Does the content of an art work matter as much as the form when it comes to beauty?
Schopenhauer says that the effect of (good) art is the temporary suspension of the Will, and the experience of the world as just Idea. Ok, we know the end goal of art. But I’m not sure if he explains where artists should look for in the making of good art.
For me, in order to truly interact with the viewer or listener and make this temporary suspension of the Will, a piece of art must communicate, beyond words of course, with the viewer.
To do that both have to be speaking similar languages. The piece of art must be in a “language” that the viewer understands. That’s why medieval art does not have the power on us as it did with peasants back then. We don’t understand it anymore.
But there is a language that we all understand, despite time and space, that of the Will. If I communicate the feeling of the Will in me in my art, as it is the same for all, it will communicate to all.
How to do that is what makes a great artist. Each artist will have to find its own way to hearing and understand the Will and then translating it into an artwork.
Also, from my reading so far of the fourth book, he says that abstract knowledge can only affect the direction of the Will, not the will. Could that also be applied to the arts, as art that makes us feel, good art, is beyond mere abstract knowledge, and bad art, such as mere depiction of reality as in neoclassicism or contemporary conceptual and social art, do not because they only communicate abstract knowledge? I know I need to further develop this thought, but I think I’m on the track to something.
I have been thinking about an idea that involves Kant, Schopenhauer and Taoism. Kant says that space-time only exists in the spheres of experience, of phenomenon, of the world as Schopenhauer’s Representation. Outside this sphere, in the noumenom, world as Will is timeless. The Tao can be understood as noumenom, Will.
In Taoism there is the idea of Wu-Wei, actionless action, which means that following the Tao, or being in harmony with the Tao, things flow naturally. It’s Joseph Campbell’s idea of follow your bliss.
If the noumenom, Tao, is timeless, it is as if everything that has ever happened, is happening and will happen, existed “at the same time” in the Tao. But as the concept of time and causality do not exist outside of experience, neither does the idea of determinism. It’s not that everything is already “written,” it’s beyond that.
So I keep thinking about the idea, even poetic, that when we follow our bliss, we are in harmony with the Tao, it’s as if we are aligned with all of this and the things that are meant to happen will happen naturally. But we can always get out of this alignment and upset everything, and that’s when things go wrong.
And the role of art is to “translate” the noumenom into individual experience, after all, everyone likes and connects with an art. So when this translation happens, this connection, beauty appears. What I told you at the beginning when we met, that beauty is not a “what” but a “when.”
I just solved the duality problem: Euclidean geometry. Kant’s great discovery, which he had when reading Hume, was a priori synthetic knowledge. Hume says that there is only synthetic knowledge a posteriori, after experience, and analytical knowledge a priori, when the predicate is already in the subject, all bachelors are single.
So Kant says that there is synthetic a priori knowledge and that is how we construct space-time, and he even gives examples of geometry and arithmetic. 5+7=12. In objects 5 and 7 and the sum, the predicate 12 does not exist a priori, but the result is already true a priori even before we do the sum, before the experience. The same is true for the sum of the internal angles of a triangle, or for the Pythagorean theorem, etc.
So I thought, when you’re navigating with a map, you calculate the angle of two visible landmarks between you and you, and you have their spatial position. The same is true for time, if there is a before and after and its temporal position.
The crux of the matter is the duality between these two milestones. The same can be said in relation to moral problems, whether there is good and evil, and our position in relation to both.
Even the problem of causality is solved this way, because we need cause and effect, before and after.
So the world is not dual as a by-product, as Kant says of the inescapable antinomies of pure reason. Duality is the way we construct the world of empirical experience, the phenomenon, the world as Representation.
What the world is not is Manichaean, black or white. Within duality there is always a spectrum, shades of gray.
All living beings are essentially food processors to keep their entropy stable or decrease if possible. I mean, we’re not much different from amoebas. We are multicellular amoebas. But the big difference is that we don’t just process food, we process information we receive from the environment. We are multicellular amoebas with a flashlight, where everything that exists in the world as a phenomenon is what the flashlight illuminates, and everything around us is the noumenom, the Tao. Time is nothing more than the processing of information, one bit after another. Bit, bit, bit… Space is the organization, using information, that we create to allow the capture of food. Plants don’t need space but they need time to process information and react accordingly, for example tobacco or mustard. But the point is, when we shine a light on a part of the noumenom with our flashlight, what is there comes into existence, becomes a phenomenon. However, our flashlight doesn’t illuminate everything that really exists there, a lot of things we still don’t see and still don’t “exist.” So I keep thinking, if by chance our flashlight suddenly illuminates something that “shouldn’t,” that something comes into existence “spontaneously.” It is not spontaneous generation in the classic sense of pre-Darwinian naturalists, it is a metaphysical spontaneous generation. It is a spontaneous generation that does not depend only on the object coming into existence, but on the subject creating the object.
