Art and Understanding.pptx. Introduction to Philo of Arts

Understanding the value of Art through visual art

1. Art and Understanding

2. The value of art is cognitive (valuable as a source of knowledge and understanding)

3. Hegel Closely identified with this ‘cognitive theory of art’ See the importance of distinguishing ‘fine arts’ its nature and value Has an interesting thesis that art in the modern period is effectively dead

4. Hegel Sees philosophy as a progressive development Religion is the heart of this development Human knowledge is self-knowledge This progressive development is from art through religion to philosophy (developmentally related)

5. Hierarchy of value of art Poetry – pure ideas Music – time Painting – imaginative space Sculpture – depict human beings Architecture – heavy materials - Diminishing dependence of the material

6. The end of art?? Development of human understanding (art to philosophy) Development of art forms (architecture to poetry)

7. Cognitive theory of art Contemporary world regards science is the most successful form of knowledge Though art can teach us something about human nature, but the say must ultimately be borne out by the sciences. Hegel held that the value of art is to be ‘cognitive’

8. Nelson Goodman “A major thesis of this book is that the arts must be taken no less seriously than the sciences as modes of discovery, creation, and enlargement of knowledge in the broad sense of advancement of the understanding ” (Goodman 1968: 102)

9. What do we learn from art and how do we learn it? The information is not an integral part of the work Art and propaganda Propaganda – to secure belief and assent Art – to secure belief through reflective understanding We learn from art is not that paintings, poems, plays, can provide us with information or propagate opinions in attractive ways, but that they advance our understanding by enhancing or enriching it.

10. Some philosophers resisted on the grounds that ‘they sell out ‘art proper’ to the contemporary obsession with ‘science’ as the only thing that matters. “to the question of the ‘cognitive significance of art’ I say directly that although many works in many arts can and do give us knowledge of many kinds, nonetheless if this knowledge were the key and limit to the love of art, the world would be even sorrier than it is now” (Morgan, in Hospers 1969: 231)

11. Morgan’s view Cultural prejudice – a preference for explaining the value of art in cognitive terms. Must preserve its distinctive value The danger is it will lead us to think that the ‘truths’ conveyed are central, while the art which conveys them is secondary Sistine ceiling or scholarly treatise on Pauline theology? The Sistine ceiling can reveal something about the theology of St. Paul.

12. Morgan’s argument Any truth must be contradictable One artwork cannot contradict another Therefore, no artwork can as such be the assertion of a truth. This is good argument if it is in terms of truth, but Goodman expresses ‘understanding’ rather than ‘truth’ Understanding – defective or inadequate, but not negated. If artworks cannot contradict each other, it does not set ‘art’ apart from science Aristotle to Newton to E instein

13. Aesthetic cognitivism Valuable because of its ‘ability to enhance our understanding’ It can explain what makes an art especially important and why it described as lasting ‘achievements’ (insightful, profound) It is better regarded as a claim about understanding than truth.

14. For Aesthetic cognitivism Art enriches human understanding makes it relatively easy to explain the place of art in our culture. Cognitivism can make sense of someone’s undertaking a lifetime commitment to art, as a painter, poet, or composer. Art enables us to explain the way we discriminate between works of art. Cognitivism also enables us to make sense of an important range of critical vocabulary.

15. Against aesthetic cognitivism Goodman’s art and science Science as a general term, a wide variety of intellectual inquiry. (history, math, philosophy, astronomy, etc.) A movement of thought from an established basis to a potential conclusion via logic or set of rules of reasoning. Axioms to theorems, premises to conclusions Though terminology differs, they share the same basic structure. From base to terminus to base to terminus

16. Against aesthetic cognitivism In a work of art, there is no obvious parallel to the distinction between evidence and hypothesis and no obvious equivalent to the ‘logic’ of inquiry. Works of arts are works of imagination. Artists may indeed direct our thoughts, but they can hardly be said to direct them to reality. Their activity is not the recording of fact but the exercise of imagination. What it says or shows cannot be said or shown in any other form without significant loss of content. This is a consequence of the unity of form and content in art… works of art are ‘organic unities’ , that is entities so integrated that the alteration of a single item within them – a line in a poem, a colour in a painting, a harmonic progression in a piece of music – changes the whole work.

