of sorts. This design need not necessitate such detail as the mathematical precision of a still life, but rather the design comes from having art qua art or beauty as a telos. Acting with such regard is the means by which the beautiful for Gadamer, "enjoys universal recognition and assent…but serves no specific purpose". Art requires participation in the work; a primary and fundamental engagement that virtually begs the question "is this art?" Indeed, asking whether or not something is art is irrelevant; prima facie, it is the very fact of tradition, i.e. history, culture and language that establishes something as art. Art has no meaning apart from these contingencies. In this project, I am going to work to explicate Gadamer's ideas of the play, the symbol and the festival in relation to the writing of religious liturgy. Here, I will posit my own assertion that the performance of liturgy amongst a body of people is analogous to Gadamer's Aesthetic theory, in the sense that it serves the ontological function of the beautiful, that of bridging the chasm between the ideal and the real.

Just as the artwork is the focal point in determining a subjective experience of art itself, "so is the act of understanding similarly determined by the matter to be understood; as the experience of art reveals, not in spite of, but precisely because of the way it also conceals, so also is understanding possible. It is not in spite of, but again, precisely because of, its prior involvement."[2] Gadamer makes the comparison between experiencing an artwork and the concept of play. Indeed, play is not a "disengaged, disinterested" subjective experience; play is an interaction involving dialogue, asking the question, "is this art", and a reciprocal interpretive process. For Gadamer, this is a project of hermeneutical ontology; that is, when one stands in front of an art piece and readily engages it as art qua art, not only is the art interpreted into and made meaningful because of one's own subjective, historical conditioning, but moreover, the artwork in turn works to challenge the person's own ontological questions. Before the person had seen the artwork, this meaningful experience had not yet occurred; yet after the experience, the person is changed because of what she saw and experienced. As Gadamer nicely says, "My concern is not about what we do or what we ought to do, but rather, my concern lies in what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing." All art and artistry draws upon play in a fundamental way, the ways in which the audience of the artwork are of equal importance as the artist and the artwork themselves. If there were no audience, then the work of art, while not meaningless per se, would not posit influence to distinct, factical ontological entities.

Similarly, the conception of the symbol has its meaningfulness found within recollection and tradition. The symbol is supposed to remind us of something that we have already once known. He gives us the example from the Greek tradition, where Aristophanes tells us that:

Originally all human beings were spherical creatures. But later, on account of their misbehavior, the gods cut them in two. Thereafter, each of the halves, which originally belonged to one complete living being, seeks to be made whole once again. Thus every individual is a fragment or a symbolon tou anthropou.[3]

Thus, Gadamer's symbol is such that art is supposed to reflect for us what is not immediately apparent, but that seems to nevertheless "ring true or obvious". As humans are constantly trying to find the other side of their sphere, to be made whole again, they experience pieces of wholeness in their different encounters with art and with their present world. Moreover, it also serves an ontological function; it calls us to seek to understand ourselves within the artwork. We are drawn into the piece because it reflects something about ourselves that we "know" but must "recollect" and posit and interpret within the experience of art.

Just as the playful and the symbiotic relationships of the human and the experiences of art acts as a vehicle for understanding the hermeneutical "being" of both the art and the human, the festival works to show the historical placement, the "situatedness" of the being. Festivals are to be celebrated, they are an occasion that "lifts the participants out of their 'everydayness of existence' and elevates them into a kind of universal communion."[4] The festival is a gathering of people that is purposive, for the joining together to participate in a ritual or observance of a particular day, a factical joy or sorrow or perhaps for an unknown reason save the routine of doing it. An important aspect of the festival is that it creates its own time and space, but it is such that it cuts through daily time and space to a sort-of "positive parasitic relation". By that I simply mean that where time and space occur in their everydayness, when the festival occurs, everyday time and space still occur, but there is an additional bubble of time and space that exists both because of and in addition to, everyday time and space. Art is analogous to the experience of the festival, because it too creates this extra burst of time and space; it dislocates us from our everydayness and allows us to see our everydayness in a new light and with different regards to our daily experiences with the world; but moreover, it is the case that this experience is such that anyone who experiences the art will feel this dislocation. Thus, while people need not share an identical experience, it is the experience itself, which lends to the communal experience.