I once commented on a YouTube video by an “intellectual”, one of those critics of political correctness, in which he accused Kant of being a solipsist. I and a few others said no and he replied, etc., always politely, and we ended up agreeing to disagree. My argument is that in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says that the mechanisms that create empirical experience, the world as Representation, have to be universal and necessary among human beings. So I got to thinking about the subjective and qualitative aspects of empirical experience. I had already come to the conclusion that we use Kantian transcendental aesthetics for morality (I don’t know if I’ve already written to you about this). That is, for all aspects of empirical experience we use the same mechanisms. And what we call objective reality is exactly the agreement between members of the same species that what is experienced is the same thing, real. If only I see the bottle of water on the table, I’m either crazy or delusional. The same applies to aesthetic and moral judgments (Critique of Judgment and Critique of Practical Reason). If only I think something is beautiful or ugly, if only I think something is moral or immoral, I am also “crazy” or delusional. As it is not objective and physical reality (Critique of Pure Reason) I have the excuse of calling it “my opinion” (which could also be right, after all it is subjective). So the conclusion I reach is that in all aspects of the reality in which we live (Pure Reason, Practical Reason and Judgment), the same mechanisms for creating empirical experience are used. Kant made a mistake when he attributed a different mechanism to each of them, and in fact it is all the result of transcendental aesthetics.
And this mechanism exists in a different way for each different species of living being. Each species has its own objective reality, its world as Representation.
And it is also because of this that excessively negative (e.g. abusive relationships) or positive (e.g. overprotective parents) environments and relationships are terrible for a person’s mental health. Because, as Cazuza sang, ‘Your ideas don’t correspond to the facts.’
Affective, moral and aesthetic realities are as real as physical ones. The big mistake of Cartesianism and the Enlightenment is to consider physical reality as “more real” than others. Big mistake.
Nietzsche helped me solve the problem of beauty and morality. The beautiful and the ethical. For him, the only morality is self overcoming, self-knowledge, working to always be a better person.
I had already discovered that art itself, that which comes from our ancestors in cave paintings and then in statues of gods, and eastern and western religious paintings, up to modern art, is self-knowledge from the artist to his viewer.
The artist brings the unconscious content, according to Jung, and when it crosses the border of pure reason, it becomes an image according to Kant’s transcendental aesthetics. These images come from Jungian archetypes and myths according to Joseph Campbell.
Within this, the artist needs to use Wittgensteinian language games to communicate with the viewer and for them to understand what was communicated, recognize in themselves what the artist saw, and thus get to know themselves better.
Then the beautiful happens. As I told you back when we met, beauty is not “what” it is “when.”
But now the question remains: what is or when is ugly?
“The soul never thinks without an image.” Aristotle
Beauty is moral in a nietzschean way, that of the betterment of the self.
We keep looking in others for what we lack in ourselves. That the other will occupy this space and will make us whole. But only we ourselves can make ourselves whole. The Self. Each of us is a Self in itself and we will never be able to merge with other Selfs to end our suffering and/or the suffering of others. The most we can do is help others to complete themselves.
The goal of the Self is to delimit the boundaries between itself, others and the outside world. But not to create a wall to hide behind. By delimiting the Self you become aware of who you are.
Selfhood = delimitation of the Self
Completing yourself is the same as becoming whole like the universe. A universe in itself. Or the same as the universe itself. Undifferentiated from the universe.
When you are whole in yourself as a person, you do not become a person different from others, but you become all people in one. It becomes undifferentiated from the whole.
I understood my mission as an artist. Taking the things that I have in my unconscious, in my shadow and translating them into the conscious, visible in the image of art. This way I will definitely help myself to suffer a little less and maybe it will help someone else too.
I want to show others the path I took from the inside of my head to the outside. From my inner world to the real world. When you are whole in yourself as a person, you do not become a different person from others, but you become all people in one. It becomes undifferentiated from the whole.
