Philosophy of Art
Through his book The World as Will and Representation, in which the author claimed that the world was driven by an unsatisfied will, Arthur Schopenhauer influenced a philosophy student, Friedrich Nietzsche at the University of Leipzig. Nietzsche found Schopenhauer as the best possible educator and began to convince his friends to join his new faith, where they consulted Schopenhauer’s work in every trouble that they encountered. Friedrich went further dedicate to him one of his essays ‘Schopenhauer als Erzieher’, one among his ultimate meditations, to show his appreciation. The significance of philosopher rests more on the example that he sets both in his book and in his life than on specific doctrines. His example states that a philosopher is a genuine man not a great thinker, and he is preeminent in these virile qualities (Friedrich Nietzsche).
Schopenhauer influenced Nietzsche to believe that happiness is not a priority and that an end to life means an establishment of a nobler culture and ultimately the production of genius. A good philosopher according to Nietzsche is the one who portrays the meaning of life, and shows the priorities of a true culture.
Schopenhauer’s tragedies
Schopenhauer distinguishes three types of tragedies
- Blind face- such as the title of Shakespeare’s book Romeo and Julie” most of the tragedies of the ancient.
- Characters situated with regard for each other such that their positions compels them to do each other the greatest injury, neither of them being entirely on the wrong.
The third tragedy was the most deep and important to Schopenhauer than the other.
This is because he believed that the latter tragedy provided a larger platform for the destructive manifestation of the will- it brings ‘tragedy’ close to home.
Schopenhauer finds tragedy significant to art due to its immense effects, and its difficulty in achieving.
G.W. Hegel’s highest art
Hegel’s philosophy provides a wide-ranging account of beauty in art. It displays the development of art historically and portrays some of the individual arts such as architecture.
According to Hegel, the artist ought to have a good understanding of history and a theoretical conception of art. The romantic form of art constitutes the absolute end of art as an expression of the absolute. Hegel believes that a creative artist has to deal with critique, interpretation, and reflection of art.
Representationalism versus Formalism
The idea that the mind perceives only mental images- objects outside the mind forms the basis of representationalism. Formalism analyses the way objects are made and their physical aspects. Formalism emphasizes elements such as colour, shape and texture rather than the other concepts. Philosophers consider the context of the work for instance, the reasons for its creation to be of secondary importance.
Hume versus Nietzsche
David Humes came up with ideas that he based his moral stand on;
- Reasons alone cannot be a motive to the will.
- Reasons do not make up moral distinctions.
- The public derives moral distinctions from the feelings of approval or disapproval.
His view of art is different from that of Nietzsche in that Nietzsche feels that the moral standard that Hume employs kills the vitality of the soul instead of adding value to artwork.
The main point of expressionism
Expressionism is a style of art adopted mostly by German people in the early twentieth century. The main idea behind expressionism was to portray a subject of art as expressing the artist’s inner state. Philosophers value expressionists as a spontaneous feeling, which unlike professionalism is an artless, emotional art. The difference between representationalism and expressionism is that it depicts an object in a recognizable manner, especially in the portrayal of the physical surface of the art object.
Adorno’s theory of Aesthetic
Theodor W. Adorno although not well known among Anglophone philosophers, was an important German philosopher and social critic especially after the World War. He came up with the Aesthetic Theory, a book that was published in 1970, which sort to explain the relations between art and society. He argued that the previous eras of art had been restricted by cults and imperial functions and that modern art’s freedom from such restrictions had led to the expansion of critical thinking capacity and increased formal autonomy. Following the expansion, Ardono felt that the art had an increased responsibility for societal commentary.
However, he championed against the idea that politicized content is art’s greatest critical thinking but rather a more abstracted type of truth-content found in the relation between many dialectical interactions emerging from the artwork and the tradition of the society as well as internal dialectics.
References
Cohon, R. (2010). Moral Philosophy. Retrieved from Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy.
Conversi, L. W. (n.d.). Tragedy. Retrieved from Encyclopaedia Britannica.