Hence, we have worked through explicating a few key aspects of Gadamer's aesthetic theory. As a personal anecdote, in my current internship, I am part of a staff of five or so people that writes religious liturgy for the different seasons of the ecumenical, liturgical calendar. Liturgies are the words of call and response between a church body and its leader (pastor, priest, clergy, etc.). For the past few months, we have been meeting to write the liturgy for the coming season of Advent, the weeks of waiting and preparation for Christmas. I find liturgy, both as a participant in the congregation and as a leader, an incredible functionary of reciprocal dialogue. Through the formulations of the words, we work to incorporate peace, justice, racial reconciliation and inclusive language. The words generally include basic statements of belief; not just about the overarching protestant faith but it also speaks to our daily role of peacemaking in the world. Through the weekly reiteration of these words, it establishes a community, it establishes commitments, and it gives rise to the power of language to work on individual factical ontologies. When I read and speak aloud statements of my belief each week, I am professing both to myself and to the world around me, who it is that I am--not in a transcendental, neutral framework, but in an interpretive, hermeneutical positioning of that specific time and place. The next week, I will be situated in a separate time and place and thus will occasion new words, and new understandings of those words in light of my recent factical experiences.

In the ways that it relates to Gadamer, a church service is similar to play in that it also is not a "disengaged and disinterested" experience. The reading of liturgy cannot happen in a space where there are not people. Rather, its very nature necessitates dialogue; it necessitates players participating with the dialogue. If people did not show up to take part in this "play", if people did not engage their specific roles within the experience of play, then the play would be utterly meaningless. Part of liturgy is the meaningful participation. I do not mean to imply that religion on the whole would be meaningless without players, but the weekly, repetitive functionary of a church service or liturgy recitation would be meaningless without this dialogical reciprocity. Symbiosis is derived from the Greek "syn" [with] and "biosis" [living], giving ways to the idea of the long-term interactions between different biological species. Gadamer's notion of the symbol seems to be a critical depiction of this. The church service, the people that actively engage in the liturgical readings engage with the rather parasitic history of the church and actively work to change and reshape history. Standing and participating is a way in which we recognize the wrongs the church has committed, but also verbally commit to working towards a new aim. We recollect our past situatedness and we make new claims in our new experiences, claims that incorporate our present world, claims that include rather than exclude, and hermeneutically function to make explicit the things in the world that are implicit or kept hidden (racial violence, domestic abuse, hate crimes on the GLBT community, homelessness, etc.). The function of the symbol of the church and the dialogue about beliefs are integral to the shaping of what happens "to us, in light of what it is that we are doing." Lastly, the conception of the festival is such that the specific hour each Sunday morning, apart from the ritual, tradition and historical situatedness that it holds would have no meaning whatever. However, by the very nature that at 11am on a Sunday morning, 200 or so people gather in a room to participate in the same festival-like experience. It grants the same "bubble" of time and space that disrupts our everydayness participation in the world. It is not merely because of a final telos that we gather; in a way, we gather because of this ritual. Being a part of the ritual is part of disclosing to us and to the world a piece of our own ontological searching and discovering.

Although there are some obvious discontinuities between the aesthetic experience and the experience of religious dialogue, the metonymic tools Gadamer provides, in turn provides a helpful resource in discovering the ways the participation in life can act as a moving, dislocating force to identifying one's situational being. Interestingly, with the rising of blog culture, liturgy is no longer something that is practiced only within a certain space. Moreover, with the rise of women taking leadership positions in a church, liturgy is no longer being written in only male (and Medieval) dominated language such as "Father-God", "King" and "Lord". There is a sense in which, not only has the very act of writing liturgy become a more socialized position, but the very language itself has become less hierarchical, less distant and more in tune with a personal congregation. When the language that people are speaking is a language that meets people in their familiar and contingent language, then it is such that the language does not demand distance, but rather, it is language that creates solidarity. When a telos for living (life) is created as opposed to working towards a final end, it seems to be the purpose of the church to create solidarity amongst themselves and then take that solidarity into the world to promote peace and wholeness.