This is my favorite painting of his [Edward Hopper], New York Movie. I saw it for the first time at the Whitney Museum in NYC. It hit deep. Her loneliness is impressive. I don’t think anyone painted loneliness like him. I think it’s a loneliness that everyone has, existential, of being trapped inside ourselves, and despite trying our whole lives to get the fly out of the bottle, as Wittgenstein says, it will never come out and our little flies will never really leave. meet the flies in the other bottles. But at least we can make the bottle increasingly transparent. That’s the artist’s job, to make everyone’s bottles more transparent. That alone makes it all worth it!
There are no muses. There are interesting raw visual materials to be developed following the precepts of Kandinsky and Schopenhauer. The most interesting book ok Kandinsky is not ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art,’ but ‘Point and Line to Plane’ where he shows the inner dynamics of each of the three elements and how they develop from point to line to plane to make an image. And Schopenhauer because according to him, a successful artwork is one that causes the temporarily suspension of the the Will, allowing us to be free of suffering even if for a moment. In that moment we experience only the world as Idea.
Any kind of language, visual, corporal, musical and written/spoken is a metaphor/analogy of the subject of which it is a description of, and in doing so it never communicates the whole of the subject, always losing information in the process.
The problem of art is both schopenhauerian and wittgensteinian. Schopenhauerian because good art subject is a metaphysical one, the Will. Wittgensteinian because in order to communicate the Will it must be used a reference that we all understand, the platonic ideas. The deeper meaning of an artwork comes from the Will. But in order to objectify it in a piece of art, i.e, to bring in to the principium individuationis, it must be used a language. Languages only exist in the world as Idea. Platonic ideas are used as reflections/references of the Will, of the deeper meaning, in a way to objectify it, ergo beauty. Beauty is the use of platonic ideas as reference to communicate in language the Will. Because languages only exit in the principium individuationis, no language will ever be capable of communicating exactly the platonic ideas, therefore all we can have are metaphor, be in paintings, music, stories or dance.
Language games. All modes of communication are shadows (metaphors/analogies.) As such some of the meaning the transmitter wants to communicate to the receptor is lost in the way only to be completed by the receptor if it shares and understands the same codes used by the transmitter. Both parties are active in a communication. This is why contemporary, conceptual and social art do not work, or rather work only with whom the code is shared.
“Art is a harmony parallel with nature.” Paul Cézanne. Art is a metaphor/analogy
Language only is in relation to other. Meaning only is in relation to other. Art only is in relation to other. A movement only is in relation to other. In it self a movement is meaningless, it only is in the whole context in which it is happening at the moment. Therefore movement can be a language, e.g. dance.
Beauty is when that which is being communicated is communicated clearly. (What about ugliness?)
Time is inner sense. Space is the pure form of all outer appearances.
This visit to CCB made me think. Worringer in Abstraction & Empathy said that art over time acts like a pendulum, in calm times it reflects nature in figurative art, in times of change it goes to abstraction. This explanation never fully convinced me. Now I’m wondering if this isn’t what our dear friend Kant calls the antinomy of pure reason. A false antinomy. Abstraction and figurative art are not opposites. It is a false dualism that does not exist. There is no opposition in art. I think art has a lot to do with philosophy. Philosophy can separate into two large groups, one explaining things as they are, the other asking or imagining how they could be, or simply asking questions that have never been asked. So I think that over the millennia art can also have these trends, which are not opposites, they complement each other, explanatory art, which helps to explain everything from the entire cosmos to the current zeitgeist, and another, inquisitive art, which asks questions that many Sometimes you can’t even put it into words, as if they were issues deep in the collective unconscious that are still emerging and will need decades or centuries to come to the surface. For example, in Greece the idea of the individual arises and art reflects this. No more kings and gods. Or like here in the photo a work by Ed Reinhardt that is difficult, even impossible to put into words the question that is being raised. I’ll research this further.
I hope this makes sense. In Kant’s transcendental aesthetics, space and time are two a priori synthetic knowledge. They produce knowledge before the experience itself. Time is an inner sense to organize the order of experiences and space places us in relation to the outside world, in relation to things in themselves, to objects. And how do we navigate? By triangulation. Two eyes, two ears, as the parameters, and we triangulate the exterior point to locate ourselves.
But our world is much more than simply the external world of objects. It is also a world of human relationships and concepts to be navigated. And how do we navigate? By triangulation too. But this time the point is us and the two points are the extremes of the duality of things. Black and white, male and female, etc.
My point is that we use the same transcendental aesthetics to locate ourselves in this world. And it is also synthetic a priori knowledge because this location happens before any experience and it is also from there that we partially discover who we are. Because it is only in relation to something.
