Art and Beauty as ways of Knowing
How knowing through aesthetic experience can balance out tendencies towards alienation and dissociation within conceptual forms of knowledge
If you stop someone on the streets and ask them which members of our community are pursing truth they may mention physicists, biologists, social scientists, philosophers, theologians, or religious sages but it is unlikely they will mention artists. In our culture, the key to the realm of truth is thought to abide within the life of the mind. Surely the clay used to make sculptures, the instruments used to make music, and the non linear language of poetry pales in its potential for grasping truth when compared to the complexity and the sophistication of the conceptual models which intellectuals use to trace the contours of reality. Or at least this is the assumption many of us unconsciously hold: that the language nature speaks is much closer to the linear, systematic language of science, philosophy, and theology than to the more affective, non conceptual expression of the arts.
Many thinkers have challenged the presupposition underlying the possibility of making this distinction at all. These thinkers point out that in order to hold that certains mediums or tools are more suited to grasping ultimate truth than others, that the tools or mediums we use to grasp truth aspire to approximate the structure of a reality independent of that tool or medium. Many thinkers would reject what we could call this “representational paradigm” of knowledge which suggests that human explanation aims to capture the true structure of reality “out there” by using a tool that corresponds to and “represents” that structure. Instead, some philosopher defend a “performative paradigm” of knowledge which suggests that the medium or tool used to articulate reality actively shapes our understanding of the structure of reality and our relationship to it. In his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel took this performative paradigm of knowledge and worked it out in great historical detail.
In these Lectures, Hegel looks at the different mediums cultures throughout history use to articulate and construct their most fundamental understanding of truth; illustrating the way different mediums contains different potentials and possibilities for understanding ourselves, the principles we live by, nature as a whole, and the relationship between the three. Although Hegel provides a finely textured analysis of the potentialities of different mediums of art, for the purposes of this post I will be drawing on Hegel’s more general distinction between art and philosophy, or intellectual analysis. I should first note that based on racist and Euro-centric commitments Hegel implies that intellectual analysis is a more sophisticated way of articulating truth than art in order to justify his own culture’s superiority. Here I will ignore this value judgement but still draw upon Hegel’s insightful analysis into the differences between these two mediums. Unlike Hegel, I will frame neither as superior but highlight the way in which each medium reveals certain potentialities in our experience and conceals others. I will start with intellectual analysis.
The potency of thought as tool for understanding reality lies in a simple feature; that thought carries within it the possibility of expressing the principles which govern the truth of whatever domain we are aspiring to understand independent of the concrete, particular phenomena that make up that domain. For example, let’s say we a neuroscientist studying the laws which govern the behavior of some part of the brain. The neuroscientist articulates conceptual laws that accurately explain the behavior of a large set of concrete physical brains.. Since the neuroscientist has expressed these laws in thought, independent of the behavior of the brains themselves, they can continue to judge those behaviors against the conceptual principles they have expressed. In this way this ability to articulate universal, abstract laws that govern a diverse domain of concrete phenomena provides the scientist with the ability to continually re-assess the laws as new concrete data is analyzed. All intellectual fields of study make use of this method in some way. Weather one is a social scientist, a natural scientist, a theologian, or a philosopher, one aspires to arrive at conceptually expressed universal principles that explain a domain of phenomena and then continue to test those principles against new observations of that domain. Of course, this not always how these disciplines work. We often find intellectuals becoming dogmatic when they refuse to budge from their commitments to certain principles even when the movement of nature proves incompatible with those principles. However, Hegel suggests that a non dogmatic engagement with knowledge that is continually sensitive to the processual, ever-changing movement of nature and culture is what thinking in its deepest and truest expression has to offer.
That being said, Hegel also points out that the very same feature that can open up a fluid and processual engagement with knowledge also contains a strong potential for alienation. Intellectual disciplines can seem to suggest that the true meaning of the world lies within the intellectual laws and principles which they espouse as the ground of nature’s behavior. In this way, the power of abstraction inherent in thought contains just as much danger as it does potential. If we take these abstract principles to exist independent of our own experience, they can easily alienate us from that experience, causing us to think of the immediate sensory display of nature as governed by cold, emotionless, and impersonal laws that could care less about our feelings, our aspirations, and our struggles. Hegel does point out that taking these abstract laws to exist independent of the concrete phenomena they explain is a kind of intellectual confusion, as they only have real existence insofar as they are embodied in and through the behavior of those phenomena. However, he also acknowledges that the very ability to articulate these laws independently can, and often is, interpreted in this alienating manner.
Using art as a way of expressing truth, on the other hand, makes this particular form of alienation impossible. Art does not make this abstract move towards universal principles articulated independent of the concrete world of our immediate experience. Instead art expresses the universal forces which govern the cosmos as embodied and expressed through concrete physical phenomena. Hegel points to great works of art from history such as the pyramids of Egypt and the sculptures of Ancient Greece as examples of cultures which used works of art to express their fundamental grip on themselves and the cosmos. Hegel writes of these cultures live in “purely poetical conditions and so brought their inmost and deepest convictions before their minds not in the form of thought but in shapes devised by imagination without separating the universal abstract ideas from the concrete picture.” For example, a sculpture of Athena, the Greek goddess of war and courage, does not point to courage as an abstract value or indeterminate force but fully embodies and expresses the meaning of courage in its very physicality. The magic and beauty of artistic expression is that, unlike intellectual analysis, it does not encourage us to seek a conceptual justification beyond its own immediate expression. Rather the concrete physical expression of beauty justifies itself. I am sure we all have this experience in our own engagement with art. In my own experience, I find this to be particularly true with music. If I am feeling a difficult emotion, then often listening to a song that gives musical expression to that emotion provides the emotion with a sense of fullness, meaning, and justification just for existing. I do not feel I need to explain, understand, heal, or make sense of the emotion. Instead the music reminds me that this emotion, just through the simple fact of its existence, is already justified as a unique beautiful expression of reality. In this way, art allows us to enter into to a state of knowing that concrete reality is meaningful, beautiful, and purposive without needing to explain why it is meaningful, beautiful, and purposive by appealing to an intellectual principle. As Brook Ziporyn writes expressing the meaning of beauty for thinkers like Hegel, “Beauty is purposivity without purpose…It is the unity of purpose and purposelessness, of knowledge and non-knowledge, of coherence and incoherence, of consciousness, and unconsciousness”
Thought and the various forms it takes amplifies our natural capacity for abstraction and transcendence. Thought allows us to take a step back from the dynamic movement of nature and construct models of those movements that allow us to grasp the systematic unity, harmony, and beauty of the world as a whole. This intellectual explanation of nature as a whole then provides us with a distance from nature that allows to continually stay in conversation with that world of change. However, Hegel’s work points out the danger in taking this capacity for transcendence and abstraction, as leading to the ultimate truth or treat it as the most essential aspect of our humanity. This capacity for transcendence can easily transform into alienation and even dissociation if think that these abstract, conceptual explanations are more “real” than that the concrete phenomena they explain or if we think they are needed to justify our lives. Art has the power to balance out this over emphasis on transcendence by emphasizing immanence, the way in which the fundamental forces of nature and our highest ethical and spiritual values only have existence insofar as they are lived out and embodied in the concrete realities of our lives. If we take art and beauty as a way of knowing that is equally essential to conceptual knowledge, we are reminded that an intuitive sense of the beauty, fullness, and felt purposiveness of existence bestows just as legitimate a meaning to our lives as an intellectual explanation.
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