Quote:
Originally Posted by A Little Green
A killjoy. An attempt to analyse and make sense of a thing of beauty, whether it is an art guy explaining why some element in a painting is in the specific place it happens to be in or a scientist explaining how the sea is made of H2O molecules, is something I can't help but regard as interesting but dull - something that takes away the mystery.
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It reminds me about the anecdote on Goethe which I don't don't remember exactly but I can outline the idea of it.
Goethe was climbing the Alps with his romanticist friend and when the sun set in beautiful colours his friend asked him how dull it would be for Goethe as he was a student of light and colour as a "scientist", that he wouldn't get the feeling of it. And then Goethe replied that on the contrary, knowing how the colours were born made it even a greater experience as it was not only an aesthetic but also an intellectual experience at the same time...
Like Morthoron implies, we have a nice divide between the romanticism of feeling and then the intellectualism of reason. Not that he suggests we should choose between the two - and not that I suggest it. But we should be aware of the divide and that none is the clear champion.
I mean "take away the mystery"? I do hear that oftentimes at school. But what does that actually mean? Why are the "mysteries" of nature poorer than those produced by our poor imagination (I mean the "unicorns" or " anthropomorphic Gods", really, how low can you get)? I mean science has explained a lot of things that had a "mystical" explanation earlier but aren't their explanations even more mysterious? The idea that matter is actually composed of tiny particles and are merely constructed of nothing? How do you understand that even if it's taught to you at school? There's no mystery in there? Or that those tiny particles actually can be either waves or energy? What about the dark matter? Black holes sucking everything into them? Or the microscopic life-forms discovered that are more dreadful than any aliens Hollywood has produced, life-forms discovered from 10 kilometers+ under the sea thriving without sunlight, in acid... Would any human imagination thought of these unless the world threw them on our inquisitive eyes and minds?
In medieval times it was thought that human imagination was "connecting those things in nature that were not connected and dividing those which were not divided in nature". How true (think of the unicorns or anthropomorphic Gods again)! All fine and dandy, but dependent on our everyday vision of the world itself, built from our experiences...
Or to pose the question from a different angle: why is something you can't articulate dearer than that which you can articulate? And this I think is more to the point made here.
Okay too late (RL) to press the point, but let me just make a few questions...
In music as such (non-vocal music that is) or in non-figurative art one could say there is no easily discerned conceptual substance. But every novel, every poem, every song, every theater-piece is conceptrual through and through. They are built from concepts and their combinations. The question remains are the individual works immune to translation, can they be described meaningfully in other concepts?
The romantics made a difference between
allegories and
symbols meaning that an allegory was something you could explain with other concepts (eg. describe what it meant; like a scale meaning justice or a lion meaning courage etc.) but with symbols you could only point at the work and say: that is what is meant in there.
So is a piece of art a symbol in the romantic sense? Our culture tends to champion that view today...
Let me draw a parallel here. The romantic movement also "discovered" imagination again. To them it was inspiration, something coming from the innermost recesses of our individual being (paving the way for psycho-analysis and the concept of unconscious). But "inspiration" had meant something completely different before the 19th century Germany (and France).
In-spirare actually means to "breath in", to breath in from outside - from the muses in the earliest notes of our culture.
So where do our "new" ideas - that make works of art, engineering, science... - come from; from outside of us (eg. the shared world open to all of us) or from the innermost recesses of absolutely particular individuals?
How should we "read" art? As something that can be shared with others - even if disagreeing but then again helping others to see things they don't see (or getting "corrected" or being opened with new perspectives by others) - or as private experiences closed to any conceptual sharing just keeping with our own feeling here and now?
Bah... the time is running. But I hope I managed to make at least a few provocative intrusions into the subject...
And to avoid any misunderstandings, I'm not sure I'm an advocate of either extreme view I've built up here. Like Aristotle said, the virtuous way is somewhere in between the extremes...