Relation to the world· Aestheticsdifficulty
Purpose of art
What is art for: to give pleasure, to reveal truth, or to transform the world?
Depending on the answer, a work that pleases without saying anything, or unsettles without pleasing, holds a different value, and we crown different masterpieces. What is decided here is the very measure of what makes a work great.
Pleasure
0Art does not have to be useful, moral, or militant: its sole end is beauty and the pleasure of form. To subordinate it to an external cause is to betray it and reduce it to a mere instrument.
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Truth
5Art is a path to knowledge: it discloses a truth that the concept cannot reach, the essence of the world, the opening of being, or time regained. Its greatness lies in what it lets us see, not in the pleasure it gives or the cause it serves.
Explore this position →Romanticismexplicit
If art creates rather than imitates, it is because it reaches what neither concept nor science can utter: the absolute, the infinite, the lost unity of spirit and nature. The work is neither ornament nor diversion but an organ of truth, the highest one, there where discursive philosophy fails. crowns art as the completion of the system; seeks to « romanticize » the world so as to give it back its mystery.
Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism · Novalis, Pollen
Schopenhauerexplicit
Art delivers a knowledge that science cannot reach: , become a pure subject of knowing, grasps the Ideas, the eternal forms of things, and communicates them. This contemplation is at the same time deliverance, for beauty suspends the will and the wrests us from it by main force. Music holds a place apart: a copy not of the Ideas but of the will itself, it is the metaphysics of the world made audible.
The World as Will and Representation, Book III, §§34-52
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Hegelexplicit
Art's sole end is not pleasure: it gives the Idea a sensuous form, and is thus one of the three ways, with religion and philosophy, in which absolute spirit knows itself. But because modern inwardness overflows every sensuous form, art, on the side of its highest vocation, is for us "a thing of the past": not that we stop making it, but that it is no longer where the highest is uttered.
Lectures on Aesthetics, Introduction (Lectures)
Platoexplicit
Art is never judged by the pleasure it gives but by its truth and its moral effect: mimetic poetry is condemned for flattering the soul's lower part and straying from the truth. Conversely, the admits a regulated music and stories that shape character and tune the soul to harmony, making art an instrument of formation.
Republic, X, 605a-608b · Republic, III, 398c-401d
Aristotleinferable
Poetry yields pleasure, but it aims above all at truth: more philosophical than history, it speaks the universal and the possible rather than the particular. The catharsis of the passions, a purgation of fear and pity through tragedy, adds a transformative function, hence a shared weight tilted toward truth.
Poetics, 6 (1449b) and 9 (1451b)
Transformation
0The artist lives in his own time and cannot wash his hands of it: his work awakens consciences, denounces injustice, and takes part in the struggles of the age. Claiming to remain neutral is already taking sides.
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Related problems to broaden toward other axes
- PrescriptiveAestheticThe beautiful and the good
Are the beautiful and the good one, or are they rivals: does beauty raise the soul toward the good, or seduce it by flattering appearances against duty?
a beautiful actBeauty in life
The beautiful is the sensuous shining of the Idea.Hegel · Lectures on Aesthetics, Introduction
Poetry is more philosophical and weightier than history: it speaks of the universal, history of the particular.Aristotle · Poetics, 9 (1451b)