90. Ethics, art and education

The Dutch philosopher Fons Elders proposed that ethics concerns protest against what exists: This is not as it should be, while aesthetics concerns acceptance of what exists: This is what it is. And indeed, the classical Greek term aesthesis means perception, seeing what is. Aesthetics is being in the world.

This reminds us of Heidegger. In item 40 of this blog I discussed Heidegger’s being in the world as a process by which the self is constituted by action in the world. I connected this with pragmatism (see items 23, 26, 28): the view that ideas guide action but are also changed in action. So, being in the world is not static, but a movement of constitution, of self and of ideas. This forms one of the sources of existentialism.

In item 41 I made a connection with entrepreneurship as a pragmatist search for novelty by exploring the limits of what exists in the economy, by adapting and transforming ideas and practices as they fail or open up novel opportunities.

As I discussed in item 80, Heidegger referred to art as world making. This indicates a change, replacement or alternative to what exists. That may entail protest against what is, but it may also leapfrog any such protest in going ahead to make a new world, in moving away from what exists. In preceding items in this blog I discussed how art goes about taking us outside what is, in world making.

Ethical protest entails criteria for good and bad. Where do those come from? Are they independent, outside from what is? Can one criticize what is without first creating a perspective from which criticism is made? Perhaps ethics requires art to create such new perspective.

What is the relation between art and education? If education includes ethics and ethics requires art, then education requires art.

But this goes deeper. Education is derived, literally, from the Latin educere, which means ‘leading outside’ from a given situation. In other words, education is not initiation into what exists, and certainly not subjection to existing authority in knowledge or ethics. It is giving means to find one’s own way. It is guidance to freedom.

If immersion and then departure from what exists arises in art, in forms, colours, movement and sounds, and arises in entrepreneurship, in action in the economy, and if education is helping to depart from what exists, then education needs art, not only for ethics but for life more widely, including entrepreneurship.

So why are modern societies saving on art? Will that not entail a thwarting of ethics, education, and entrepreneurship?

89. Aesthetic judgement

Is aesthetic experience purely subjective, or is it also objective, somehow, or inter-subjective? Can we give arguments for our aesthetic appreciation, trying to get others to agree? And what kind of agreement could that be? How rational could it be? The philosopher Kant posed this question. Rather than elaborating his view I offer my own, which resembles Kant’s but goes its own way.

For this, I continue the analysis of meaning in connection with art that I started in item 80 of this blog. In my earlier discussion of meaning (in items 32-34) I proposed that rational understanding of something entails that we categorize it, i.e. assign it to a concept. We do this by picking out perceived features of it, depending on the context, to see if they fit the concept. We do this by comparing features to a prototype or a script that represents the concept. That is how we make sense of the world. The process depends partly on shared linguistic practice and partly on our personal cognitive make-up with its repertoires of connotations that we attach to things, developed along the course of our lives.

In item 81 I proposed that art upsets or bypasses this process: observed features do not fit into established categories. In that sense art is not representational, embodies what cannot yet be thought. The flower in a painting does not quite fit our notion of a flower. In abstract art it is not even clear what the corresponding concept might be. Art is a way of world making, as Heidegger said. Art explores or suggests new scripts, in new connections between old and new features. In some arts that yields a static structure, as in painting and sculpture, in others it is sequential, in a new connection between elements in time, as in music, film and theatre,

Since scripts are part of cognition, in script making art touches upon cognition, but rather than script usage it is script building, cognition on the move. There lies a connection between art and discovery.

However, script building is not a solipsistic affair. Existing scripts are widely shared, more or less, between people, as part of language and culture, and from such shared scripts and their usage we infer principles and elements of script building that are likely to also be shared more or less between people to the extent that they belong to the same culture. Our ways of world making can thus be recognizable to others. On that basis one can try to objectify aesthetic experience, in pointing at shared principles of script architecture and construction. In avant-garde art even those principles are set aside.

In the way described, art lifts us beyond conceptual understanding and ordinary experience. In that sense it is transcendent, going beyond the world or ourselves. It can be ecstatic, lifting the self out of itself, or sublime, rising above existing concepts, rules or standards. And there, as Kant said, art can touch upon religion, and it can serve to engender religious experience.

88. Wabi-Sabi

In this blog I have pleaded for imperfection on the move (see item 19): for a positive appreciation, not just acceptance, of imperfection, the impossibility, even undesirability of absolutes, and acceptance of change, and of the provisional nature of ideas, knowledge and morality. In change, imperfection can become less imperfect without ever becoming perfect. In that change lies the journey of life. And as Nietzsche indicated, pain, misery, grief, and anguish are part of that life and should be faced rather than hidden in the distraction of false beliefs and hopes. Is there some ultimate goal of that journey, beyond life? Who knows? Probably not. But cannot life yet flourish, and isn’t that enough?