But why triangulation? By postulate 5 of Euclidean geometry, “if two lines intersect a third line in such a way that the sum of the interior angles on one side is less than two right angles, then the two lines must intersect on that side if they are extended indefinitely.” And our brain works in Euclidean geometry, just as the physics we “live” is Newtonian and not quantum or relativity.
So, that is, the world is indeed dual, beautiful and ugly, good and evil, love and hate. But it is only like this because of Kant’s transcendental aesthetics, in which we establish this duality a priori in order to locate ourselves and navigate both the physical world and the world of human relationships.
And this has several implications that I still want to develop later. For example, mythological and even mystical issues, zero, 1, 2, 3. Nothingness, unity (uruboros), duality and trinity. And artistic issues, of course, in the sense that art is a way for us to navigate this world. But I will develop this later.
Platonic ideas are the forms or the molds, archetypes, frames, in which the acts of the Will are understood given our apparatus.
Platonic ideas are the basic vocabulary of the world as Representation.
Platonic ideas are the tools with which we impose order to the world as Representation. Osiris Vs Isis. Culture vs Nature. Order vs Chaos. Class of things and events. Jordan Peterson 2014 Personality Lecture.
Platonic ideas give meaning to the world. Related to Dostoyevsky.
Dostoyevsky. Rationality is not enough to give meaning to life. Platonic ideas and Jung’s archetypes are the bricks beyond rationality that give structure to life. Moving upwards: platonic ideas; Urphänomem; archetypes; culture; individuality.
Life is the process of reversing, suspending or at least mitigating entropy inside a closed system that takes its energy from without either receiving it (vegetable) or moving towards it (animals). So given the right circumstances the process of life is inevitable. What circumstances are theses is impossible to tell as we know only one example of these systems. Once life begins it stays alive as long as there’s a source of energy. If the system can suspend entropy it just needs to stay alive, no need for change. It, how ever, multiply it self. Isn’t an organism that divides itself the same after the division or it just stayed the same only in more quantity? If it can reverse entropy, it means that it uses the energy to lower its entropy from one moment to another, i.e. changing itself. It organizes it self in ever less probable systems. Therefore is does not stay the same system. It can, however, multiply itself, but it must change as it multiplys in order to keep lowering the entropy. And finally if a system can only mitigate entropy, it must either change itself to lower its entropy as a new system or keep fixing itself to prevent the entropy to increase. In all of these scenarios, a system that remains unchanged, just stays alive for as long as there is a source of energy. If it needs at least to multiply itself to stay the same, it opens up the possibility of change. Just as much systems that change to lower the entropy, to either restore the system or lower its entropy. As these changes happen, and such (it needs development)
Life is eternal in the sense that we are one with the cosmos, we have always existed in the cosmos, we will always exist in the cosmos. We only wake up for a little while and then come back to the eternal dream. We’re like bubbles in pulsating and vibrating liquid sphere, we jump out of it for a brief moment but soon enough we come back to the whole.
I’ve been thinking about the relationship between life and entropy for some time now. The 2nd law of thermodynamics says that the entropy of a closed system always tends to increase if there is no external source of energy. Life is nothing more than a process of decreasing or stabilizing entropy, with the external source of energy in the Sun. So if life on Earth had the same origin, we can think that Life is the same process happening continuously since the beginning. I mean, spontaneous generation, abiogenesis, could very well have happened. And it only needs to happen once for the process to continue as long as there is an external energy source. I had been thinking about all of this for some time, but I was taking classes on Aristotle (Physics, Metaphysics, On the Soul and Nichomachean Ethics), and it clicked with me that his soul is exactly this process. Which is Schopenhauer’s Will, and the Tao. It does not explain spontaneous generation. But it shows that this only needs to happen once, and that, given the necessary circumstances, it can be a completely natural process. There is a lot to think about this, of course.
We are a function. Equations. Platonic ideas, urphänomem, archetypes are constants in the equation. Culture and personal experiences are variables.
Artists are shamans. They communicate the structures of the world, of life, of society, and of the self. These structures are Schopenhauer’s platonic ideas. Artists teach and guide people on how to navigate reality.
Artists help people bring to light in a tolerable way all aspects of life, desirable and undesirable. Platonic ideas and archetypes are the basic building block, the fundamental vocabulary with wich to make sense of life. But not in a the pragmatic way on a newtonian mechanics of the spirit. This vocabulary comes from way beyond what language can even fathom to achieve. To communicate this trancendental knowledge, a priori knowledge in fact, we have music, architecture, images and story telling, to create metaphors that illuminate within us. We all know it. But we don’t t know we know it. Art let us know…
Art is the objectification of the transcendental.