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[1] Gadamer, H.G. The Relevance of the Beautiful. Trans. Nicholas Walker. p. 12

[2] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/

[3] Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful.

[4] Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful.

A Theological Perpective on Aesthetics

Throughout the history of western thought, theology has been a persistent topic and many philosophies of aesthetics have sprouted from theology. Augustine, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Jonathan Edwards have all contributed to the topic of theological aesthetics. Beginning with Plato, art and physical beauty have been seen as connected with something divine: hopefully this condensed survey of religious aesthetics will help unpack this idea and provide us with more tools to discerning why artwork is important to us.

St. Augustine defines humankind as “animal, rational, and mortal” (Augustine 173). Reason allows us to connect pieces of our knowledge together and some humans are able to use reason as a guide to knowledge of God. Reason comes to us through language and thereby through hearing which leads Augustine to argue that human beings are most receptive to the form of art that is heard, i.e. music.

When we hear music (like this song from the 300s, around Augustine’s lifetime), we experience two types of pleasure: the pleasure from the senses and pleasure from reason. The reason why our rational capacity takes pleasure in art is because it has a sense of design or order. For example, music is made up of sound that is pleasing to the senses, e.g. we like to listen to clarinets, not nails on a chalkboard. Music also has a “certain rhythmic measure” (Augustine 175) that delights reason through the senses, which is why the clarinet must be making sound in some kind of order for us to delight in it as art.

Reason delights in beauty because it “wish[es] to be straightway transported to the most blessed contemplation of things divine” (Augustine 178). Although reason “realize[s] that nothing please[s] it but beauty” (Augustine 180), it begins to suspect that the order in beauty reveals universal truth. If the human being is not preoccupied with earthly beauty, he or she will be able to focus on God. In this way, Augustine’s argument is platonic: physical beauty in art is derived from an absolute, unchanging, eternal standard. However, Augustine adds that the connecting link between the two is a sense of order that is recognized by the rational side of our human nature.

Instead of giving aesthetics a subordinate role, Hans Urs von Balthasar prioritizes the idea of beauty as integral to our understanding of truth, God, and goodness. According to Balthasar, God creates the image for us and the image is an example of a form. A form is something that is indissoluble and greater than the sum of its parts. Examples of forms include the gospel, marriage, a human being and being a Christian (Balthasar 26-7). A form involves a kind of mystery whereby all of the imperfections of the constituent parts are transcended and a new kind of more real and more true thing is brought into being that cannot be explained by, say, Aristotle’s four causes. For example, I can not describe a human being to an alien by listing that person’s chemical and psychological properties or by reciting an evolutionary history or genealogy. Those are part of the person but none of them really capture the person (Balthasar 26).

All forms have beauty and Balthasar states that “the form as it appears to us is beautiful only because the delight that it arouses in us is founded upon the fact that, in it, the truth and goodness of the depths of reality itself are manifested and bestowed, and this manifestation and bestowal reveal themselves to us as being something infinitely and inexhaustibly valuable and fascinating” (Balthasar 118). Because forms are beautiful, Balthasar states that we naturally are enraptured by them. Balthasar uses the example of the Christian parable of the merchant who finds a pearl of great worth and sells everything he owns in order to buy it. The person who experiences beauty knows the immense value of it and will do apparently irrational things to obtain the thing. According to Balthasar, Christians similarily are enraptured by the beauty of Christ and will do anything to continue to experience it (Balthasar 33). In fact, in order to prophesy for God, prophets must necessarily be artists and present their message in a form of art, namely poetry (Balthasar 44). However, the physical form of beauty “takes us only as far as the threshold” and afterwards, the beautiful form of Christ is experienced (Balthasar 65). So, for example, this picture would have beauty grounded in a reality while this piece of art would be beautiful only. According to Balthasar, worldly beauty (which includes the beauty of art and the beauty of worldly forms) and the beauty of God are equal in their vivacity and magnificence but Godly and Christian beauty are grounded in a solid reality.