How does this relate to art? Does art aim to achieve perfection, or can it rejoice also in imperfection on the move? There is a Japanese tradition in art that does just that. It is called wabi-sabi, which means the beauty of imperfection, impermanence and incompleteness. It stands in contrast to modernism, in a way that perhaps resembles my opposition to Platonic and Enlightenment ideals of context-independent, immutable universals.

In his booklet on wabi-sabi Leonard Koren (1994) lists the following differences between modernism and wabi-sabi:

modernism                                                               wabi-sabi

 the box as metaphor (rectilinear, precise,  contained)   the bowl as metaphor (free shape, open)

manmade materials                                                     natural materials

ostensibly slick                                                           ostensibly crude

needs to be well-maintained                                        accommodates to degradation and attrition

purity makes its expression richer                                corrosion makes expression richer 

solicits the reduction of sensory information                  solicits the expansion of sensory information

is intolerant of ambiguity and contradiction                  is comfortable with ambiguity, contradiction

cool                                                                            warm

generally light and bright                                              generally dark and dim

function and utility are primary values                           function and utility are not so important

perfect materiality is an ideal                                        perfect immateriality is an ideal

everlasting                                                                  to every thing there is a season

I would not want to subscribe to all these features of wabi-sabi, to the point of rejecting modernism. I still rejoice to see modernist Bauhaus architecture, for example, though I might not want to live in it, but I equally rejoice in seeing an gnarled old wooden door about to fall from its rusty hinges, though if I lived there I might want to replace it.

Are we here facing Nietzsche’s opposition between Apollo and Dionysus again, in a different form? Before (in item 81), I argued for a dynamic unity of the two, an echo of dialectics in philosophy, where there is temporary balance, reduction and purity, that is next carried into novel settings that break harmony, in a falling apart of an established order that meets its limits. I would like to see wabi-sabi decay as a movement towards new life, in new forms that aspire to a perfection that is never achieved. 

I am reminded of the late self-portraits of Rembrandt: the decay of old age, lines becoming diffuse in rough, thick strokes of paint, the ruby blotch of a thickening nose, astonishingly expressionist for his time.   

87. Music

Here I continue a series on art that was started in item 8 of this blog.

What makes music different from other arts? I am not sure and can only offer some conjectures.

From very early on, in ancient cultures, music was seen to be transcendent, conveying religious inspiration, in the form of chants or songs. Does music reach the sublime more than other arts, perhaps?

For Schopenhauer art in general yields a temporary escape from the drive of the will, and to him music was especially conducive to such transcendence.  

In contrast with literary art, music is not logos, not words and concepts. In item 80 I suggested that art may upset or disturb reference, change meaning, but perhaps for music we should say that it is beyond meaning, reference, or lies outside it. In my discussion of meaning, in item 32, I defined sense as the way in which we establish reference. If art in general meddles with that, how does music fit in? Does it not fit, or does it seek reference beyond concepts, beyond the world and ordinary experience? This would connect with the idea that music is more prone to the sublime, and a more ready instrument for religion.

In item 29 I discussed the object bias that I suspect in our cognition: the hard to avoid metaphor of seeing abstract notions, such as happiness, or sorrow, or meaning, as objects moving in time and space. Perhaps music helps us to escape from that bias, in explorations beyond objects.

In contrast with visual arts (except film and theatre) music is dynamic, forming a connection between the present, past and future, in the development of a musical theme. Or, in terminology that I used before (in item 34): a script connecting elements in time. Thereby, perhaps music offers what Henri Bergson called duration, a subjective experience of time not as linear progression but as punctuated by rhythm, slowing down, accelerating, bending back, repeating and modifying the past and anticipating the future.

I proposed earlier that art is a breaking of universality, in a declaration of independence of the individual. Perhaps music goes beyond individuality, not in constituting a universal but in capturing the movement of the individual, in its emergence and transformation. 

Or does music go back to the womb: the beat of the heart and the echo and swirl of the waters? And if indeed music appeals to reminiscence of water, is it in our genes, from the time that we evolved out of fish from the sea? Could that be part of the evolutionary substrate of aesthetic judgement that I discussed earlier (in item 83)? 

David Stubbs asked Why do people get Rothko but don’t get Stockhausen? Why do abstract pictorial and plastic art create hypes, fetching astronomic prices and long queues at exhibitions, while modern music can barely survive? My answer would be as follows. Children rarely grow up with modern music and hence do not learn to appreciate it, while they are all the while confronted with abstract forms, in architecture, decoration, and logo’s. Children who do get acqainted with modern music early on are much more receptive to it.