A transitive meaning can become intransitive depending on the frequency it’s used amongst a group of people.
Samadhi – Uttara Gita. Supra consciência. Ver fora o que está dentro. Paralelismo. Reflexo.
There’s no cosmic or universal conscience because the purusha only becomes conscious when is manifested in the atman. Or the atman is the conscious manifestation of the purusha.
Is art analytic or synthetic knowledge? A priori or a posteriori?
The three components of color; hue, saturation and luminance, are intuitions of the sense of sight that are transformed into color a posteriori.
Images are pure intuitions (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pg. 73, B35, A21, B36) and therefore are outside space and time, i.e., eternal.
It is proven that we don’t see reality as it is. Our sense apparatus is made not to capture as much information as possible. Quite the opposite. It is made to block information so to prevent our brains to be overwhelmed and to focus on what is in fact important for our survival.
Art history as it is taught in universities, as I learned in college, is wrong. The idea that art is in a teleological path from abstraction to naturalism, from cave paintings to a realistic depiction of nature “as it really is,” from sculptures of nature gods as depictions of our natural urges and unconscious drives to pure concept and reason and intellect over our is wrong, as has been proved over and over again by Alois Riegl, Wilhem Worringer, Otto Rank,
¨But the central question of all æsthetics is: how the artist achieve this effect, that enables so many others to identify themselves with his work?¨ Otto Rank, Art and Artist, pg 95.
Goethe Urphänomem = Köhler gestalt = Platonic ideas. Urphänomem, which all instances of that type could be seen as metamorphosis. Urpflanze is the Urphänomem of all plants.
“Whether this psychic structure and its elements, the archetypes, ever ‘originated’ at all is a metaphysical question and therefore unanswerable.” Carl Jung comparing Archetypes to platonic forms (he almost got it right, they are platonic ideas.)
A priori filters. Reality is shaped by what your goals are.
Abstraction is communication with the transcendental. Representation is communication with the worldly.
Archetypes, i.e. platonic ideas, are the only thing that actually exist.
What is empirically true is that which comes from a priori synthetic knowledge, i.e., that which is necessary and universal.
A healthy psyche is that which is aligned with the Will, in that it doesn’t fight, repress or try to control it. It works alongside in cooperation receiving the energy (libido) from the Will towards creation, work, etc. It does not mean that the Will controls the psyche or that there isn’t free will, quite the opposite because only a conscious and free person can work with the Will voluntarily. And only the conscious and free person can be aware of such dynamic.
The original function of art is to bring to consciousness the contents of the unconscious in visual form so people would achieve such healthy psyche because that meant that they were aligned with the godhead, with the world, etc. To have a healthy psyche, from the point of view of affection, meant that the whole world was in order, because from such point of view, the is that which is felt.
Shared inbodied plataform. Why you can share the same world with mammals but the world of octopuses are opaque to you. Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning video 07.
The self is what is constant throughout all the transformations. The Phoenix. Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning video 07.
Things are good and bad at the same time. People are good and bad. Society is good and bad. Nature is good and bad. Mother, father. Woman and man. Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning video 08.
Understanding is an echo of information. Emotional systems locked on. Jordan Peterson, Slaying the Dragon Within video, @29:00.
We contain information we can’t articulate. We act on it. Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning video 08. (Art communicates information that cannot be articulate.)
It’s very hard not to have the confidence of your father. Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning video 08.
Einfühlung — Röttgen Pietà
What’s being communicated is irrelevant and should not be asked.
True art comes with true independence of the mind and spirit. True art and artist is one with the Will. And yet one cannot paint the Will. One paints the world.
Nothing is not art.
The water keeps falling in the waterfall independently of you.
I just wanted to drink some coke after I decided to drink coke. I clearly felt that the decision to drink coke came before I was aware that I wanted to drink coke. The timeline was: I made the decision; I consciously made the decision; I suddenly became aware that I made the decision before I consciously made the decision; I consciously made the decision after I started moving my arm to grab the coke.
What’s being communicated is not pertinent, but rather that it is being communicated. Contemporary art is concerned manly with what’s being communicated.