17. Another consequence of organic unities in art is that artistic insight and understanding cannot be paraphrased. as soon as we attempt to paraphrase the content of a work, that is, to present it in some other form, we destroy it. thus , the truth in art eludes us every time we try to explain it. the thought or idea in a poem cannot be expressed adequately except in the way the poet has expressed it. 3. The particularity of art . Aristotle claimed that cognition trades in universals, which means the acquisition of knowledge always involves a measure of abstraction and generalization.

18. Imagination and experience Does the fact that works of art are works of imagination really remove them from a concern with reality? Distinction between imagination and fancy. fancy is completely free, while imagination operates within constraints. Imagination is a mode of realistic depiction, but its realism does not lie in ‘mimesis’, the mere copying or reflection of facts external to the work. Fancy, on the other hand, is in fact a deliberate act of mind. Intellectual inquiry employs imagination. Indeed, the ‘facts’ may need imaginative treatment before they yield much in a way of a test, and often imagination has to be employed in rooting out the facts in the first place.

19. Map and Photograph Maps aim faithfully to represent the landscape whose features they record. Hence, it might be supposed that map making involves the complete suppression of imagination. However , geographical features are represented on maps by symbols. Hence, the usefulness of map, depends upon the imagination with which symbols are devised . As in the construction of a map , imagination is involved in the taking of the photograph, at a minimum in the choice of a point of view. The photographer’s imagination chooses a point of view and the photograph directs our perception to see what we would not otherwise have seen accordingly. Hence, the first objection is not to be so clearly drawn.

20. 2 nd objection Where is the ‘logic’ in art, the process of arriving at the truth that we might test? Science as a movement of thought, which directs the mind through a progression of thought – modes of understanding. Art – presents a point of view There is more to the life of the human mind than conceptual thought; the activity of the senses is as much mental as that of intellectual reflection. The contents of my mind are made up of the visible, audible, and tactile as well as the intelligible. Now, sensual experience, as an aspect of mind, is not a matter of passive seeing and hearing, but of active looking and listening. They also direct the mind of the audience.

21. Art as ‘ directing the mind’ the painter determines how see the objects in the picture. Composer determines how music is heard. Architect determines the order of shapes and materials. Artistic imagination directs the minds of readers, listeners, audiences and as yet we have seen no obstacle to the idea that this can be done to the advancement of understanding.

22. The objects of imagination What does it enrich our understanding of? What could artistic understanding be about? What is its objects? Deceptive photographs – photographs that give rise to mistaken ideas about the object photographed. We do not need to inspect the original subject of the photograph. We need not go beyond the photograph; its aesthetics merits and demerits are wholly within the work itself. The irrelevance of the independent subject is one consequence of the view that in art the ideal is unity of form and content. In other words, the art lies in the harmony of form and content.

23. The objects of imagination Photographers, poets, and painters can direct the mind, but the point of their direction does not make reference to anything beyond the work. Collingwood refutes the idea that what is valuable in portraiture is what philosophers of art often refer to as mimesis (imitation), the ability to produce convincing resembles. He assumes, correctly, that we can tell the difference between good and bad portraits even when we do not know what the sitter looked like. It follows that what matters is not faithful copying of the original.

24. The objects of imagination Nevertheless, it does not follow that these works do not point beyond themselves in any way whatever. While not being chiefly concerned with these or those objects, they may still be related to more general aspects of human experience. Since the merits of a work of art can only be looked for within the elements of the work itself, they cannot lie in its correspondence with things that lie beyond it, but must be found in the way those elements unify form and content. However, this does not rule out all possible relations between a work of art and an external reality. Indeed the insistence upon unity of form and content as an artistic ideal may work to the advantage of the idea that art has cognitive value.

25. Art and the World What then is this relation? We first look at art and then, in the light of it, look at reality in order to see it afresh. S ometimes, even, it is thanks to art that we become properly aware of some aspect of experience fo r the first time.

26. Art and the World “nature is complete, suppose you reproduce her- (which you can’t) there’s no advantage! You must beat her then, for, don’t you mark, we’re made so that we love. First when see them painted, things we have passed, perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see; and so they are better, painted…” (lines 297-303) Robert Browning Mere replication of ‘things out there’ is worthless since copying can’t improve upon the things it copies.

