PHILOSOPHY An introduction

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PHILOSOPHYAn introduction
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LECTURES

• I. What is in a Word?
• II. Virtues and Principles.
• III. Mind and Body.
• IV. Politics in a Globalizing World.
• V. Science and Society.
• VI. The Value of Beauty.

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VI. THE VALUE OF BEAUTY
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• AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE
• What is aestetics all about?
• 2. WORLD-DISCLOSURE
• Are there any similarities between art and
  science?
• 3. THE PROMISE OF HAPPINESS
• How to conceive the relation between art and
  society?

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I. AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE
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AESTHETICS

• Aesthetics gt a subdiscipline of philosophy that
  is engaged in the critical reflection on art.
• Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762) introduced the
  concept aesthetics.
• Central questions
• 1. What makes an object beautiful, sublime,
  disgusting, entertaining, boring, tragic,
  humorous, etc.
• 2. Has art a truth-function?
• 3. What ist the difference between an aesthetic
  and a non- aesthetic experience?
• 4. Is the world of art a specific sphere in
  society?

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CONVENTION AND ESSENCE

• TWO KIND OF DEFINTIONS OF ART
• Conventionalist definition gt arts institutional
  features, art changes over time, relational
  properties of artworks.
• Essentialist defintion gt there is an essence of
  artworks that is transhistorical and
  transcultural.

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FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

• MAIN WORKS
• Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik
  (1872).
• Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882).
• Also sprach Zarathustra (1883-85).
• Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887).
• Antichrist (1888).

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THE BIRTH TRAGEDY

• Schopenhauer gt non-rational forces reside at the
  foundtion of all creativity and of reality
  itsself.
• Dyonysian gt the strongly instinctual, wild,
  amoral energy within pre-Socratic Greek culture,
  i.e. a creative and healthy source.
• Apollonian gt the forces of logical order and
  stiff sobriety.
• The dionysian has been submerged and weakend as
  it became overshadowed by the Appolonian.
• Art gt the resurrection and fuller release of
  Dionysian artistic energies.

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II. WORLD-DISCLOSURE
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NELSON GOODMAN (1906-1998)

• Main works
• The Structure of Appearance (1951).
• Languages of Art (1968).
• Ways of Worldmaking (1978).

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THE SYMBOLIC CHARACTER OF THE WORLD

• Art cannot sharply be distinguished in goals
  and means from science.
• Novels, paintings, symphonies and plays are just
  like scientific theories symbols that classify
  parts of reality.
• Peoples use symbol to discover, understand and
  construct the worlds of their experiences.
• The languages of different forms of art are
  helpful in the disclosure of the world.

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WORLD DISCLOSURE

• World disclosure creating new horizons.
• Methods of creating new horizons
• 1. Deconstruct and reconstruct.
• 2. Re-order things.
• 3. Add or exclude.
• 4. Using new metaphors.

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HOW DOES NEWNESS COMES INTO THE WORLD?

• The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity,
  impurity, intermingling, the transformation that
  comes of new and unexpected combinations of human
  beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs.
  It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the
  absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a
  bit of this and a bit of that is how newness
  enters the world.
• Salman Rushdie

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III. THE PROMISE OF HAPPINESS
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WALTER BENJAMIN (1892-1940)

• Main works
• Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928)
• Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter der technischen
  Reproduzierbarkeit (1936)
• - Das Passagenwerk (1981)

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THE LOST AURA

• The development of art gt artworks lost their
  aura.
• Autonomous art had an aura.
• The begining of artistic production gt ceremonical
  objects designed to serve in a cult.
• What mattered was their existence and not their
  bein on view.
• They had an aura because they were embedded in
  ritual and tradition.
• Aura gt a magical authority and authenticity.
• The seperation of art from ritual gt art became
  more and more a product for exhibition and
  inspection.

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• There is a painting by Klee called Angelus
  Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move
  away from something he stares at. His eyes are
  wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.
  This is how the angel of history must look. His
  face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of
  events appears before us, he sees on single
  catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon
  wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel
  would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make
  whole what has been smashed. But a storm is
  blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his
  wings it is so strong that the angel can no
  longer close them. This storm drives him
  irresistibly into the future to which his back is
  turned, while the pile of debris before him grows
  toward the sky. What we call progress is this
  storm.

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THEODOR W. ADORNO (1903-1969)

• Main works
• 1. Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947)
• 2. Philosophie der neuen Musik (1948)
• 3. Minima Moralia (1948).
• 4. Ästhetische Theorie (1969).

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OBJECT AND RESOURCE

• CULTURE CAN BE
• 1. The object of critique gt cultural industry.
• 2. A source of critique gt modern art.

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DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT

• Consists of five essays 1) concept
  enlightenment 2) Odysseus 3) Sade 4) The
  Culture Industry 5) anti-Semitism.
• Central thesis enlightenment turns against
  itself.
• Enlarged concept of enlightenment.
• Enlightenment starts already before the 17th
  century.
• It is a sketch of a continuity between myth and
  enlightenment.

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MASS DECEPTION

• Culture industry
• Standardization.
• Pseudo-individualization.
• Undermines autonomous art.
• Cultural means to defend the status quo.
• Profit motive transferred to cultural entities.

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ART AS SOURCE OF CRITIQUE

• To make you hear what is unheard.
• To make you sea what is unseen.
• To present you a language you didnt know.

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THE CRITICAL FUNCTION OF ART

• Good art is the best antithesis towards the
  status quo of society!
• Negative aesthetics gt present the non-identical.
• Good art has a truth-function.