“Meaning is use.” L. Wittgenstein (i.e. humor)
“In the beginning was the deed.” Goethe
“Understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than anyone may think.” L. Wittgenstein
“If you are puzzled by the nature of thought, belief, knowledge, and the like, substitute for the though the expression of thought, etc. The difficulty which lies in this substitution, and at the same time the whole point of it is this: the expression of belief, though, etc, is just a sentence; — and the sentence has sense only as a member of a system of language; as one expression within a calculus.” L. Wittgenstein, Blue Book pg. 42.
I’m reading Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Blue Book, and it’s one the most interesting philosophy books I’ve ever read. He explains how language works. He calls language games, because language only makes sense because we all understand the major parts of the rules. The specifics do not matter, as long as we share the big picture. A good example is humor, a joke is only funny if both parties have a deeper understanding of the whole culture (no wonder I was thought that australian humor sucked.) Language is not about specific rules or a specific meaning of a word or even what’s being said, but rather the greater scheme of things, in that, what matters is that something is being communicated, what and how do not matter. It got me thinking about the problem of contemporary art. Contemporary art is focused solely on what and how something is being communicated. And since each artist thinks the…
But in order to think something, you must put boundaries on what you are thinking. We can’t think of everything at once. And life is everything at once.
This is a great example of what Wittgenstein calls a private language, one that only the person understands and as such can change the rules any time and is useless in communicating with others. We already have such a beautiful and rich language game rules (broadly speaking, culture), in which we can communicate. Great artists are the ones that use the rules shared in order to communicate their message. As an artist I know that it is difficult as hell to do that, and although creating your own private language may give you an aura of intelligence, it falls short in communicating your message. As I like to say, what’s being communicated is irrelevant, what matters is that it is being communicated. I strongly recommend the reading of the Wittgenstein’s Blue Book.
I’m reading the blue book and I must say it’s one of, if not the most difficult books to understand that I’ve read. It’s not difficult to read because it does comes across as him dictating the book as he did. But actually this adds to the difficulty in understanding it, because it feels that he changes directions constantly.
But I think I may have understood a couple of points he’s trying to make:
1) the meaning of a word is not well defined, black and white. The image that comes to my mind is that of an electron, or any subatomic particle, that is not really a physical object with well definitely boundaries, but rather a cloud that, depending on the context in which you look at it has has certains behaviors. I.e. the
2) the meaning of a word depends on how each cloud stands in relation to others adjacent clouds in the context of the whole of the
3) the rules of the language game is the greater cloud made out of all these smaller clouds, that
4) the images and laws of the perception of the world as Idea influences on the understanding of the language.
The problem with contemporary art, and more specifically with conceptual art, is that it locks up the message being communicated in such a rigid form, away from its natural and organic form, that it imposes on the viewer one and only one understanding and feeling, if any, that which the artist intended to communicate, and it aggressively negates any other interpretation of the message, precluding the viewers from using any of the sociocultural, biological, historical and personal vocabulary they have available for themselves to understand the message on their own way, and even creating themselves their own message from the artifact created by the artist.
Transitive and intransitive in art. Bad art is transitive and good art is intransitive.
Something only exist in relation to the other. Consciousness is the relation of one thing to the other, subject and object. There must be subject and object for something to exist. Everything that exists is subject and object. The only thing that exists is consciousness. Outside consciousness nothing exists. Everything is consciousness.
The mind does not follow the principle of sufficient reason because it is not part of the world as Idea, but rather it is the subject that creates the world as Idea. The mind in the body is the “frontier” of Will and Idea. This frontier has many levels, from the deeply unconscious (ever “closer” to the Will) to the absolut conscious (that which commands the voluntary actions of the body, i.e. Idea). That which the mind creates is a direct manifestation of the Will. All creation (ideas) comes from the Will, traverses the many levels of the unconscious to conscious frontier…
All communication is at heart the Will communicating with it self. Any communication, even and specially between animals of different species and even the interaction between animals, plants and minerals, are only possible because we all share the same language, that of the Will.
The difference between humans and the rest of Ideas, is that we are aware of the existence of such game. Even though we don’t (and never will) fully understand the “rules” of such game.
Intransitive art comes directly from the Will and communicates directly to the Will. This is why it is intransitive, it is the Will communicating with it self. (It follows a priori knowledge.)
But why does some art communicates with some people and others do not? Because it depends on how it is created and then received by the intelligible and empirical characters of both the artist and viewer, in addition to their respective social, cultural and historical contexts.