27. Art and the World To appreciate the extent of the alteration in thinking about art that this reversal brings about, more needs to be said about the abstract metaphysical notion of the ‘world’ that this way of speaking employs. The ‘world’ in this context is to be understood not as a set of objects, but as the generalized content of our experience. Experience – specific context, human connection, sense experience

28. Art and the World Using experience in this everyday sense, we can sya that the life of a human being is in large part a matter of experience. Memory, imagination, anticipation of the future, intellectual abstraction. In paying attention to what is happening around us and to us, it is these other aspects of mind that help us connect up our experience and make it meaningful by linking past events, present experience, hopes for the future and rationally tested beliefs.

29. Art and the World Much of our everyday experience is made up of encounters with words and actions and gestures of other people. the meaning of these is not always plain; the same words can indicate anger or upset or anxiety. To interpret other people’s behavior adequately we need imagination. Some people are much more sensitive to nuances in speech, appearance, and gesture than others. It is this variation that creates a significant role for art and artists.

30. Art and the World Much of our everyday experience is made up of encounters with words and actions and gestures of other people. the meaning of these is not always plain; the same words can indicate anger or upset or anxiety. To interpret other people’s behavior adequately we need imagination. Some people are much more sensitive to nuances in speech, appearance, and gesture than others. It is this variation that creates a significant role for art and artists.

31. Art and the World Works of art are works of imagination, and that the imagination of the artists can transform our experience by enabling us to see, hear, touch, feel, and think it more imaginatively, and thus enrich our understanding of it. To appreciate this fully, it is essential to see that the process involves moving from art to experience, not the other way around… art deals in particulars while understanding deals in universals. We need generality. How then can particular images illuminate universal experiences?

32. Art and the World The value of a picture lies not in its supplying an accurate record of an event but in the way it enables us to look at the people, circumstances, and relationships in our experiences. The question to be asked of such a work is not, ‘ is this how it really was?. But rather, ‘does this make us alive to new aspects of this sort of occasion?

33. Understanding as a norm The belief that art can illuminate experience by making us more sensitively aware of what is contains – is much more plausible as a normative than a descriptive doctrine. As a normative doctrine, it says that the arts have the capacity to enhance our understanding of experience, not that all and every work of art does this. It also holds that, when artworks do enrich our understanding of experience, this gives us reason to value them more highly than if they simply gave us pleasure or were beautiful to contemplate. It is dogmatic to insist that only art that enhances understanding is valuable. (dogmatism)

34. Understanding as a norm it is judgement of this sort that incline people to claim and others to deny that the work of people like F landers or Woodhouse is art. But once all the relevant facts and distinctions have been set out, this is a dispute about labels and nothing very much turns on it. “depth” and “profundity” There is more to art than the pleasure without denying that pleasure is sometimes one of the things that makes it valuable. Normative theory – how art should be valued, not just how it is valued. It does not imply anything about personal taste. It should not be based on cultural prejudice. Contribution for our understanding of human nature and condition.

35. Art and human nature Scientific – natural world and physical universe Artistic – human nature and human condition. By providing images through which our experience may be illuminated. OBJECTION: CULTURAL RELATIVISM - concepts of human nature and condition are not fixed. - thus, it cannot be given universal content. No point of reference Human condition is made up of elements which affect all human beings – susceptibility to cold, hunger, and disease, the nature of childbirth, pain, illness, bereavement, and mortality. (all of these provide the recurrent themes of songs, story telling, and depiction in every culture)

36. Art and human nature It is now time to turn from the general to the specific , and from the possible to the actual. Can the claims of cognitivism be made good with respect to all the different art forms? And can it be shown that cognitive enrichment is an actual and not merely a possible value? Can it be shown that absolute music can illuminate human experience? Could the building of a temple or a palace be the construction of an image from which we might learn about the human condition? Could a dance be about human nature?

37. Summary Aesthetic cognitivism – art is more valuable when it serves as a source of understanding, which in principles puts art on par with science, history, and philosophy. Art and experience – imaginative art can illuminate our experiences Artistic value – aesthetic cognitivism explained why we value great works of art more than other forms of art. Specific art forms – could music, architecture, and dance be about human nature and human condition?