Balthasar, like Plato, emphasizes the fact that worldly beauty can lead us astray from what is real (Balthasar 124). Therefore, Balthasar’s philosophy has platonic overtones but also prioritizes beauty in that the experience of beauty (both of aesthetic and art forms and of spiritual forms) as integral to the Christian experience. However, by broadening the meaning of beauty beyond just physical art, Balthasar connects sensible art to other valuable things, such as a human being or God.

According to Delattre, Jonathan Edwards, in a similar manner, finds beauty in different forms other than art: beauty is a characteristic of God, human spirit, ethics, justice, and anything else that is good (Delattre 2). In order to experience non-physical beauty, Edwards describes a sense different from hearing, touch, taste, sight, or smell: that is a spiritual sense. This spiritual sense allows grace to be felt and ethics to be beautiful (Delattre 5).

Edwards also prioritizes the idea of sensual experience. Sensual experience inspires human beings to affections such as anger, love, or impatience; these affections then cause human beings to will and then to act. Edwards states that “the affections of men are the springs of the motion: take away all love and hatred, all hope and fear, all anger, zeal and affectionate desire, and the world would be, in a great measure, motionless and dead” (Delattre 6).

Edwards’ interpretation allows the experience of physical beauty, say an image of a gorgeous natural waterfall, to be connected with spiritual experiences of “beautiful” ideas, such as when one realizes the beauty of democracy. Both are things that create affections in a human being and thereby motivate our actions. In this way, physical beauty is given a more prominent and important role in Edwards’ philosophy: a beautiful sculpture can inspire people to give large sums of money to museums or a beautiful person can inspire irrational actions.

Theological perspectives on aesthetics introduces ideas such as rational order in art, Balthasar’s “form,” a spiritual sense, and a broadening of the concept of beauty. Broadening of the idea of beauty allows the beauty found in aesthetics to be connected with things like justice and ethics and God. This allows us to account for why we enjoy artistic beauty: we recognize in it the same sort of either order or “form” that we find in other things. By connecting beauty to things like justice and ethics, it seems that aesthetic and artistic beauty is naturally made subordinate to these other things. However, by rejecting the idea of mimesis, physical beauty no longer becomes a shadow or imitation but instead is meaningful on its own.

Prioritizing beauty alienates art that is not beautiful, particularly modern art. However, I think that focusing on Edwards’ idea of a spiritual sense or using Augustine’s theory about order, will allow us to describe ugly art. When we look at art we are experiencing something that could be good, like experiencing justice, or bad, like experiencing hate. What is interesting about art is that we experience it and recognize order in it that is similar to the way in which we experience important, meaningful ideas. Although a painting is just a collection of paint and canvas, we value and name it “good” in the same way that we might value and experience love. This is somewhat like taste, in that our experience of the artwork is connected to some sort of feeling of approbation. However, this view allows art to be kept in contact with the rest of our values by making the act of experiencing art similar to the act of experiencing values or meanings. I think that this concept could be very useful in aesthetic philosophy because it achieves meaning for the artwork.

Works Cited

Augustine. “Selections from De Ordine.” Trans. Robert P. Russell. Philosophies of Art and Beauty. Eds. Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns. London: University of Chicago, 1976.

Balthasar, Hans Urs von. The Glory of the Lord. Trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis. Eds. Joseph Fessio S.J. and John Riches. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982.

Delattre, Roland Andre. Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards: An Essay in Aesthetics and Theological Ethics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968.

Heidegger

Just found this speech of Heidegger. It's the rectorate speech. I am still kind of heart broken that Heidegger may have been a Nazi. I think this is the speech. I got it from wikipedia. Enjoy.

http://www.eco.utexas.edu/~hmcleave/350kPEEHeideggerSelf-Assertion.pdf#search=%22%22The%20Self-Assertion%20of%20the%20German%20University%22%22

what if heidegger interpreted art like a 3rd grader?

my friend teaches in an art gallery and has quite the amusing blog based on conversations had with his students: http://artoflooking.blogspot.com/

enjoy!