Kant has this principle he calls the Synthetic Unity of Apperception, which is the “I think.” It takes all the stimuli captured by the sense organs and cognizes in one unified consciousness, in one thought. But, the synthetic unity of apperception can only cognize if something is given through the senses. Now, the artist does the same thing. He or She takes in all the stimuli from inside itself, emotions and thoughts, and from the outside, the environment,
When such intransitive communication happens is what we call Beauty. Thus, as mentioned above, beauty is not a “what” but a “when.”
Art communicates all levels of presuppositions; from platonic ideas, the very bricks of reality in the world as Representation; mythological; cultural; temporal and personal. The more comprehensive thesis presuppositions, more people will understand. From elementargedanke to völkergedanke to persönlichgedanke.
Beauty = Cortéx. Ugliness = Amygdala.
You are perfect the way you are because the only way that you are is by being you. Otherwise you would be someone else andas such you wouldn’t be you. Because the only parameter of your perfection is you, no one can be a perfect as you are you.
The making of art is the zen principle of actionless action. If you want you won´t. If you won´t, you will.
The singularity is an illusion. There are no boundaries between anything. I stop here you begin there. The number one is an illusion. Nothing is one. It only exists in the abstract knowledge of the world as Representation. The principle of sufficient reason. Not only our minds are a stream of consciousness, but our body are a stream of mass. We feed our mind with stimuli as we feed our body with mass. The same thing each is made of. We are it. We need stimuli as we need food. Nietzsche was right, the more we say no to suffering, the more we suffer. In accepting that we are just a “continuation” of the things in the world as Representation, the more we empathize with each other’s suffering thus lessening our own suffering. Suffered arises not from wanting and desiring. These are symptoms of not being one with the Will. The more we think and act as if we are single, apart from the Will, singles in the world as Representation, only in the world as Representation, the more we crave the unity with the Will. But since we live only in the world as Representation, we seek endlessly for other objections of the Will to satisfy this need. As nothing will satisfy, we are forever desiringand suffering. The answer is not to negate the suffering nor to try endlessly to satisfy it, the only way to to leave the forces that push us to and away from, is to leave the wheel of Samsara to the only point that nothing moves, to the very center, the immovable spot.
The problem is art that tries to say something. Because as such it will always stop at the limits of language. Any message that can be laid out in thought can be communicated in words. Everything else can only be passed on without words. ¨What can be said at all, can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.¨ L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Art is such silent communication. Therefore the artist must not be concerned with what being communicated, but only that it be communicated.
Instead of keep wanting, to keep persuing the never ending wheel wanting and suffering, in a everlasting forward motion, one should take the perpendicular direction and move to its very centre, the only motionless and immovable spot.
The scientific revolution didn’t just created atheists. It created mythic dissociation by making the biblical events into historical events and no longer just myths. People still believe but believe with the eyes of reason. If you try to make sense of a myth you kill the myth.
The Big Bang is the birth of consciousness. When one “thing” first becomes conscious of other. Before the Big Bang “everything” may have already “existed,” but, if each was not conscious of other, one did not exist to the other, thus nothing existed. As one is only in relation to other, if each does not relate to any other, nothing exists. It is the Will becoming conscious of it self. A Black Hole is the death of consciousness. In a Black Hole all becomes one. As one, there is no other for it to be conscious about. Thus nothing exists, and with it space-time.
The problem with a ‘clearly defined message’ artwork is that most assuredly it will not be understood by the audience in such a well defined and clear message that the artist intended because from the moment it leaves the artist studio, it becomes a piece in a much broader language game. The message might be clearer in the artist’s mind because he is aware of all the boundaries that delineate its meaning. But, as the audience comes from all sorts of walks of life, it is impossible for the message to be understood in such a clear way as it was originally intended, or even understood at all, because once you have a very sharp and well defined target, it becomes much easier to miss it.
Then you ask me how can the artist be sure that the message he intended to send will be understood. He can’t. The artwork will always depend on the rules of the language game at the time and place it’s being viewed by an audience in order to be understood. And the artist will never be able to communicate all the rules of the language game that he used in creating the artwork to the artwork itself in order to be understood.
How come we appreciate older artifacts and artworks, such as ancient artifacts and religious paintings from the early renaissance? We don’t actually have to appreciate the specific message the artist intended on communicating with the piece…levels…fibers…Birth of Venus…chinese paintings…from the Idea to the Will.
Concepts are at the edges of a language game. (Needs further development)
My father “I’m going to get the house plans (vou pegar a planta da casa.)” Caretaker delivers a fern (samambaia.) Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) 1991, is about him and his lover countdown to the end of their life after learning about his lover’s aids diagnosis. Audience, “these are two clocks.” Language games. Both situations are very similar. It may seem obvious for both my father and Felix Gonzalez-Torres that a “planta da casa” means only blueprint and two clocks touching and synchronized mean two lover’s relationship through time, respectively. But for the recipients of the messages, that come from…(needs further development) (see L.W. P.I. §139 – 142)
Nietzsche rausch
Birds making art. Nest ornamentation.
Let’s take a dog. Say a German Shepherd. We take it away from its mother as soon as it stops breastfeeding. We take it home. A place with a big garden, far enough from anything. So much so that it wouldn’t even be able to listen to other dogs barking. We don’t take it for a walk or let it meet any other dog until it reaches full maturity. When it first meets another dog,…
“There is nothing holding us together.” John Joseph Campbell, about Wittgenstein in language.
“We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts. Nothing insures that this projection will take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules), just as nothing insures that we willl make, and understand, the same projections.
That on the whole we do [make the same projections] is a matter of our sharing routes of interest and feeling, senses of humor and of significance and of fulfilment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation – [sharing] all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls “forms of life” Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less, than this. It is a vision as simple as it is difficult, and as difficult as it is (and because it is) terrifying.” Stanley Cavell.
“The mistake is to think that to find the standard of right or wrong, you have to look within the mind of the individual using the sign. Rather, you have to look at the customs or practices within which that individual’s use of the sign is located.” L. Wittgenstein.
“What you do with a picture is really up to you. You need to know how the picture can be interpreted just to be interpreted. You can’t just take it that the picture carries its own interpretation with it. So if you don’t understand the word at all, the picture is not going to determine the right way to interpret word.” Prof. John Joseph Campbell, The later Wittgenstein (part 2), YouTube.
Word language is a wittgenstenian convention that do not refer directly to anything in the individual or colective psyche. Images can be symbols that do refer to the individual or colective psyche. Word language is a code invented for easier comunication between individuals and groups with no direct ground in the psyche. Visual language can be (but mostly isn´t in the same way) a code used for easier comunication between individuals and groups with no direct ground in the psyche that didn´t need to be invented because it has grounds in the human psyche. Therefore it can be understood without the use of word language. Visual language can be understood because we know we share the same understanding of its meaning in a deeper way that we know we share the understanding of word language. We cannot refer to it using word language because we did not invent a code that we can all agree on that refers to it. But since we as humans share a very similar psyche (we know that our brains functions overall in a similar way because we are of the same species) we know how our brains react to the same visual stimuli. And it reacts in similar ways because we all must share the same code for some of the visual language. The same applies to olfactory and odoriferous.
Transcendental analysis and transcendental conditions. What must be in place a priori for us to understand experience. Kant. Prof. Dan Robinson, YouTube.
Space places us in relation to other. Distinction in space. That and I. Time in relation to ourselves. Sequence of thoughts ordered in time. Inner framework. Time from the mind can be imposed in space.
Word language is used solely in the phenomenon. It lives and it´s about the phenomenon. It´s source is only the humam knowledge and it communicates only human knowledge. It does not exists in the noumenon. Visual language on the other hand, does live in both noumenom and phenomenom. That is because the first source of visual language is not the humam knowledge, the first source is the world as Idea, the objectification of the Will. Knowledge is created in the experiencing of the world as Idea. Visual language then can be used in the phenomenom to communicate human knowledge (signs), but it can also be used in the phenomenom to communicate about the noumenom (symbols and art). Thus understanding can happen in the phenomenom only if we share the same language games of the word language. But understanding in visual language, because the language game that is shared is that of the Will, we can all understand when it refers to the noumenom, i.e., in symbols and art. And when such communication happens is when it is beautiful, rausch. Therefore, beauty, aestethical arrest, rausch, different from what Schopenhauer thought, is not the suspension of the Will and the experience of the world only as Idea, but rather it is the experience of the world as ONE Will. “You’ve got sadness in you, I’ve got sadness in me – and my works of art are places where the two sadnesses can meet, and therefore both of us need to feel less sad.” Mark Rothko.
Word language is always a posteriori. I must be in the form of a language game (L.W.). Visual language can be a posteriori, also in the form of language games as signs, but it is also always a priori, when the logic of language games does not apply because its meanings are not dependent on use, but rather need to be a priori in order of the very survival of the organism. As a by product of such a priori meaning, symbols and art can be understood by anyone independent of the language game one is inserted into.